Laura Dern Reflects on a Year of Personal Grief, Industry Anxiety and Great Movies

This year, when Laura Dern started shooting Is This Thing On?, she noticed her dynamic with director Bradley Cooper echoing her work with David Lynch, who’d cast Dern in her breakout Blue Velvet role nearly 40 years earlier. “People might think, appropriately, that this would be the first time I’d have had the experience of the director being the camera operator,” Dern says, noting that Cooper took on that job just as Lynch had in the past. “But I’ve been lucky to have that experience firsthand [repeatedly], in a very raw way, where your director becomes your partner.” 

Over the past several decades, Lynch remained one of Dern’s closest artistic collaborators, as she starred in everything from Wild at Heart to Inland Empire to Twin Peaks: The Return. He died just before filming began on Is This Thing On. “It was a very tender, heartbreaking time,” Dern admits. “I feel like I’m still just at the beginning of it.” 

Dern has been touched closely by 12 months of profound loss and grief for Los Angeles, the city in which she was born, raised, and still works and lives. At this point, she’s all but embedded in its heartbeat, from her work with the Academy as a governor and museum board member to her singular filmography across iconic movies and TV series. January saw Lynch’s death and the devastating wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Last month, her mother, the Oscar-nominated actor Diane Ladd, died by Dern’s side at 89 years old. And on this December afternoon, we’re speaking just a few days out from the brutal killings of Rob and Michele Reiner, whose son Nick has been charged with their murders. 

“Literally, my kids are in this house like it’s the countdown to Christmas, but it’s just for getting to the end of this year,” Dern says with a weary laugh. “That’s the most common discussion.” 

As to how she’s holding up these days? “I just haven’t gotten there yet — I haven’t let myself be in it yet,” Dern says of processing her mother’s death. “It’s the same in a weird way with David and other losses that have happened this year — it’s so compounded. But I will say, while I’m in the deep thick of it, looking at photos and watching things and trying to figure out how to honor her and honor him and all of that to come, I feel really blessed by their legacies — by holding onto the things they’ve given us in art and in friendship and in memories, in stories and in activism, in all of it.” 

Dern adds, “And I am particularly grateful — sincerely — that this is the movie that I’m talking about. I’m talking about intimacy and grace and longing and grief and being true to yourself. Honestly, I said to my publicist, if it were any other themes, I don’t think I could do this at all.”

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“This was my first opportunity and blessing to be part of a movie that I knew Rob Reiner had gifted us,” the 58-year-old Dern tells me right out of the gate. What does she mean by that? “Knowing how to balance truth and complication and flawed characters and joy and hopefulness — it feels like an impossible task, but one that he seemed to always be able to give us.” Is This Thing On? was made intently in that tradition. 

Dern met Cooper about a decade ago, and before long became a close friend and colleague as he made the shift to directing. “Anything he was acting in, he was like, ‘Will you look at this? What do you think?’” Dern says. “Then once he started directing, I was with him to watch screen tests and camera tests, or read early drafts.” On both A Star Is Born and Maestro, “We played around with scenes together watching cuts in the editing room.” She didn’t know Arnett as well, but he too was tight with Cooper. As they embarked on Is This Thing On?’s emotional two-hander together, the actors made each other a promise: “To be as vulnerable and honest and open as we’ve ever been.”

The magic of Dern’s moving, complex performance crystallizes in a scene where she doesn’t say a word. The film traces the lives of separated spouses Alex (Arnett) and Tess (Dern), with the former secretly processing the breakup through an amateur stand-up comedy act. While on a date, Tess inadvertently stumbles into one of Alex’s sets — which spikily interrogates why their romance fell apart. Tess listens on in shock. With Cooper right there up close with the camera, Dern reacts through it with spectacular nuance. You can feel the actor discovering, then exploring the emotions as they hit her — newly heartbroken, dryly amused, oddly turned on. 

“It takes a filmmaker who wants to not only hold on an actor’s face, but let the actor in real time catch up with themselves,” Dern says. “What surprised me, but I’m so grateful for, is that I was able to find Will so funny even in the hurt and the pain.”

The sequence showcases what Is This Thing On? is all about: a warm, honest examination of flawed people reflecting on their mistakes while trying to figure out what they want. While the most modestly scaled film of Cooper’s directing career, it fits neatly into Dern’s oeuvre, which is loaded with movies by such great American humanists as Alexander Payne, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike White and Kelly Reichardt. Its arrival at the end of a year marked by box-office gloom for films of its type — sophisticated, relatively quiet character studies made for adults — is top of mind for Dern. “We’ve all become desensitized by fireworks, maybe,” she says.

