If actress Hope Davis looks familiar, it may be that you caught her in the small independent films “The Myth Of Fingerprints,” where she played Noah Wylie’s wise-beyond-her-years girlfriend, or the highly underrated “Daytrippers,” where she portrayed an insecure wife who spends an entire day tracking down her philandering husband.
But if you’ve lived in Chicago for more than 10 years and frequented Ann Sather Restaurant on Belmont Avenue, you might remember Davis serving you pancakes slathered with lingonberries. “I worked mornings, starting at 7 a.m. — the cinnamon roll shift,” she says. She toiled there back when she was a struggling actress, trying desperately to get an audition at one of the classier theaters in town.
Born in New Jersey to a chemical engineer father and librarian mother, Davis attended Vassar College as a cognitive science major. “It’s a multi-disciplinary study of the mind and how people think,” she explains. But the acting bug soon bit so hard that she spent her junior year in London, “studying with masterful people at the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company).”
After graduation, she moved to Chicago, which was fast becoming something of a theatrical mecca. She and some friends started a small theater company in an Evanston school basement that they painted black.
“There were about 10 of us,” she says. “We did Brecht, Pinter, Beckett, things we had no real understanding of.”
Davis still refuses to divulge the name of this less-than-successful troupe. “We’ve all agreed never to tell,” she says with a laugh, “because it was so stupid. Something we made up late one night in college.”
But she soon discovered that the business end of theater wasn’t to her liking.
“We were trying to run this artistic democracy and it was completely insane. We had no leader and we fought all the time. I wasn’t up for it. I’m the sort of person who likes to go to work and do my job.”
So the company disbanded, leaving Davis free to sample some of the other fledgling theater groups around town.
“I remember auditioning at these storefront theaters in the western part of the city. They were little teeny places with a red curtain that divided the stage.”
But just when it looked like things might not work out in Chicago — Davis was forced to take a job as a temp for an insurance company on Wacker Drive — she made a big score. She was cast opposite William Petersen and D. W. Moffatt in the Remains’ Theatre production of David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow.” Adding to her luck was that “Plow” was being directed by Joel Schumacher (of “Batman” fame), who later gave Davis a small role in “Flatliners,” which kick-started her film career.
These days, Davis can be seen in “Next Stop Wonderland,” which opens Friday. The film is a romantic comedy in which Davis plays a lonely Boston night nurse who is still suffering the death of her beloved father and the loss of her politically active boyfriend. Thanks to some unwanted help from her pushy mother, who places a personal ad in a newspaper for her daughter, Erin finds herself back in the dating scene, where she somehow keeps missing the man we all assume is Mr. Right.
The amount of improvisation that went into making “Next Stop” gives the film a pleasant edginess.
“Some directors are attached to the words,” Davis explains, “and want you to read everything exactly as its written. Other directors only have an idea of the scene and don’t know what the words should be. This director (Brad Anderson) vacillated between the two, trying to see what kind of spark could happen accidentally.”
And as for fate, which plays such a key role in the film?
“I’m a romantic spirit,” she says. “I like to think that there’s a purpose behind the things that happen in our lives, especially relationships that fail and those that succeed. But I also think that you need to get yourself to the place where you’re open and ready for it to happen.”
