When we first meet Isla Fisher in a hotel room at Claridge’s, she’s complaining about a cold while tugging down her mini dress. This lady is willing to suffer for her art. We’ve met up to talk about her latest film Rango, loving lizards and her regrets about not kissing Johnny Depp when she had the chance.
Hi Isla, firstly, can you tell us why you wanted to get involved with Rango?
It was director Gore Verbinski, I’m a big fan of his movies. And the writer, John Logan’s done Sweeney Todd and a bunch of stuff I really enjoyed.
He showed me some of the images from the movie they looked so unlike traditional animated movies, where everything’s really brightly coloured and fluffy and cute. Everything seemed really edgy and quirky, and that really appealed to me too.
And then also, believe it or not, I love lizards. I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d get to inhabit the emotional landscape of a lizard.
How did you get into the part?
Well, I did do a little bit of research on lizards but Gore laughed at me for it! He had already shown me some of the animation for my character, so I didn’t actually have to create the character from scratch, I was just able to help facilitate the idea that he’d already had. I knew the physicality of the character and I knew how she walked the walk and talked the talk. Vocally he wanted her to sound like the love child of Holly Hunter and Clint Eastwood.
How about accent training? Do you find accents quite easy to pick up?
It depends on the accent I’m doing, but I watched Raising Arizona for Holly Hunter many, many times and I recorded it on a CD for my car. Vocally I just tried to keep the pitch of my voice deep and masculine-sounding because she’s such a tough character - smart, independent and feisty.
You’ve said she’s independent, do you think you’re like her at all?
I wish I were more like her because she’s so confident and she stands so tall. She sees through Rango’s nonsense and knows that he’s a charlatan. But she doesn’t expose him because she admires the fact he’s charismatic and gregarious and so different from her. She’s the brains behind the operations really. As a character, particularly a female character in an animated movie, she’s not a damsel in distress, she’s someone to respect and admire so it’s pretty cool that I was able to play her and I’d like to think I have any of her traits, I’d be very flattered.
Are there any women you look to as female role models?
I could say all the obvious women - who doesn’t look to Mother Teresa or Joan Of Arc? I suppose on a personal level I really admire my mother, she was able to work and have a career and also be an incredible mother and a very decent person. All the women who are working to prevent people trafficking I admire, and there are a lot of ecological women I love too.
As far as actresses go, I really admire Reese Witherspoon. I feel like she’s made choices that have been surprising, but at the same time she’s played women who are independent, who don’t just want to get married.
Are you aware of the examples you set for your own children in your work?
Oh definitely. Being a mother has changed my attitude to my work. I only want to pick projects or get involved with stuff that I really, really love because it’s time away from the most precious people in my life. So, from that perspective – but also because I have daughters - I want to set a good example by being an independent working mother, even though I seem to have managed to get out of the working bit most of the time!
We read that you regretted not kissing Johnny Depp when you had a chance.
That quote has gone everywhere! It was a flippant joke I made that ended up somehow becoming an internet quote. I was just joking that I couldn’t kiss Johnny Depp because I got sick. It was supposed to be funny, not literally me sitting at home crying myself to sleep.
He’s said he’s baffled by his heart-throb status. Having met him, can possibly be telling the truth?
I do actually believe that he is baffled by it. He’s extremely down to earth and he doesn’t seem to take it all seriously at all. And I think he has so much to offer other than that side, not just his looks, he’s extremely funny, smart and well-educated.
Which probably makes him more attractive…
Which probably makes him more baffled, and the cycle continues!
Do you set yourself a lot of goals or do you go with the flow?
I do go with the flow. I definitely like to keep life as an open book. You never know how anything is going to work out, so it’s best not to have too many expectations, but at the same time, I definitely have a to-do list every day and I probably do at least two per cent of that to-do list on a daily basis. I’m proud of myself, I tick of at least one thing every day. Usually it’s just ‘pack school lunch’.
How do you strike a work life balance?
I do want to say that I don’t think it’s possible to have it all. I think something has to give and you can’t be everywhere all the time, or everything to everyone. I just try to do the best I can and make the most of every day.
A lot of our readers have been asking us how to lose baby weight. We read that you dropped your baby weight to film Confessions Of A Shopaholic in a ridiculously short amount of time. Have you got any tips?
Just to tell everyone at home, so that they have some perspective, they hired me a personal trainer who came to my house and dragged me out of bed and forced me onto the treadmill. If I admitted that I’d eaten a French fry, or sweets (I love sweets) he’d almost cry. I was under incredible pressure to look a certain way for the movie, it was a fashion-intensive film, it wasn’t like I was playing a regular girl. Patricia Field was doing costuming and had an idea of the silhouette of the character, and so it’s part of my job to lose that weight.
I’ll go on the record and say that breast-feeding is the absolute best thing you can do for your baby and the best thing you can do for yourself. For so many reasons, from preventing breast cancer and osteoporosis, but, honestly, weight loss as well. Once you’ve had a baby you just have to keep nursing until they go to university, and then you’ll be svelte for life. That is what I’m saying.
