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[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Francis Bacon, whose insight has shaped reflections on the nature of beauty for more than four centuries, would no doubt find proof of his theory in [Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en). From her heterochromatic eyes to the fierceness and delicacy of her frame, she radiates dissonance, bursting at once with movie-star effulgence and an earthy groundedness. When I meet her for lunch at Pasadena’s Magnolia House, I’m swept away by her warmth and enthusiasm.
The “strangeness” I sense in her is less a matter of the physical than of the intellectual and spiritual. Bosworth is intensely curious about the world and an insatiable reader. Our conversation returns again and again to the books that have shaped our sensibilities and worldviews. Most recently, Bosworth has been enamored with Ocean Vuong, whose debut novel _On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous_ reminds her of the work of Haruki Murakami, one of her favorite writers. “I’m more starstruck by great writers than anyone else,” she confesses. “Literature informs my artistry almost more than cinema. It fuels a deep part of me. If I’m not reading, my creativity isn’t being stimulated the way it needs to be.” She is drawn to dark fiction (“The darker the better!”), stories filled with threat and otherworldliness, in which the line between beauty and horror blurs. As an example, she offers a scene from Murakami’s _The Wind-up Bird Chronicle_ that depicts, in gorgeously excruciating detail, a man being flayed alive. She was so mesmerized and repelled by the scene that she read it aloud to her husband, the director Michael Polish, and the two often revisit it in conversation.
Bosworth has found outlets for her dark aesthetic throughout the past decade, most recently in Netflix’s science-fiction mini-series _I-Land_ (2019) and the postapocalyptic thriller _The Domestics_ (2018). In 2016, she starred in _Before I Wake_, a dark fantasy about a little boy whose dreams—and nightmares—bleed into reality. The film is an elegant blend of family drama and phantasmagoria, and Bosworth’s performance as the troubled boy’s foster mother is complex and emotionally nuanced.
Soon, she will play Sharon Tate, the actor and wife of notorious filmmaker, Roman Polanski, who, in 1969, was brutally murdered along with seven others by Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ during a three-day string of killings in Los Angeles. Directed by Polish, it will be the first film about Tate’s life made with the approval and input of Tate’s family.
Later this year, Bosworth will also star alongside Mel Gibson and Emile Hirsch in _Force of Nature_, a heist-meets-hurricane-disaster film, in addition to _Wild Indian_ with Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Greyeyes, a dark thriller chronicling two Anishinaabe native men who covered-up a murder years ago.
As we eat our scrambled eggs and spinach and imbibe our caffeine (she favors tea, I coffee), I happen to mention that I teach at a university. She beams. In 2018, she and her husband opened a non-profit school, the Montana Institute of the Arts, where they teach filmmaking each summer to a crop of students from working-class (and often indigenous) backgrounds. “Our school is unorthodox and unique,” says Bosworth. “I learned from the experience of being on a film set. I didn’t go to film school and I carried that around with me for a long time. I had imposter syndrome and felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. But it really is the experience of actually _doing_ something where you learn the most. So the school is based on learning from professionals who are in the field. We bring in producers, AD’s, people who have really made things.”
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
Michael Polish’s father is a Montanan, and he and Bosworth were married on a ranch near Philipsburg in 2013. Both believe Montana is the “perfect place” for their school. “It’s inspirational and still wild,” she shares. “The first two years have been really special and we’re excited for this summer. We feel like we have some magic dust with the program.”
Despite significant early success, like starring in blockbuster early-aughts films _Blue Crush, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!,_ and _Superman Returns,_ Bosworth hasn’t always felt “in control of her own narrative” as an artist. “For so many years I was a young blonde actress, getting pats on the head. ‘Oh you’re cute, can you not have an opinion?’ ‘Oh, you read?’ ‘You got into Princeton?!’” She’s excited to see the industry changing in the wake of #MeToo, especially as the career of her stepdaughter, Jasper, begins to blossom.
Bosworth’s turn toward independent filmmaking has also been empowering. “Leadership, driving the momentum of something is in my DNA.” Positions where she lacked creative control have thus been particularly discouraging. She speaks on the frustration of pouring her heart into a scene, knowing she had given an amazing performance, only to see it “cut to shit” during editing. But this changed when she met Michael on the set of _Big Sur_ in 2011. She felt immediately that this was someone who understood and _respected_ her as an artist. “I had never met anyone who said, ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘Well, I want to do this.’ ‘Okay, I’ll write it. Let’s do it.’” Whereas for much of her career she felt like she was just trying to survive in an industry that could be as soul-crushing as it was dreamy, all of a sudden she didn’t feel alone anymore.
“He can give me a piece of direction that’s so freaking ‘out-there’ and I’ll just understand what he wants,” she confides. “The first scene I did in _Big Sur_ I was nervous and all over the place—Michael affectionately calls it ‘fireworks’ because I was overacting. We were sitting at the dinner table and it’s Jack Kerouac and my character, and she’s in love with him but he’s drunk and fucked up and crazy at the table in front of her son. Most directors and producers want you to pick up the pace,” she says, snapping her fingers, “and you can lose a sense of the magic. But Mike told me not to say anything until I believed it, and I sat there for four and a half minutes, silent, until it clicked and I finished the scene in a way that surprised him but was also just how he wanted it. He called ‘Cut!’ and looked at his first AD and said, ‘_I’m going to marry her_.’”
