Everyone wants to go to Marcia Gay Harden’s house

By Janet Mercel 
Photography by Harold Julian
Creative Direction Nhi Mundy 
Styling Ise White 
Hair Kazunori Ueda 
Makeup Rebecca Alexander 
Photo Assisting Mikala Gallo 

Above: Brunello Cucinelli blouse, linen pants Mirth,
sold at Concrete + Water, cardigan First Rite,
boots Andre Assous, hat model’s own

Marcia Gay Harden’s 2018 memoir opens with a passage from that quintessential figurehead of upstate folklore, Washington Irving, about Rip Van Winkle’s decades-long nap in the Catskill Mountains. The anecdote is a metaphor for Harden’s relationship with her mother, of time passing and memories lost, but also reminds us that the Oscar-winning actress is intimately familiar with the territory.

Her own Catskills home is a supremely private property on Gossamer Lake in the Catskills, where Harden and her family had congregated and escaped to, canoed, gardened, and cooked together since 1997 when she and her former husband acquired the initial 150 acres and continued to snap up surrounding chunks of land to accrue the current 300-plus. 

When I visited her there last October, it was arguably the most beautiful day of the whole month, and the houses (plural) were at their preening best. Enviable stacks of firewood were piled at numerous indoor and outdoor fireplaces, the leaves had begun turning and whisped over the lakewater and our heads as we traipsed around the grounds, and the autumn light was the exact color that makes people wonder this time of year if keeping that city apartment is really necessary after all. The property felt alive and loved in a way that secondary homes often do not, and by the end of the day, its owner will have made me understand exactly why, and I would be sad to leave. 

“Have you seen the nasturtiums?” Harden asked us — me, the photographer, and various crew who had gathered for the day’s shoot. She mentions the nasturtiums three times before we end up out in the gardens that she is in the process of winterizing. (On the phone later, she asks my opinion on burlap beds versus tarp sheets, etcetera. I tell her my parents advise running the lawnmower over fallen leaves in the yard to shred them and use them as mulch; her interest is laser-focused.) 

Left: jacket, pants, sweater Alex mill,
sold at Concrete + Water 
Right: cashmere top Gap,
wool trouser Madewell,
plaid scarf Epice, Paris,
sweater Lauren Manoogian,
sold at Mayer Wasner,
boots Andre assous 

Harden is not afraid of physical labor, or if you’re familiar with her award-laden acting career, emotional labor, either. She is proud of her house and all the work that’s gone into it from many hands, although she doesn’t like the expression “house proud” because it reminds her of boorish rich people who give boring tours and force you to appreciate their artwork in every room. This is not one of those homes. (Although the late season, pumpkin-bright nasturtiums she so wanted us to enjoy were, in fact, perfect.)

“We built the main house, what was going to be our retirement home, first, then the barn and bunkhouse, then the boathouse in 2009,” Harden says, the he in “we” being her ex, the director Thaddaeus Scheel, with whom she has three children. “His stamp is all over it. I thought at one point maybe I should sell it, but then I realized, why obliterate it? Why should I have to find something that doesn’t have that connection? You don’t have to annihilate people. And it’s not like I sat around eating bonbons while he worked on the house.” 

She’s not eating bonbons now, either. Harden maneuvers the ATV, understands the plumbing and irrigation systems on a cellular level, and could pull your car out of the mud with her tractor if ever needed. She can hear the heartbeat of her household and has an understanding of its operations and property management that many full-time upstaters will never have, much less people who spend the majority of their working lives on set or onstage, on location, in Los Angeles or in New York. Perhaps it’s those very absences that drive her to run a tight ship. 

