Mia Farrow and Cole Escola Are Looking For a Room in Fire Island

From sailing the Nile River with Bette Davis to being baptized (sort of) by her godfather George Cukor, Mia Farrow has had a unique life in show business. And that’s to say nothing of her own distinguished career as an actor, the highlights of which include starring roles in some of the 20th century’s most beloved films, including Rosemary’s Baby and Hannah and Her Sisters. Now, at the age of 80, Farrow is experiencing something of a personal renaissance, having just returned to Broadway for the first time since 1979 opposite Patti LuPone in The Roommate, a zany and heartwarming two-hander about an unlikely pair of friends. The role earned Farrow a Tony nomination, her first, and led her to Cole Escola, a two-time Tony nominee this season for the uproarious Oh, Mary! When the two got on Zoom last month, just before Lupone’s explosive profile in The New Yorker, Escola, a self-professed student of Old Hollywood, couldn’t wait to show Farrow what they’d just bought at auction: a pink satin pillow that once belonged to Greta Garbo herself. In conversation, the fast friends got to talking about grief, grandmas, and being frightened of Joan Crawford.

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COLE ESCOLA: I’m laying down so that it feels like therapy.

MIA FARROW: Why not? Feel comfortable. You had the option just to talk on the phone, but I was told that you preferred to be on Zoom.

ESCOLA: Well, I had to see you. First things first, boxers or briefs?

FARROW: Boxers.

ESCOLA: Okay, great. We got that out of the way. I loved you in your show so much.

FARROW: I didn’t know you saw it. I’m coming to see Oh, Mary! on the 5th. I know you like to know these things.

ESCOLA: I do like to know. 

FARROW: I’ve been watching some videos of you here and there on Instagram and stuff. I love them. I send them to everybody and I’ve even posted them to my BlueSky, yes.

ESCOLA: I can’t believe you’ve watched that trash.

FARROW: It’s not trash. It’s a gem.

ESCOLA: I keep telling people that if they give me any trouble, you’re going to beat them up.

FARROW: [Laughs]

ESCOLA: Did you stay in the city when you were doing the play?

FARROW: I did. And I did nothing. I didn’t do caffeine. I didn’t ever drink. I didn’t go anywhere. Once, when we were in rehearsal, Ronan [Farrow] and his partner took me to lunch in the park. Besides that, it was my hotel room, it was my dressing room, and it was the stage.

ESCOLA: That’s basically how I’m living now too. I don’t do anything. I really can’t.

FARROW: I couldn’t. I have done plays where I could. But in that play—

ESCOLA: It was just you and Patti.

FARROW: And mostly it was me, because if you read the script, I initiate just about every conversation.

ESCOLA: That’s a lot of energy.

FARROW: And also, she’s Patti fucking LuPone. You don’t want to screw up.

ESCOLA: I can imagine.

FARROW: Believe me.

ESCOLA: Well, watching that, I was like, “Oh, I want Mia Farrow to be in three plays a season.” I need to see you. I’ve loved you in films, but you never know if someone’s talent translates to the stage. Sometimes people come from film or television and they just sort of disappear. But you are so alive.

FARROW: Every second of it, we were locked into each other. In that kitchen and before each show, she would always check to see who was there. And she said, “I want to see, where are my gay boys?” 

ESCOLA: I like to peek too. 

FARROW: Not me. I don’t want to see the audience, but it’s nice to hear them. 

ESCOLA: Do you want to do another play?

FARROW: I would love to. I forget, because I’m very good at doing nothing. I have a gift for that. Not everyone has that.

ESCOLA: I think I might have that gift too.

FARROW: It’s not a contradiction to be an introverted person but also want to be on stage and do it all.

ESCOLA: No. Both things require a sort of vulnerability, so it makes perfect sense.

FARROW: I can’t wait to see your Oh, Mary.

ESCOLA: Well, lower the bar, because I’ve really let myself go.

FARROW: Ronan has a very high bar and he’s been twice and he’s going to go again with me. He loved you.

ESCOLA: I just rewatched A Wedding a few nights ago.

FARROW: Do you know that I’ve never even seen it?

ESCOLA: You haven’t?

FARROW: No.

ESCOLA: Oh, you’re sensational in it. And you don’t even speak!

FARROW: I was the deaf mute.

ESCOLA: You’re just so mesmerizing. What was it like working with [Robert] Altman and that huge ensemble?

FARROW: I mean, it was many things. He had his own little coterie of people that he works with over and over. A couple of them were actors, but they would also write at night. And it was mainly improvised. He said, “I have a great idea for your character. She never speaks.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. He’s Robert Altman, whatevs!” So I never spoke and my days were pretty easy. I got to work with Lillian Gish, who was in the first movie ever made. Was it The Birth of a Nation?

ESCOLA: And she was in Orphans of the Storm with her sister.

FARROW: I think those films may be lost to time, but she was lovely.

ESCOLA: Oh, and you also worked with Bette Davis in your next film, Death on the Nile.

