What is most important about your characters in 'It’s Complicated'?
Alec Baldwin:
Jake is not a guy who wants to have a fling with his ex-wife because he’s bored. This is a man who is still in love with his ex-wife. My job on this movie was to make her — Meryl’s character — feel loved, because my character is in love with her. He married somebody else and he made a mistake, and now he wants to come back.
Meryl Streep:
For me, it was just to let myself be pulled, pulled, pulled into it — even though I knew it was bad for me — and try to not get lost.
Baldwin:
I don’t think Jane is primed to even let Jake in until she finds she has feelings for another guy. She’s ready to be with someone, it’s been 10 years, but when she sees him, she panics and she goes back to someone she knows.
Streep:
That’s the smartest thing you ever said, and, by the way, from now on I’m saying that was my motivation, even if it wasn't.
Baldwin:
I have spoken to a lot of men about this. You are lying there in bed in the last desiccated, arid months of your bad marriage. You’re lying there hoping a meteor hits that house and kills everybody in it. You can’t take another night of the tumbleweeds blowing through the bedroom, and you can’t eat another pint of ice cream and watch late-night news shows. You fantasise about a woman you want to be with. And Jake is a guy who goes out and meets and marries that woman. But by the time you have gotten out of the one marriage, gone out on your own, identified and seduced and married the other woman, a few years have gone by. All of a sudden, you’re 51 years old and your new wife is 31, and you’ve changed, and you’re thinking, “There are a lot of things about my ex-wife I really miss.” I know a lot of men who are like Jake. They think they want a certain thing, but by the time they get it, they’ve changed and they don’t really want it. They want...
Streep:
They want to go home. It’s all about going home. And the longing to make that right.