“I don’t like gender pass-offs, and I didn’t want to be dependent on a man of the house in order to keep it. When you just turn it over to someone else, mistakes get made because someone didn’t know about the spigot for the outdoor shower or that the pipe from the footing drain backs up.” (This is an intentional edit of Harden’s four to five-minute, detail-intensive explanation of what a footing drain is and how it works, but rest assured it was comprehensive.) “My ex has been great about showing me those details. It’s offensive when someone comes in to fix something, and they’re like, ‘Listen, lady, just let me do my job.’ They don’t use logic; they’re using ‘this is the way it’s always been done.’ And because right now I’m not shooting…” Harden pauses weightedly, “a certain show, I’ve had the inverse blessing of being here to train a new person.” 

“We built the main house, what was going to be our retirement home…His stamp is all over it. I thought at one point maybe I should sell it, but then I realized, why obliterate it?”

The actress is referring to the current state of the entertainment industry, in that October 20th marked the 100th day of the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild) strike, the longest in the union’s history, and that the Hollywood machine has ground to a halt for the last several months. SAG members are forbidden to promote struck work without consequences, and while Harden is not allowed to talk about current projects or her latest television series on CBS, I am allowed to write about it.

So Help Me Todd is the most recent in a long list of TV appearances that have made her as beloved a small-screen performer as a big-screen one. She has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, including a turn as the blazingly bigoted Star on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Her string of SVU appearances is legendary for show zealots, not because Harden plays a neo-Nazi, but because of her willingness to be so cringe it’s difficult to believe it’s happening onscreen. Her episodes aired between 2005 and 2013 and were chillingly prescient, rife with eco-terrorists, schoolyard shooters, anti-semites, and white supremacists. Harden is not one to shy away from unsavory, unflattering material that a less confident actor would instinctively avoid. 

Her singular performance as Celeste Boyle in 2003’s Mystic River (for which she was a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee after winning the same award in 2000 for Pollack) troubled me for years and still does, as she wanders from scene to scene looking haunted and morally bereft as Tim Robbins’ wife. Laura Linney, as her nearly villainous cousin, asks at one point, “What kind of a wife says things like that about her husband?” It’s Linney’s line, but it always pulls me back to Harden’s character. What is motivating her? In a film where the men go about their important male business in Southie-esque Boston, Celeste is the emotional callback for the entire movie, returning over and over to her struggle as a wife and good person. “Didn’t she just have a major crush on Sean Penn’s character and was trying to suck up to him?” I asked Harden. (Of course, it was never going to be that simple.) “Oh no, I think it was that Celeste was deeply religious and tormented,” Harden explained. “If someone you love in your family did something terrible and you’re a good Catholic girl from Boston, you know God will know. How do you hold a secret like that? Well, we know she didn’t tell the church or the cops.”

Above: wool knit sweats Amente, sold at Concrete + Water,
faux fur vest by Amente, sold at Concrete + Water,
boots model’s own, knit top Theory, scarf Hermes,
Right: Turtleneck dress Lars Anderson, sold at Mayer Wasner,

It’s a ridiculous notion to ask an Academy Award-winning actress how they do what they do when so much comes from an intangible place, but I ask, anyway. “HOW do you do that?” As in, how do you keep everyone’s eyes on you to the very last frame? Not alone, Harden says. She is always quick to point out the brilliance of her colleagues in interviews, in podcasts, and in conversation. “Clint [Eastwood] and Joel Cox, his editor, are two hugely important storytellers. I can’t tell you how important the editing process is — to know when to hold the entire moment a little bit longer to have the audience weeping. Without that, you would have had something completely different. I am enamored of Clint and Joel. It was the same thing with Pollack; the director and editor allowed my character to live and do the storytelling.” 

Harden embraces the make-believe of acting, the costumes, the wigs, the accents, the fun of it. (See: The Mist and Miller’s Crossing.) She searches for a humanity point of reference for every character and all the things that make a role stingingly real. I told her that while reviewing her body of work, I realized she is a longstanding gay icon, which somehow managed to escape me before now, so I asked a friend about it right before our interview. “Oh my god, yes,” he yelled. “I’m not even sure why. I think partly because of her performance style. She can be almost campy with her ‘capital T’ Theater voice. She’s not afraid to be silly. And because she always has these biting, cutting one-liners that make her such a queen. Now I’m going to go rewatch The Morning Show.” 