Bosworth’s relationship with Polish marked a turning point in her life—a rebirth, even. While their film collaborations have given her a greater sense of creative autonomy, their marriage has opened her outward and deepened her sense of responsibility to others, near and far. She loves having wisdom to share with Jasper, whom Bosworth considers “hands-down the greatest unexpected gift of her life.” The two have a unique relationship. Not quite mother and daughter and not quite sisters, they are a blend of both. Utilizing the Spanish taught to her by her paternal grandmother, Jasper calls Bosworth _madre_.” And Bosworth’s maternal instincts have kicked in: she even learned to cook just for Jasper.
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Since marrying, Bosworth and Polish have become more socially conscious. Prior to launching their school, they made a film together to shine light on the sex-trafficking industry that preys on Central American migrants. After listening to an NPR story on the bust of a sex house near their LA neighborhood, Polish took an interest in the problem and began developing a vision for a narrative film that would, in Bosworth’s words, take a “Trojan horse approach to the subject matter.” The film, _Nona_ (2017), begins as what seems to be a love story between a young woman and a man who promises to help her journey north to find her mother in America, before unraveling into a nightmare of human exploitation. The project very nearly didn’t get made: during preproduction, one of the financial backers pulled out. After some careful accounting, Bosworth decided to finance the film herself and stepped into the role of executive producer and producer, trusting their small crew could pull everything off. The resulting film was powerful, and prompted many trafficking survivors to reach out to Bosworth and Polish. “The reason I do what I do is to connect with people,” Bosworth tells me. “I love the feeling I get when I know I’ve impacted others.”
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
She sees this satisfaction as intrinsically connected to the joy or catharsis she experiences when touched by great art, especially music and fiction, and she’s not averse to letting artists know when they’ve moved her. In one case, doing so led to one of her most significant film roles. “I reached out to the author of _Still Alice_ over Twitter to share how much her book affected me, because my grandparents suffered from Alzheimer’s.” She asked the author, Lisa Genova, whether she had considered making her novel into a movie. Genova shared that the project was already off the ground and recommended Bosworth for the role of Anna, a daughter of the main character. “That’s literally how I got the part,” recalls Bosworth. “I had known Julianne Moore for many years and really wanted to work with her. I remember being really nervous on that project because it was subject matter that felt very personal, very raw, but I was also nervous to work with Julie. Everyone felt that way—when you’re working with one of the greats, it’s amazing.” Moore, of course, went on to win an Academy Award for her role.
Working with Moore was both inspiring and instructive. Bosworth came away understanding she needed to hold things more loosely and not try too hard on set. “There was one day where we were filming one of the most important, emotional scenes for her,” says Bosworth. “I was selling my house at the time, and we were chatting right up to the moment where the AD was quieting everyone down shouting ‘We’re rolling!’ and she’s continuing to talk to me, saying ‘If you need a good realtor, I have a good realtor.’ Right up until ‘Action!’ she was chatting about real estate and then just clicked into her role and stunned me with how brilliant she was.”
“I asked her later what the trick was. And she said it’s just years and years of experience. She did all the work way before she walked on set and didn’t need to grind and pull herself apart to produce that performance—she trusted herself.”
Bosworth is increasingly learning to trust _her_self. She’s also learning to compartmentalize all the emotional intensity she accesses in her roles so it doesn’t compromise life outside of work. “Real pros leave their shit on set,” she states, but admits that this is rather difficult when you live with your principal co-worker. To stay sane, she and Polish even tried to implement a rule that they don’t talk about work after 6 PM. That lasted about two days.
The blurring of work and home life is not what most concerns Bosworth, however. She has caught her stride professionally, having self-financed and produced her own project, and she expects to soon direct her own film. But the mystery of filmmaking has faded some with all that experience. Bosworth fears that the jadedness that attends adulthood might rob her of the magic of reading, or even the magic of making movies. “You have to be careful not to fall out of love with the magic of it,” she says. “Especially when the commercial or executive side of things imposes itself, it can eclipse the art.”
How does she try to re-enchant her life and art? Her answer is surprisingly simple: horses. As a child, Bosworth was a champion equestrian, a skill that earned her a role in Robert Redford’s _The Horse Whisperer_ and launched her career. One of her earliest memories is of being thrown from a spooked horse when she was four or five years old—and then immediately jumping back on. Riding is deeply connected to her sense of her own resilience and her sense of continuity with her past. Like her time under the wide open sky of Montana, it immerses her in the beauty and power of nature.
Bosworth also looks for grace and mystery in everyday life. She has great affection for her pets, a pair of French spaniels, and two cats. “Everyone thinks they have the best animals,” she remarks, “but we actually do.” Everyday, Polish—who originally trained as a visual artist—leaves a minimalist ink drawing for Bosworth to find when she wakes up. They depict scenes from the previous day, often involving their pets in comic scenarios. She shares a photo of a recent sketch Polish made when she was recovering from the flu. It shows a cartoon Bosworth coughing while being nuzzled by all four of their pets. The caption reads “Let the zoo take care of you.”
Her relationship with Polish is defined by such idiosyncratic intentionality. Each intuitively grasps the needs of the other, something Bosworth attributes to a cosmic consonance—his Scorpio to her Capricorn. Though she’s hesitant at first to use these words (“Talking about yourself as an ‘artist’ can sound super affected, and I don’t want to sound like a douche.”), she sees her marriage itself as a living expression of art. In my estimation, Bosworth has nothing to fear from her sense of the magic of film waxing and waning. Whatever magic exists in the creation of art is even more abundantly present in great love, which always entails its own creations.
[Kate Bosworth](https://www.instagram.com/katebosworth/?hl=en) wears [BOTTEGA VENETA](https://www.bottegaveneta.com/us) clothing and accessories.
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Photographed by: [Nina Raasch](https://www.instagram.com/ninaraasch/?hl=en) at [Voyeur(s) Agency](https://www.voyeurs-agency.com/).
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