Marisa Abela

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1:16Checking in with her during filming, she always reassured me that it was intense, it was challenging, it was exhilarating. but really, Ruthie, the greatest thing about the whole process was working with the brilliant and fearless Marisa Abella. One night a few months ago, Sam called me at home to tell me Marisa was in the River Cafe and might we send her a glass of champagne. When I told this to a friend who was visiting me from New York, he said, Ruthie, we're not sending her a glass of champagne. We're going there right now to give it to her ourselves. She's amazing. And she was, and she is.

1:54Three days ago, Back to Black opened in London, and though I was 3 ,000 miles away in New York, the word traveled that it was a great movie. Today, we're here together in the River Cafe to talk about performance in the kitchen and performance in front of the camera. And afterwards, we'll have a glass of champagne. So, talking about the movie, it opened up Monday night. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's going to ask you who was there and what did you wear. And I'm going to ask you what you ate and what did you do for food. Let's be honest. I'm wearing like a Fendi dress that's very figure-hugging. What does the food have to do with the Fendi dress?

2:32Were you afraid of eating too much? Yeah, kind of. You kind of split the scene or something. Right, right, right. You just want to be, you want to feel your best, but it's still just sort of about like pacing and whatever. And also you get so nervous that it's just, the adrenaline is so intense. So what did you do? Did you eat before you went? Did you have a good meal on Sunday night? I had a good glass of red wine. A good glass of red wine. And I did have a good meal. I had a chicken soup. Did the premiere. That was very exciting. What was the most exciting moment of the premiere? It was very important for me.

3:07It was my first ever premiere. So I was, you know, I wanted my family to be there and my friends. And then you get five people that get to sit next to you. I said okay who's that going to be my mom my dad my whatever but I decided that it should be my best girlfriends because they're the ones that are going to be just so excited and I think the most purely happy moment was when I sat down next to them and the first 10 minutes or whatever all of them just turning around to me at one specific moment wet when you see the effect I couldn't possibly compare it to what we do. But having to see the response.

3:47I was talking to Sarah Jessica Parker, and we were talking the other day about audiences. And I was saying, I can tell a night when we might have the same team, sort of the same food, the place is full. But you can have at the end of it thinking, uh-uh, it didn't work? Or yes, it did. And I said, does that happen in theater? She said, sometimes, Ruthie, I just wonder if all those people called each other first before they came and said, let's not laugh at any of the jokes. Or they call each other and they say, OK, we're going to be really responsive. It's almost the mood. So did you feel that from the audience and your fan?

4:24You know, it's also difficult to tell, especially with a film, when you're not rehearsing the scenes or the type. You film every scene individually for three months. It's difficult to remember exactly what's going on. And then you watch it on screen and, you know, within the first two minutes you get a big laugh or something. And you think so much about what the reaction to it's going to be. You don't even think, you know, well, people find it funny. So then when people are laughing, you're like, oh, my God, you know, this is crazy. And we got a standing ovation at the end, which is, and I didn't, I think I blacked out.

4:59I didn't notice. I like walked straight up to Sam and I was like, I can't believe, how do you feel? And she was like, Marisa, turn around. like everyone is on their feet and I was like what you know and it's just it's just it's wild when you're working when you are filming what if you knew that you had a long day of performing different scenes different songs what would you eat well this is different to to most of the other work I've done because I had specific needs to me as Amy you know I went through a physical transformation. What was that? I lost a lot of weight to play her at certain points in her life.

5:39How much? Do you remember? Probably about 12 kilos. No. Well, let's stop there and tell me how you did that. Well, essentially a plant-based, gluten-free, dairy-free, carb-free. I mean, it was sort of legumes and plants in the evenings. In the evenings. and did you find that difficult? I mean, as you can tell, food is... But the truth is that what it does do is that it makes those four months of your life completely about the work. And I'm not a method actress in that I go home and I think, am I Marisa or am I Amy? I know what's going on and it's not important for me to do that. but what it does mean is that you can't get away from this work and it is the most important thing as it should be for those for that time when it's a physical feeling like that you can't you know you can't change it like hunger for me the most important thing though I wasn't going to do the classic you know you hear about these actors that are like I was on one whatever and a cigarette a day but it wasn't that I ate because for me the most important thing always was the rest of the work?

