Mira Sorvino Is Ready for Her Next Act

In 2019, two years after Mira Sorvino helped inspire the #MeToo movement, Ryan Murphy cast the actor in her highest-profile project in two decades. Netflix’s Hollywood featured the Oscar winner as an actor whose career stalled out after a relationship with a studio head. In one poignant scene, she’s rescued from B-movie hell when Patti LuPone’s and Holland Taylor’s characters suddenly offer her the chance to work—really work again—in a dramatic role she can sink her teeth into.

On a recent weekday morning, Sorvino is describing the scene because I’ve asked how it feels to be getting compelling roles again, after Harvey Weinstein froze her studio career in retribution for her rejecting his advances. In FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story, Sorvino plays Monica Lewinsky’s mother, Marcia Lewis—a protective force in the eye of the titular scandal. Sorvino will also return to comedy in a forthcoming series from Sharon Horgan, starring with Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear as a singing, dancing, stereotype-thrashing ghost.

Sorvino says she feels just like her Hollywood character did.

“I cry tears of gratitude that someone would be so big-hearted and so generous. If you see the scene, you know I’m using my insides for that,” Sorvino says, starting to cry herself. “It’s a really powerful scene because it captures that gratitude and the magnanimousness of people who make a choice to believe survivors and give them second chances in the business. This is a cold business.”

As someone who was forcibly ejected from its inner circle, Sorvino knows that better than anybody. “It’s almost like you’re in the Colosseum and the emperor is putting the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down, and the crowd goes with it, and they move on. And the body’s dragged out. This is not a warm, nurturing community. It’s an ever-shifting community…where people’s heads are always on the chopping block. The idea that people took the chance to hire me again and believe in me and see something in me, I cannot say how much that means.”

In real life, Sorvino was blacklisted from Hollywood studio films for two decades—in spite of an Oscar win, three Golden Globe nominations and one win, and an Emmy nomination. During those 20 years, Sorvino had four “beautiful” children with actor Christopher Backus, leaned into activism (she is a United Nations goodwill ambassador and has partnered with Equal Rights Advocates to fight for women’s workplace issues, among other endeavors), and accepted what she thought was her professional fate: “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be…. It was heartbreaking to me and it certainly felt personal, like I wasn’t good enough.”

In more recent years, she was forced to accept less desirable projects to support her family, including a part unthinkable for other Oscar winners: appearing in a guest role in someone else’s Lifetime movie. “I wasn’t ashamed of it because I was a judge talking about domestic violence,” says Sorvino, a Harvard graduate who spent our phone conversation striving for silver linings.

Sorvino did not anticipate the effect that her decision to speak up about Weinstein would have. In Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article, published in October 2017, she was one of the first Hollywood stars to go on the record with allegations about the executive—saying that he made unwanted physical contact with her in a hotel room at the Toronto Film Festival in 1995, and later showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night uninvited. (Weinstein, who is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted of rape and a criminal sexual act, has denied all charges of sexual misconduct.)

“That definitely was a fork in the road of my life. There’s no way to minimize the impact of that decision—I was one of many silence-breaker people who decided to bring to account a very, very evil man,” says Sorvino. “To be a part of something that large with that much potential for good change has really meant an enormous amount to me.”

Sorvino’s decision to go public made her one of several celebrity faces of the #MeToo moment. But the sudden public attention she faced while reprocessing her trauma—and processing the traumas of so many other women—was its own challenge. She found herself confronting other buried traumas as well, like a violent sexual assault she suffered as a teenager and an inappropriate encounter with a casting director.

“It was easier to be anonymous than to have everybody open up those wounds, in a way,” says Sorvino. “I had never taken care of myself well enough in the past. But I also don’t think anyone could have known what it would feel like to go on an interview show, and all of a sudden, 98 faces of women who had been victims of Harvey pop up behind you [in a graphic]. And they’re looking for [my] reaction and I start to cry. These are things that normal victims [wouldn’t encounter]. It’s compounded…. But I think I’m stronger for it.”

Another bombshell came in December 2017, when Lord of the Ring director Peter Jackson confirmed what Sorvino had long suspected—that Weinstein waged a “smear campaign” against her and Ashley Judd.

“Obviously, I knew that Harvey was angry with me,” Sorvino says. “But I did not know he had the reach that he had—that he could chill my entire career so that I could not work in studio films anymore. That threw me into a tailspin…. To find out that it wasn’t random; it wasn’t fate. It was a malevolent hand that altered the trajectory of my life and my career. 

“This is the problem with sexual harassment: It is not an annoyance or a nuisance or something that women have to fend off. It shapes their entire lives and their potential. A man being able to stunt your career, to get you fired or not hired for refusing to comply with sexual demands, sexual predations—it’s the destruction of so many women and men. And I’m just one of millions of people that this occurred to. It’s really shocking and horrific.”

Problematic power dynamics are at the center of FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story, which reexamines Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton and its hellish aftermath. Playing Lewinsky’s mother has been a welcome challenge for Sorvino, who spoke to Lewinsky at length about Lewis.

