A real Earth mother

REBECCA De MORNAY stars as a surfing star’s tough wife on HBO’s “John From Cincinnati.” She appeared in “The Wedding Crashers” and recently completed filming on Bruce Sweeney’s “American Venus.”

Do you live in the city proper?

I live in Los Angeles, in the hills that will pass for countryside, but five minutes from Sunset Boulevard. But you feel you could be in the South of France if you squinted. The bougainvillea, the trees, the breeze, the Mediterranean architecture. I live in that part of town with the coyotes and the hummingbirds. The coyotes howl at night to remind you that things are not so rosy in California. Especially for the cats.

So even though you left for a time, you’re really a Californian.

I’m a native Californian. I left when I was 5 years old, but it wasn’t me who chose.... My mother traveled overseas so I sensibly traveled with her. And I didn’t really come back till I was 18. As soon as I came back I walked into the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles. Without ever having thought of being an actress.... And I never walked out.

That speaks of a bravery or inquisitiveness or a bold foolishness.

The kind of life I grew up with was the kind of life that either you became bold or you fell by the wayside, I think. Somehow, I wound up at a casting office in Los Angeles. The woman wanted me to read for something. And I said I hadn’t done anything. And she said, “You just came to town and you’ll have to pay your dues with one-line parts.” And I said: “No, I’ve paid my dues. My life so far has been paying dues. I want a leading role.” And that’s what I got: “Risky Business.”

Hmm. It doesn’t sound like you were angry, exactly, but for some reason you thought you had nothing to lose. Not to sound like a therapist.

I think I’d gone through it in my head as a teenager. As all of us do, I tried on roles. There have been so many things I’d thought about doing, including being a therapist or a photographer or a pop singer. Many identities. How do I want to live? I’d tried on different ones, starting when I was 14. I always had the feeling I could see the end of the road with each. It wasn’t going to catch fire. That was something my mother gave me, which was a gift: To feel the thing that’s yours as a teenager. I hope my daughters feel that when they’re teenagers.

And were you on your own? Or did you find people to depend on?

My closest relatives were not with me or here part time or I wasn’t speaking to them. But one person who was very influential to me in my early career was Harry Dean Stanton, who I met when I did an apprenticeship with Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. We had conversations about acting and what it was and what it wasn’t. I think a lot of people on the outside think a good actor is a good liar, when in fact the opposite is the truth. Which is hard to do, and society raises us to lie about what you feel. Children understand what it is to feel until it’s repressed out of them.

Are your daughters yet at that age when they feel that pressure?

One’s 9 1/2 and one’s 6. My 6-year-old is just starting to feel a pressure to contain herself in kindergarten. Within the school structure, she’s realizing that everything she wants to do and say is not always appreciated. But I’ve tried to raise all of them with a fierce dedication to letting them express themselves and validating whatever they’re feeling in the moment. I think a lot of parenting is a power play -- or it certainly was a while ago. Modern parenting is more geared toward honoring the child. I do think one of the things I learned as an actor is that at 5 years old, we’ve experienced every emotion there is.

The show has an excellent sense of California.

What I can see as an objective viewer of surfing -- being a great surfer has to do with surrendering to the wave that’s right there. I think our culture focuses, in our sports and leisure and politics and lifestyle, on dominating other people across the world or Mother Earth or women in general. But to be a great surfer you have to give in to the water, the ocean, which is unpredictable and unconquerable. You have to ride the wave you’re given.

[David Milch said] he was going to set the show in a city, to do an East Coast city story. And HBO was developing a story they wanted to set in the surfing world. So they said, could you do it in a surfing milieu? ... So it wasn’t organic, but the things that happen are what needed to happen.