Does she worry about the future of movies without the fireworks, then? “The industry gets into a clickbait habit of like, ‘Oh yeah, that movie’s not doing well, that movie’s not doing well, people didn’t like that movie as much as the other movie,’” Dern says. “But it’s like, ‘Well, you’ve said that about 15 movies this season, so maybe it’s that people aren’t going to the movies.’

“What worries me is the noise of, ‘I guess people are just only watching it at home.’ When people talk about smaller, independent film — movies about people — as though those are movies you can stay home to watch because they’re intimate, they’re missing the point,” she continues. “To be next to your neighbor that you don’t know, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to, one, have a shared experience; and two, you’re then walking down to your car with the person you went with and you’re talking about it — and then you’re going to dinner and maybe getting into a relationship conversation you wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s the church of movie going that I was raised on, and I just don’t ever want us to lose that.” 

This has been Dern’s biggest onscreen year since before the pandemic, when she won the Oscar for 2019’s Marriage Story while appearing in Gerwig’s Little Women and the second season of Big Little Lies that same year. Her other major 2025 credit, Jay Kelly, is another Netflix-Baumbach joint in which she effortlessly steals all of her scenes — this time, as the worn-down publicist of a Hollywood mega-star, played by George Clooney, inching toward a personal reckoning. 

On the Oscars stage in 2020, Dern called Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarnados a friend; she also toplined the streamer’s romance film Lonely Planet last year. In all this talk about theatrical with films like Is This Thing On?, I wonder how Dern feels about Netflix’s possible impending acquisition of Warner Bros., which has the town on edge even as Sarandos is promising to maintain the legacy studio’s theatrical strategy. “I’m deeply hopeful that with the news at hand that what can come from it is a trust in cinema, that movies deserve to have a theatrical experience and audiences need that and filmmakers that need that,” Dern says. “If we lose that, we lose the filmmakers. They’ll always be there  — David Lynch will go make a movie with the Sony camcorder and shoot it for $300,000 — but you don’t get to make the same movies you want to make if you’re not given the financial support to make them. Those movies should be seen in the theaters.”

And trust: Dern is going to theaters. “This is a great year for movies,” she raves. “I’ve been particularly moved by how intimate relationships are at the core of a lot of these films…. Filmmakers are leaning on empathy as a theme. I just saw such a great movie last night, which made me proud of this moment for movies.” I expect her to name a best-picture heavyweight in the conversation with her films, like Sinners or Sentimental Value. “It’s Zootopia 2!” she cheers. “Oh my God. I mean, incredible. Everybody’s finding their way to do it, and to be honest, you don’t want to miss seeing Zootopia 2.”

Dern brings a life spent on film sets to work every day. Moviemaking is her life and she speaks of the process with reverence, passion and expertise. She had a moment with Cooper on Is This Thing On? that says a lot about how she approaches the job these days. They were holding for some kind of noise pollution, maybe a helicopter, to pass while wandering around the set. He stood right in front of her, holding the camera. 

“He’s staring at me through the lens, and I’m looking at him, and we’re waiting through this moment, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s you and me and we’re doing this,’” Dern says. “There was no adjustment period of like, ‘Whoa, Bradley is in my face with a camera.’ No — it’s what we do.”

For her noted taste in Hollywood, her work in the trenches with filmmakers like Cooper, Dern only amassed a handful of significant credits behind the camera so far. The big shift came a little over a decade ago with Enlightened, HBO’s masterful but underseen series that Dern starred in (winning a Golden Globe and receiving an Emmy nomination), but also co-created and executive produced with Mike White. She’s more recently gone on to help develop series like Apple TV+’s Palm Royale and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things. But in observing an actor-turned-director like Cooper, might Dern see that in her future too? 

“No one’s asked me recently because, for years, I’d say it is something that fascinates me, but I’ll never do it until my baby goes to college,” Dern says. “And now, my baby is at NYU — so I better get my act together.” She has been thinking about directing, she reveals, but as with every choice in her career, she’s approaching it carefully — and heart-first. “God knows I know how much there is to learn as a filmmaker, so I would never do it unless I believe that I was the person to tell the story,” she says. “So: Maybe. I hope so. I know that the story will reveal itself.”