6:57Like, can I embody her? Can I inhabit her? Can I sing? Can I move? Can I, you know, and I wasn't going to be able to do that if I had absolutely no energy. So it was sort of like a science of finding the maximum amount of energy from the minimum amount of sustenance, essentially. As you say, you were doing it for work, weren't you? It was like for a job. It wasn't because you wanted to fit into the Fendi dress or you wanted to get a boyfriend. I mean, there's so many issues. Yeah. And also, you know, Amy had bulimia. I was playing someone with an eating disorder. So it's also about understanding the psychology of eating disorders and also one eating disorder over another.

7:39It's interesting to me as an actor, you know, if someone has anorexia, that's something very different to if someone has bulimia. Someone's relationship to food is interesting. I think, you know, needing to eat and purge versus not eat anything at all says something different about a person, I think. From what age? 14. Forever? Pretty much, I think. It's difficult to say exactly, especially when she was in the throes of her addiction, what her appetite was like at that point, probably incredibly low. Versus when you're healthier with your relationship to drugs and alcohol, your relationship to food might be different because your body changes.

8:22You know, if you're eating more because you're not using. But what we do know is that she had a difficult relationship with food and with her body image from the age of 14. As an actor, having someone tell you that you need to look a certain way for a role when that role is fictional is very difficult. And I think I would struggle with that. but when it's not fictional and she's existed and her relationship to food and drugs and alcohol has affected the way that she physically manifests to all of us, then I think it's my job as an actor to do that thing. Do you think the food was overpowering in terms of her whole character, that it was defining?

9:08Yeah, well, I think that, you know, part of the reason that her addiction hit her physically as hard as it did was because she didn't have the sort of physical capability to keep up with as much as she was consuming. But I also think that she was completely hounded by the paparazzi. one of the things that drew me to Amy as a woman was that she had this insatiable appetite for life and for music and for you know and that you can see that in her body when she's younger she's not afraid to be hungry for life and for experiences and for food and as the world got more hungry for her it's almost like they stole that appetite from her it's almost like you know Ariel and Ursula like They took her voice away from her and they took her appetite.

10:04And when someone is feeding on you, is there that much left? I know it's kind of sounding a bit metaphorical now. No, it isn't. I think that food, if you're told as a woman in your life, don't take up space. You have to stop enjoying one of the simple pleasures. It's a sensual pleasure. and I don't think she was afforded many of those. Tell me about the joy that you had during filming and about that you told us about a Christmas dinner. What was that like? My birthday's in December and obviously Christmas is also in December and my trainers said, listen, you have to give yourself one thing to work towards.

10:44So like, you know you're going to be able to give yourself whatever you want on that day. And it can either be your birthday or Christmas because December kind of works for us. And I was hosting Christmas that year in my flat. that so it became all I could think about if I was hungry I remember one time I got a massage my I'd booked in a massage and it was an hour and a half and instead of relaxing during this massage all I was thinking was well I'll serve you know little bagels with crème fraîche and and I'll I'll do caviar and I'll do this and it was like you know it was a Christmas for four people and I had a ham, a lamb, a chicken because I was just so fixated on this food.

11:34Did you know the River Cafe has a shop? It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen napkins, kitchenware, tote bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shoptherivercafe.co.uk.

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13:19Wonder through the boutique shops in Lancaster, enjoy a glass of local wine or a cozy cup of coffee, and catch a live show at the American Music Theater. You can also dive into the authentic Amish culture by visiting markets and sampling the homemade treats. How delightful. Lancaster County offers the perfect balance of cozy and adventurous, ensuring a memorable escape. If you're planning a fall getaway, start at discoverlancaster.com forward slash soul sessions. Tell me what it was like cooking with Sian here in the kitchen. You did zucchini triphalati. Well, the thing about cooking is that, you know, we all, it's the same with films, right?

14:05Everyone watches movies all the time and knows what they love. but doesn't necessarily know how they'd make it. And it's like, I know what I would love to eat and how I enjoy food, but watching someone really know what it is that they're doing makes something that you know is about to be delicious. It's probably the same feeling that people get when they come on set and watch movies being made. Hi, I'm Sian Owen. I'm here with Marisa Abella, and we're going to make zucchini trifolati. in case you ever have guests and you decide you're going to make zucchini triplerd you can cut it on the chopping board or you can just cut it like a housewife that's my preferred method yeah i love that so i just cut it in my hand like turning the zucchini as i cut so cool just like just put yourself in the mindset of the uh italian housewife yeah you just turn and cut and turn and cut i cut apples like this sometimes yeah you got it and so as many zucchini as you want i'm not sure how many the recipe is going to be for probably for you'll just have a bit of garlic we've got spring garlic now that's just arrived which is also really amazing because the skin is so soft that you can eat the whole skin like you don't have to cut you don't really have to trim it right and take that off um and that will just get put in as well and then we're just gonna fry the zucchini with like olive oil garlic salt and pepper over a low heat for about maybe an hour or so.

