Last weekend’s Malibu Film Society event —an encore showing of “I, Tonya,” about the life of Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding—was the first public appearance made by well-known actress Allison Janney after winning the best supporting actress in a motion picture award at the Golden Globes last week. She was accompanied by the film’s screenwriter Steven Rogers, who is also an old friend.
Janney, 58, has played a lot of eccentric characters in her 30-plus year career, but this time, she got to play a real piece of work—the working-class mother of figure skater Tonya Harding, LaVona Golden. Not a typical stage mom, LaVona dishes out verbal and physical abuse with a bad haircut and cheap fur coat while smoking and swearing.
The film is a dark comedy telling the real-life story of how Tonya Harding, coming from limited financial means, rose through the ranks of U.S. figure skaters and made history as the first American woman to land a triple axel jump in competition in 1991. In 1994, she made the Olympic team. The class struggle was evident all along as snooty judges, obviously turned off by her hairstyles, home-made costumes and choices of music, never seemed to give her the high marks she deserved. When her husband’s accomplice tried to eliminate rival Nancy Kerrigan by attempting to break her leg with a police baton just before the Olympic trials, a worldwide scandal ensued. Harding was banned from skating for life, even though to this day, there’s no evidence she knew about the assault in advance.
In speaking of her Golden Globe win, Janney’s first, she said, “I feel like it was our child that we had,” referring to Rogers’ script, who wrote the LaVona part specifically with her in mind. “The brilliance of his script is that he understands the dark humor side of the whole story.
“I’m thinking I might have to get a real bird,” she joked, referring to her last scene in the movie, where a live pet parrot sits on her shoulder. On the Golden Globes awards show, just ahead of winning her own award, Janney took the stage wearing a fake bird on one shoulder, imitating that last scene.
Janney acknowledged that she was also a figure skater earlier in life, before sustaining an injury.
“That gave me the knowledge of skating and how much good skates and a coach cost. It’s a very expensive sport, and Tonya didn’t have the money, and they didn’t embrace her. She was from the wrong side of the tracks,” Janney said. “Her crime was that she was poor. She was unapologetically a ‘redneck’—her word—and she wouldn’t play along. The judges wanted the old-time pageantry-type contestant.”
Screenwriter Steven Rogers said he began researching the film by watching the Tonya Harding documentary “30 for 30: The Price of Gold,” which brought out the point that “narratives get changed according to how we think women are supposed to be.” He then tracked down both Tonya Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly for interviews.
“Their stories were wildly contradictory,” Rogers said. “Jeff said he never hit Tonya, and Tonya didn’t take responsibility for anything.”
As far as the mother’s character, played by Janney, the writer was unable to track her down, so he had to base her character on interviews and documentary footage. “But the stories that both Jeff and Tonya told about the mother were one of the few things they both agreed on.
“She was probably a monster,” Rogers said. “My feeling was all the characters were probably rebellious and wrongheaded.
“When Tonya talked about the abuse, she was very disassociated from it,” Rogers noted.
Janney also touched on her process creating the character of LaVona.
“I didn’t have the opportunity to meet LaVona beforehand,” Janney said, “so I had to put her together in my mind. I pictured her as a woman with enormous resentments and self-hatred who was probably abused, herself … I had to ask her in my mind, ‘What happened to you? Why did you have four husbands?’”
Janney described how her role in “I, Tonya” was shot in only eight days in between two other engagements.
“I was taping episodes of ‘Mom’ [the CBS sitcom now in its fifth season] and also doing ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ on Broadway. It was fast and furious,” Janney described. “It was a miracle it ever happened, going back and forth between these other productions.”
