Krisha Fairchild, the star of the indie sensation Krisha, Trey Shults’s debut feature which won the SXSW Grand Jury prize in 2015 and opened in select US theaters on Friday, is not like most lead actors. As the Guardian’s Jordan Hoffman put it in his four-star review, she’s “the type of person – an older woman of curvy build with long gray hair – we see in life but never on film.”
Fairchild relishes the description.
“I’m old, I’m heavy, I’m different, I’m outspoken,” she declares over lunch in Los Angeles. In person, her unbridled hair is more silver than gray – and she has a big warm smile that won’t quit.
“There are too many people who are fraught by fear,” she continues. “When you get to be this age – I’m 65 – it’s like I got no time for fear any more. I got to work with what I got!”
Fearless is the best word to describe Fairchild’s completely unvarnished performance. She plays the titular drug and alcohol addicted woman at the center of Shults’s harrowing family drama, set over a Thanksgiving dinner that turns tragic as secrets are revealed.
The film was a sensation at last year’s SXSW film festival. A few months later, it screened at Cannes where it received an equally as enthusiastic response. In February, it won the John Cassavetes award at the Independent Spirit Awards, given to a film budgeted at less than $500,000.
Fairchild didn’t make Krisha with any intention of one day going on the festival circuit or attending awards show: she did it as a favor to Shults, her nephew. The entire project is one giant family affair.
Shults’s own mother Robyn Fairchild (who is not an actor, but works as a therapist) co-stars as Krisha’s exasperated sister, while Fairchild’s 90-year-old mother plays a pivotal role as the clan’s grandmother. The film was named after Fairchild so that her mother, who appears in the film and has dementia, would not become confused while shooting.
The character of Krisha does have some family ties, however: she’s loosely based on her niece Nica, a woman who Fairchild says was “drawn to the dark”. Shults wrote Krisha after Nica, a longtime addict, relapsed at a family reunion and died of an overdose shortly thereafter.
Unlike most of the cast, Fairchild is an experienced actor – but Krisha is the first film to bring her widespread attention. At an age where most female actors struggle to find steady work in a youth-obsessed industry, she’s has finally broken through. For Fairchild, the wait was a blessing.
“I was in no way ready,” Fairchild says, looking back on her life. “I didn’t have the depth, I didn’t have the security. I wouldn’t have held on to who I am. When I was younger, I was painfully insecure.”
She’d initially imagined herself a stage actor after training at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in the 70s. When she was hired as a production assistant by Andrew Davis, the film-maker who would go on to direct The Fugitive, Fairchild made the move to Los Angeles to pursue an onscreen career. There she lived for a short period in a producer’s guest house where she says she was a “fly on the wall” to glamorous parties attended by the likes of Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.
But due to what she cites as a “lack of ambition”, Fairchild put her acting aspirations on hold. “I’m not ambitious. I didn’t want to climb in any ranks, so I just stopped,” she explains.
To keep busy in Los Angeles, Fairchild dabbled in real estate and the restaurant industry, even working as personal assistants to Joel Grey and Nancy Sinatra, who she says is a close friend.
“I’m just a nice person – they never knew I wanted to be anything else,” she says of her two former bosses. “But one day I kind of woke up and I said: ‘I will die in the traces if I stay here.’ The people who worked for them were so loyal and loved the family so much that you stayed for life. I just couldn’t.”
That realization brought Fairchild to Seattle in her 30s, where she found steady work as a voice actor, and played small roles in a number of television shows and made-for-TV movies, including Northern Exposure.
She credits that transitional period in her life for helping to form the confident woman that she is today. “The casting directors at the time were telling me you have to cover up your silver hair – and I’m like no,” she recalls. “Real women have silver hair. From the moment I started feeling free to tell people to fuck off, I felt more secure, and my life just fell into this loping wonderful pattern.”
Fairchild now lives in Mexico, following some time spent in Hawaii. Away from the business, Fairchild says she became a more spiritual person. Asked to define her beliefs, she says: “I have studied all religions and they’re too rigid. There is a spirit in everything. When I leave a room, I thank the room. When I pull a lemon from a tree in my backyard, I thank the tree.”
Since Krisha first began making waves, Fairchild says she’s been offered some roles, mostly in violent fare that she rejected because she “didn’t believe in their message”.
“Let’s face it,” says Fairchild, “I don’t have a lot left in me. In the end, when you’re happy in your life and you work hard to know who you are and what value you carry in the world, it’s easy to say no. It’s easy to say yes to the right thing – and no to the wrong thing.”
She says she has “no doubt” she’ll be working again in the coming year, doing “the work that I always wanted and believed I could do. And I’m old enough to be grateful.”
- Krisha is currently playing in select theaters in the US, and expands to more on Friday.