“She tried to shield her daughter and do everything she could to change the situation for her, but she couldn’t,” says Sorvino of Lewis. “The only thing she could do was give her comfort. That is a horrendous situation to be in as a parent, when your child is suffering and the entire world is turned against her—and excruciatingly mocking and delving into the deepest, darkest sexual details in her relationship with the president. And blaming her for the relationship when, of course, the leader of the free world has his own free will…. I have so much respect for her and admiration for them as a family.”

There are scenes where all Sorvino’s Lewis can really do—while cooped up in her Watergate apartment with Beanie Feldstein’s Lewinsky—is urge her daughter to turn off the 24/7 news coverage.

“It was incredibly moving for me to see [Monica] in this catatonic state on the couch, watching as people tore her apart on late-night talk shows or on interviews. And saw as the president got to go out and give these press conferences where he blithely denied almost her very existence…”

Sorvino trails off before thinking aloud: “This must be terrible for Hillary [Clinton] to watch…but I have empathy for everyone involved, except perhaps Bill Clinton.”

Sorvino speaks excitedly about her next project: the forthcoming Starz comedy-horror series Shining Vail, cocreated by Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan. Courteney Cox stars as a lady-porn author attempting to recreate her early-career success by moving to an old house—new location, new inspiration. While there, she meets Sorvino’s character, Rosemary, who is either a ghost, alter ego, split personality, id, muse, or demon.

“Courteney’s character is the only one who can see me,” says Sorvino. “I am from the ’50s—I wear all vintage costumes, have platinum hair, talk like I’m in a ’50s TV show or movie, and don’t get all the modern references. She doesn’t know that smoking is bad for you. She’s a ’50s want-to-be party girl, but wasn’t really allowed to do that. She’s delicious. You’ll see.”

Sorvino has had to come to terms with the fact that she lost an enormous chunk of her career—prime years particularly in an ageist industry—to Weinstein.

“I mourn the loss of the two decades of career that I would have had, had that not been done to me. I mean, that’s rough,” Sorvino admits, before pivoting back to the positive. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had four kids if I was that busy working from movie to movie…. I have to be philosophical about it. Being a mother is the best thing I’ve ever done. We can’t look back. We can’t change the past. All we can do is be in the now, and revel in the beauty of life, and acknowledge our vulnerability and our pain—and not pretend that we don’t have it, but grow and help others and be of service.”

For three years, Sorvino worked for Amnesty International as a Stop Violence Against Women spokesperson—and kept searching for more opportunities that would give her a sense of purpose and worth outside of Hollywood.

“I was thinking, How do I empower myself now? Because I feel so lost and hurt and don’t know what to do. I started a partnership with Equal Rights Advocates, which is a legislative action group out of Southern California that works specifically on workplace issues for women. With them and Time’s Up, I’ve been involved in the passage into law of 10 bills both in California and New York. That felt like I was taking my trauma and turning it into some forward movement that was helpful to other people.”

Sorvino also used her time to start writing—essays about Weinstein for Time and The Hollywood Reporter, as well as an open letter published on HuffPost in which Sorvino apologizes to Dylan Farrow for working with Woody Allen on Mighty Aphrodite.

Sorvino was asked a few years ago if the Time’s Up movement had gone too far. The actor, who finds herself cautioning her teenage daughter about sexual violence, doesn’t think so. “It’s horrible to have to give a girl protective advice. It really should be like, ‘Don’t rape,’ rather than ‘Don’t ever go to this place alone.’ 

“If women are still being raped at the rate they are—one out of [five], but I think it’s more one out of two or seven out of eight, because I feel like most people don’t reveal what’s happened to them because it’s been too painful—until that stops, it’s never gone far enough. Until women can feel like they can pursue their God-given talents and ambitions and joy without fear that they have to kowtow to the darkest impulses of abusive people, then it has not reached its zenith. And it hasn’t become effective yet. We need to get down to close to zero sexual violence before we can say that the Me Too movement has gone far enough.”

As we’re wrapping up the interview, Sorvino has a message she asks me to pass along in the piece.

“I just want anybody who’s out there struggling with depression because of something like this to know that they’re not alone,” she says. “That we are there for them. I am there for them, and I understand them. To not give up and to reach out rather than just burrowing inward. I think that’s a tendency—when we suffer we go dark and silent. And that could be a very lonely, dangerous place, where we can get bad ideas and take self-destructive actions. And reach out to all of the options out there, like RAINN…. There are people all over the country professionally there to help you, but reach out to the people you love because they probably don’t know what you’re going through.”

“There are people who understand what they are going through and there’s hope that you can come out the other side,” adds Sorvino, pointing to herself as an example. “You have different acts in your life. Right now, I’m in either act two or act three—I hope this is act three, because then there’s going to be a four and five.”

It has not been easy, but she is wiser for it.

“I’m grateful for where I am now, and that I get to be the kind of person I would want my daughter to have as an example of how to be in the world,” Sorvino says. “Some people might say, ‘Well, she’s been terribly unlucky.’ But I do have a career resurgence, which feels like a blessing. I love acting and to get to do it again at the high level that I was before I was blacklisted by Harvey. I feel lucky. I feel fortunate. I feel grateful.”