Naomi Watts on Early Career Rejection: 'I Was Desperate, Behind on My Rent'

Naomi Watts received the Golden Eye Award at the Zurich Film Festival and used her masterclass to revisit the decade of rejection that preceded her breakout in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive."

"It was a grind. That 10 years before I met David, I became so locked up and I felt worthless," Watts said. Her agent at the time told her bluntly: "We need to have a heart to heart. Honey, you are too intense. You are freaking people out."

"I went: 'Yeah, no shit.' I was desperate! I was behind on my rent; I was getting evicted. I didn't know what to bring to this room," she recalled.

Watts described how the constant feedback reshaped her into someone unrecognizable. "They told me I wasn't funny last week, so now I am trying to be funny. They told me I wasn't sexy – I'm trying to be sexy. You reshape yourself and try to read the tone of what is needed," she said. "That's how it went and I couldn't be myself anymore. I was either an extreme version of myself or a diluted version of myself. It took a genius like David Lynch to see beyond all that weirdness I built up, undo it and get to the real me."

Lynch changed her career when she met him in her late 20s. "Mulholland Drive" is widely considered her breakout. "That film gave me the most incredible role that affected people. To this day they still watch it. It's still on these 'bests' lists. I'm just very, very proud to be a part of that film," she said.

She credited Nicole Kidman with sustaining her through the dry spells. "She said: 'All it takes is one thing, one thing could change everything.' That didn't make sense to me for a very long time. Until David Lynch, and then it became very real."

Right after "Mulholland Drive," Watts starred in the horror hit "The Ring" — against her own instincts. "I tried to say 'no.' There's no certainty to anything you do, ever," she said. "I said: 'Wait. I just got this critical acclaim, so I want to instantly go into a Hollywood blockbuster-y movie?!' I fought with my agent at the time. I didn't know it was going to be a massive hit! I woke up the horror genre, in a way. It was a lucky, lucky break."

She also earned raves for "21 Grams." "Extraordinary things can happen when you get tired and irritable from doing things too much," she said of that intense shoot.

Watts identified the through-line of her work. "If there's any theme in my work, it's grief. It's why I do what I do: I'm trying to figure out the meaning of my life. Another one is identity. I love the story [that asks]: 'Who are you?'" That question, she said, comes from moving around constantly as a child, always "on the outskirts of the group, trying to find my way in."

Her recent role in Ben Shirinian's "The Housewife," set in the 1960s, continues that investigation. She plays a seemingly perfect housewife hiding a terrible post-war past. "I never played a character like this, even though I look for flawed women and I'm not afraid of unlikeable. But this was extreme," she said. "A character like that comes to you at night, in your dreams."

Watts closed the masterclass with reflections on confidence and vulnerability. "Vulnerability is a superpower. It has taken me a long time to know that, and own that," she said. "I still have a lot of self-doubt, but I don't pretend it's not a real thing. I try to see it as a gift. It's more effective than just bullshitting your way through it all."

She spoke openly about early menopause and the conversation with her partner, now husband, actor Billy Crudup, that changed her approach. "I was crying in the bathroom, trying to scratch off my estrogen patch. I told him what was going on, so nervous, and I thought: 'He's not gonna want to be with me anymore!' He said: 'Hold on. It's great that you are taking care of yourself. Why are you ashamed?' It was so sweet… And sexy. I felt safer than I ever felt."

That experience led her to found Stripes Beauty, a brand for women navigating perimenopause and menopause. "Once I talked about it with my partner, who is now my husband, and he was supportive, I went: 'How about I just own the story?'" she said. "Men have to be curious and compassionate. And our job, ladies, is to share the story."