A few days after we meet, Father Mother Sister Brother is awarded the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, making this project even more special for Bialik. The film features a trio of family-themed shorts and movingly explores the painful ties that often keep families together. In one Bialik plays the sibling of Adam Driver’s character. They visit their father, played by gravel-voiced singer Tom Waits, in his isolated home in rural America.
Waits, who has starred in a succession of Jarmusch movies since appearing in 1986 crime caper Down By Law, “is like a mythical creature”, says Bialik. “You can’t even capture him on a screen. That’s Tom. He’s the most unassuming, unusual unicorn. And he’s a person who speaks in poetry. He can’t help it. He’s from another dimension – the only way to explain it.”
Jarmusch says Waits was initially taken aback when he was paired with Bialik and Driver in Father Mother Sister Brother.
“Mayim and Adam are very precise actors,” says Jarmusch. “Tom, obviously, is looser, right? So after the first day of shooting, Tom took me aside and said, ‘So Jim, you hired these two professional killers. What do I do?’” Needless to say, Waits more than holds his own.
The other shorts in the film resonated with Bialik for their emphasis on family and what keeps one together, something the actor thinks about a lot as a descendent of eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US. Raised as a Reform Jew, Bialik “grew up with the Holocaust hanging very low”, she says. “And, yeah, it’s definitely been a huge component of my religious identity, but my ethnic identity as well… I grew up in Los Angeles, and there’s always that moment of leaving, where my grandmother would look at us like we were never coming back. That tension.”
The third story in Jarmusch’s film, Sister Brother, sees two siblings in Paris forced to sort through their late parents’ possessions, which Bialik says she could relate to since she lost her father ten years ago. “For me, Sister Brother was very, very special,” she says, alluding to how it tapped into the feelings one experiences at the loss of a parent. “The grief that we feel there is different than the grief, let’s say, that you feel in those small leavings [where one flies the nest].”
With two sons of her own (via ex-husband Michael Stone) – Miles and Frederick – the film’s middle segment, Mother, starring Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and Charlotte Rampling, also inevitably touched her. “I think many of us can relate. I have it with my mother now, who’s still living. There’s always that pull, which I think is also why this film feels so resonant for potentially everyone in different ways. We’re all children.”
For Bialik, a self-described “introvert” who’s happiest at home in her pyjamas, being involved in Jarmusch’s film could open up new, unexpected doors. “Working with Jim was a completely unexpected component of a career that, by all means, should be done,” she says. “I’ve been working since I’m 11.”
But Hollywood still can’t get enough of her; at the Father Mother Sister Brother premiere, director Sofia Coppola told Bialik how much she admired her performance. “Like, what?” Bialik exclaims. “Sofia could be wrong.”
The actor, who wears a gold Star of David bracelet around her wrist, has called herself a “staunch Zionist” and “aspiring modern Orthodox”, and has been a vocal supporter of Israel in the wake of October 7. “It’s been very difficult since the massacre,” she says “It’s been very painful. And as a liberal person, it’s a very, very painful time. As my social media tends to reflect, I think we all would like an end to all war and suffering and find a peaceful resolution.”
The question of whether she views her characters as Jewish comes up. “This is a question that we talked about when I was on Big Bang Theory, because there was some conversation... is Amy Farrah Fowler Jewish? I think Bill Prady, one of our creators and executive producers, was like, ‘No, not necessarily.’
“And my younger son, who at the time must have been eight years old, said, ‘Well, she has to be Jewish. You’re playing her!’ Why? I don’t know! This was a child’s perception.”
Family matters: Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik in Father Mother Sister Brother[Missing Credit]
Tom Waits in Father Mother Sister Brother[Missing Credit]
What about her character, Emily, in Father Mother Sister Brother? “Look, Adam Driver is not a member of the tribe, and we definitely have similarities,” she replies. “Like Jim had said, ‘These people could be siblings.’ And so when I look at him, I’m like, ‘We’re part of the human race, which is beautiful.’ For me, I guess… my parents are from the Bronx. They were born during the Second World War. There’s a way that I speak, there’s a way that I frame things.”
She points to the fact that in one of her very first movies, 1988’s Beaches, she played the younger version of the character played by Jewish icon Bette Midler. “When I was cast in Beaches, people would say, ‘You seem like this New York kid.’ And I’d reply, ‘Because I was raised like a New York kid!’ As I said, when I look at Adam Driver, sure, we could be siblings, but he could be from the other side of the river as well.”
She calls Driver a “movie star”, with a level of fame far beyond what she knows. “I still go to the grocery store,” she says. But surely The Big Bang Theory put her in living rooms across the land?
“People feel like they know me, so they really want to hug me. I make people cry. They get very excited. I made a poor lady from Spain cry. She started crying in the street, in front of a church.”
Meanwhile, her academic studies have, she says, given her “less tolerance and patience for a lot of silly things about the industry, and a lot of things especially for women, about appearance, the pressures that are just part of the industry”. Her time on Blossom was like another universe. “We weren’t wearing Spanx, we weren’t getting manicures, we didn’t have false lashes, we weren’t getting filler at 20. Everything was so, so different.”
Now aged 50, her creative life has reached a point which doesn’t involve ascribing to near-impossible beauty standards. In 2022, she directed her first movie, As They Made Us, with Dustin Hoffman – co-scripted by her partner Jonathan Cohen. She and Cohen now co-host Bialik’s podcast Breakdown: “It’s something we create together.”
But even if this is a step back from the limelight that TV brings, there’s no escaping repeat viewings of The Big Bang Theory. “It’s a strange life,” she acknowledges. “But it is my life.”
Father Mother Sister Brother is in cinemas now
Bialik and Jim Parsons in Big Bang TheoryAlamy Stock Photo