“What!” Harden exclaimed when I repeated it. “I feel like I never get to play those roles!” showing that even the most highly regarded actors in the world have blind spots about their work. “I thought it was because of Angels in America. Or The First Wives Club. And, well, because my middle name is Gay, obviously.” (Marcia Gay is preferred, rather than just Marcia.) It is, in fact, all of those reasons, and while those parts alone speak to her scope as an actor, Angels may be where her iconic status began. Harden starred as Harper in the 1991 Broadway debut of Tony Kushner’s pivotal play about closeted queer life and the AIDS crisis in New York City. She was nominated for a Tony for that role, although she’d go on to win the award for God of Carnage in 2009. 

“Angels was a life-changing event for me. By that time, we were in the hindsight Reagan era. Time had passed a little bit. The play was so epic, and it was making a difference in so many lives. So many people told me they would come to see the play, then go home and tell their parents, ‘I’m gay…and dying.’ Meaningful for that time is an understatement.” For someone who says, “All the greatest men I’ve loved in my life were gay,” Harden has always been proud to move as an advocate through the LGBTQ community, especially when the going gets rough. “I mean, people are banning books now,” she said. “There’s zero tolerance for anything, even on both sides. There’s a lack of playfulness.” Harden speaks publicly and often about how her children are teaching her the evolutionary mindset of Gen Z and younger Millennials and that the casual speech patterns of yore no longer fly. 

Right: wool knit sweats Amente, sold at Concrete + Water,
faux fur vest by Amente, sold at Concrete + Water,
boots model’s own, knit top Theory, scarf Hermes,

“All my kids are queer. My eldest is nonbinary. My son is gay. His twin is fluid. They educate me, and I love that because the rules have changed. My gay friends used to call me their best fag hag; that’s not okay anymore.” (I came of age with the same moniker, but asked a few people in my early-30s-and-younger orbit about that one- they’d never even heard the expression.) “When we did Angels, we were still educating people that AIDS medicine should be affordable, that you can’t get it by shaking someone’s hand. But it’s a different conversation right now. The hatred is so violent and righteous. I got so much hate mail when I did the Drag Isn’t Dangerous fundraiser last May. I wasn’t really hurt by it, although as a performer when anyone throws tomatoes at you, it’s shocking at first. There’s a powerful system of hatred at work out there, but the love and helping people to lift the shame is much more profound.” 

It is not surprising that someone who grew up as a Navy man’s daughter, who was born in California but by early adulthood could also call Germany, Japan, Greece, and Texas home, can inhabit so many portrayals of people’s lives and be naturally understanding of many perspectives. “I learned early that America’s not the only game in town,” she said. We agreed, though, that when it’s good, it can be very good, and discussed what it means to be an “upstate woman.” We acknowledged it is a mindset we see anywhere in the world — a self-sufficiency and grit, but one that’s not afraid of a little gloss (or a lot). Our conversation returned to where it began, to her house. She was the one to suggest I call her after I’ve put my 18-month-old daughter to bed (“I know how it is”), and we’ve spent the better part of the evening gabbing about our pull back to the Catskills. I imagine that her house at night, abutting the moon-slicked water, the fireplaces lit under a lot of heavy old wood beams, is just as beautiful as during the day. 

The time I spent there, I told her, felt completely authentic, not like a person playing the “country” role. “You know, I’m so glad you said that. Because just this past week at the house, and with you guys being here for the photo shoot, I’ve been really seeing it and feeling it. I’m here taking care of things,” Harden said, sounding very much like someone looking forward to getting up and doing it all again the next day. “I’m making the compost, harvesting the last of the tomatoes and arugula. I just invested in a Gator. And, I thought, this is really you.”