15:33An hour, you get perfect zucchini triphalati, like super slow, cook it super slow, and then we finish it with zucchini flowers at the end, which looks really fresh. It's a really nice thing if you have, like, fresh zucchini growing in your garden. It's amazing, yeah. I mean, I don't have a garden in London. You don't have a window box. Yeah, yeah. It's quite an easy vegetable to grow, the truth. But the flowers are amazing in the summer, you know, and you can fry them, but also the beautiful added to this and this is such a nice thing to have like on its own with fish or meat chicken really nice bit of olive oil i don't know if you can see that there

16:12looks a bit like sludge no it looks delicious don't put that in yeah but it's all in the intensity of the cooking down when you slow cook something it goes really and olive oil in it and good olive oil right okay exactly at the end right zucchini shifflati I hope it's cooked long enough for Ruthie.

16:38Zucchini trafalati. 18 small zucchini trimmed and cut. 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced, a handful of mint or basil, roughly chopped, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Add the garlic and gently brown. Then add the zucchini and cook slowly for 15 to 20 minutes. When brown on all sides, add 125 milliliters of boiling water and stir, scraping and combining the juices until the water has been absorbed and the zucchini is soft. Add the mint or basil, season with salt and pepper, and serve. You chose the recipe for zucchini, trifolati.

17:28I did, yeah. Why? Of all the recipes, because it's one of my favorites. Right. It's one of the first vegetables I ever learned to cook in that process. I love eating zucchini out. Mm-hmm. Courgette. Mm-hmm. Same thing? Same thing, French or Italian. I love eating it out, but whenever I cook it, I don't get it quite right. I feel like, I don't know whether I don't season it completely right, or it can go kind of like too soft, too easily for me, or whatever it is. but so but whenever I eat it out it's like my god what is this delicious especially in pasta and then so I think when I saw it today I was like well this is a perfect way to just maybe maybe it was quite selfish and also the timing she said an hour I'm bad at putting things on high for a short period of time I guess I'm quite impatient come on yeah exactly come on let's go Oh, that's very this long.

18:23Exactly. Also, I get very hungry very quickly, especially when I'm at home. I'm just like, oh, I'll make dinner tonight. Don't worry about it. And then all of a sudden, 15 minutes, I'm like, I'm starving. I don't know about you. I'm going to die. Boil water. Right, exactly. Cook pasta. Yeah. I think that the French are like very al dente. You know, they like things quite crispy. And the Italians really like to slow cook their vegetables. Right. They get more flavor out of it. Maybe it's the olive oil that is then absorbed into it over a longer period of time. The process of sort of slightly going brown and then soft and then brown again.

18:59The Italians cook vegetables for, you're British, I know, so you have to be careful not to insult you. But Maltese too, Maltese too. Okay, so then I can say that why is it that when the Italians cook vegetables for a long time, they get better. And when English people cook vegetables for a long time, they kind of get worse. A friend of mine said, I remember saying years ago that nobody really had time to cook anymore. And that's, you know, it's a shame. And he said, yeah, but except for the English, maybe cabbage, where they'll say, oh, we only have 45 minutes to cook the cabbage. Yeah. So maybe that would speed up.

19:35But I think zucchini does. We do some that, actually, I don't think we do any zucchini that is crisp. Because even if we boil it, we boil it for longer, whole, and then slice it up and put it with olive oil and mint. Right. Well, that's something that I've learned today. Yeah. See? There you go. That's good. So what was it like growing up in your home in terms of food? Because you do seem, you say you love to eat. Tell me about the early days of your childhood and food. What are your memories? I grew up at home with my mom and my brother and me. It's just the three of us. And my mom is a great cook.

20:11There was always a lot of food, you know, like that was the thing. Quantity was key in my house, like loads of food. There was never a question of anyone going hungry. And it was also such a big way of showing love. I think, you know, my mom, if I was feeling sad, it was food. If I was feeling happy, it was food. What was her background? Did she grow up in a house like that as well? I don't know. Actually, I think my mom grew up quite scared of food. My mom is Jewish. I think food in the Jewish culture is so important, you know. So I think she, and my mom didn't have a huge appetite growing up, but it was very like, finish what's on your plate.

20:52Do you know about your grandmother? Was she born in Britain? Well, so there are two sides, both sort of during the Second World War. There were my mother's father's family emigrated from Poland. My mother's family were from Austria. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think there's also something perhaps about an immigrant family in a possibly threatening environment. My family came from Russia and from Hungary, again, emigrated. and there definitely was a feeling that in an alien environment where you were concerned about the protection of your children, food was a kind of way of almost creating a barrier of safety for your kids.

21:40And, you know, the thing of coming home. I always tell the story that apparently my grandmother came to visit her first grandson, my brother, her first grandson, and she came. She used to travel with her rolling pin, you know, and so she arrived in the house of the country and my mother said, do you want to see the baby? And she said, let's eat first, you know. And so I think that culture, but it may be, you know, I'm Jewish and so I think that probably is a Jewish characteristic. But probably if you had an African family in, you know, a white society that felt threatened or, you know, a Catholic family in Belfast, that food would maybe become even more.

22:19Totally. And my mum grew up in Northwest London, so I grew up in Brighton. So there's not really a massive Jewish community at all where I grew up, but we were probably the only household. There were lots of supermarkets in Brighton where you could get whatever it was you wanted to eat. But my mum would have to go to the waitrose if she wanted anything that was kosher. Yeah, kosher. You're right. No, but my mum will only eat kosher smoked salmon. She doesn't like other smoked salmon because it's too oily. You know, she likes sort of kosher sausages and gefilter fish. And, you know, she likes that food.

22:55So she wouldn't eat kosher necessarily, keep kosher. But she had to go to that waitress to get that food. So mine was the only house in Rotting Dean, you know, right? And it had chopped liver in the fridge. But it was, I mean, but my brother and I were quite kind of embarrassed of that food, I think. It's weird. It's kind of weird. Well, you want to kind of adapt, don't you? I mean, I think you want to, whereas your mother might have been proud to do that. The children are much more kind of protective of their identity and wanting to, you know, become like the people next door, their school friends, not be different.

23:35And I think that because she was a single mother too, it was very much like she, I think, you know, when you have two kids under the age of four, we're not eating gefilte fish. so she would eat alone a lot not alone with us but eat her own meal and I we did that a lot actually growing up you know my brother loved shellfish and I loved red meat and my mom loved whatever you know and we would eat different things at the same table totally and it was funny I was actually telling a friend just now that you know I before I met my boyfriend that i'm with now that's here you come enjoy the conversation yeah i didn't like to share food and i think that that's kind of why because we'd go out for dinner and it would be like i'll have my thing you have yours it was weird for me also small plates restaurants is such a thing now you know thing in london for me growing up if we went out for dinner i would get a bowl of pasta, you know, carbonara, let's say.

24:40My brother would get the prawns with garlic and chili and my mom would get the chicken and we wouldn't share. You know, it was that, and my mom, but my mom was very good at spending that time making what it was that we wanted. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. But what it meant was that up until a couple of years ago, really, I was not good at sharing food. Well, now the only thing that I refuse to share is soup. because I think that's gross. Yeah, that's gross. I agree. Thank you. Thank you. And people also say you shouldn't share omelettes. Okay. But I like omelettes. I don't mind sharing an omelette.

25:19Well, that's all about the double dipping. Right, right, right. I think COVID also changed a lot of that, don't you? Sure, yeah. The sort of fear around that. Yeah. And did you have Friday night suppers? Well, I guess you didn't. At my mother's family's house, We would travel up to Highgate by that point where my grandfather was living, and we'd do Passover, definitely. Did your father cook? My dad does cook, but he cooked my dad's Maltese. What is Maltese food? It's kind of like a mix, just like the language of Arabic and Italian, because it's in between North Africa, Libya, and Sicily. Great, great, great mix.

26:04It's incredible. But the food is, you know, it's also in terms of produce, it's not the best place. So like the food is yummy, but it's lots of rabbit. You know, the Friday night supper in Jewish households is like, I guess it's a bit like the Sunday lunch with more religion, you know, that you read. Did you do the readings? I did. I had to sing the Manishtana and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, I remember, you know, the actual food on Passover being just sort of like some horrible, cruel event. But then it's like, you know, roast chicken or whatever it was. Lots of fish, too. And I only started liking fish a couple years ago.

26:45So you grew up really loving food, right? Loving food. Loving to eat. Loving to eat, yeah. Very much so. And, you know, if I woke up one morning and was like, I don't want to go to school today, my mom would bribe me by taking me to the bakery before school so I could get a croissant. Like, it was all, you know. And I'd have, sometimes she'd pick me up every Thursday night with a chicken katsu curry before I went to netball. I mean, I don't know how I did that. You know, yeah.

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