FARROW: I actually made Death on the Nile first, but she had worked with my father when I was 12, and we were all in Spain, and she had a very disagreeable daughter named B.D. who was my age. And Bette wanted to take her to every village and museum but she didn’t want to go anywhere. We were all staying in the same hotel. I, on the other hand, could barely not raise my hand to say, “Can I come?”

ESCOLA: “Can I be your daughter?”

FARROW: And finally, Ms. Davis said, “Mia, would you like to come?” And I’m like, “Oh, yes please.” But in the end, B.D. betrayed her mother in a horrible way, wrote a trashy book and stuff. So we’ve known each other since childhood but I lost all respect for her. I really loved her mother, by the way.

ESCOLA: So you vacationed in Spain with Bette Davis?

FARROW: No, my father was making a movie there. 

ESCOLA: I know, but you can lie. You can sort of twist the truth a little and say, “Oh yes. I love to vacation in Spain with Bette Davis.”

FARROW: I love to vacation in Spain, preferably with Bette Davis. She traveled with silver-framed photographs and she would invite me to her room and she would wear—I’ve never seen anything quite like it—a nightcap, an actual hat.

ESCOLA: Like a turban or—

FARROW: No, like a bonnet. She’d lost her hair from wearing wigs.

ESCOLA: Oh my god.

FARROW: So she said, “Don’t you wear wigs!” It’s a tall order if you’re in showbiz. But I said, “Okay.” We did all that filming on that boat up and down the Nile. When she came to work, it was like a big deal. “Ms. Davis is coming on the boat.” And she would look out over the Nile and beyond and say, “In my day, we’d have built all of this on the lot and better.”

ESCOLA: [Laughs] And then what was your relationship like with George Cukor?

FARROW: My godfather and the best of godfathers. Yes.

ESCOLA: He was just the best.

FARROW: I’m amazed that you know about George Cukor.

ESCOLA: I love George Cukor. I know he didn’t end up directing the film Gone With the Wind, but I love watching the screen tests for Scarlett O’Hara, watching him work with Paulette Goddard and all of these other actresses.

FARROW: He was absolutely an incredible person and incredible godfather. In the christening, because my family is Irish-Catholic, apparently he was obliged to hand me to the priest to stand in for himself because he was Jewish. So just for that moment, then I was handed back to him and he mentioned to my mother that I looked like a head of a studio named Eddie Mannix, which is way before my time. And I don’t know what Mr. Mannix looked like, but I guess he was pretty fierce-looking. And he just said to my mother, “She looks exactly like Eddie Mannix.” I got to go to his house every Sunday and he had tons of boyfriends. They’d be sitting around the pool and stuff.

ESCOLA: Were they all gorgeous?

FARROW: Gorgeous. He lived very near Katharine Hepburn, just up the road on Cordell Drive in LA. Say I’m at a window seat right now, Ms. Hepburn would be there, and George Cukor there with me in the window seat between them, and there was a large plant. The first time I had tea with them, I was probably 11, and I asked, “Would you like me to move the plant?” It was enormous, and they couldn’t possibly see each other. She replied, “Oh lord, no, we’ve certainly seen enough of each other.” He had these great friends—Vivien Leigh, Greta Garbo—but he said he had to cut off the relationship with Garbo when it came down to her wanting to leave notes in a tree. He said, “I drew the line at leaving notes in a tree.”

ESCOLA: Wait, she actually wanted to leave notes in a tree for him?

FARROW: Yes, exactly.

ESCOLA: I have to show you something. I just bought something at an auction and want to show it to you. It’s a pillow that belonged to Greta Garbo from her apartment. [Escola holds up the pillow] Embroidered on it it says, “Don’t worry, it never happened.”

FARROW: It’s pinkish! I don’t know what color I expected for Greta Garbo, never having met her myself.

ESCOLA: Oh, you never met her? Mysterious. But you met all of George Cukor’s other friends?

FARROW: Yes, he would have lunch with Katharine Hepburn, Simone Signoret, Vivien Leigh, everybody at a table. I didn’t say anything. Lucky me.

ESCOLA: But you never got to work with Cukor, did you?

FARROW: Alas, no, I would’ve loved that. I did get to come on the set when I was in school, when he was doing My Fair Lady. I got to see the costumes, the whole production, and I met Audrey Hepburn briefly. Vivien Leigh had gone to school with my mother, so I think she’s basically responsible for my entire career. Her boyfriend, Jack Merivale, was an actor. When I was 17, I went with a 27-year-old actress to an audition for The Importance of Being Earnest. I asked if I could audition too and I got the part, likely because I could do an English accent from attending school in England. Vivien Leigh came to see the show, which was terrifying. During a tea party scene, I was wearing a gauzy period dress and sitting in a peacock chair. When I stood up to pour tea and deliver my lines, the chair got stuck to my dress and I couldn’t unstick it. I proceeded with the entire scene with the chair on my behind. I knew I had blown it, but Vivien couldn’t have been nicer. She sent her agent to see me, and when the press reopened, she sent press to see me as well. That’s how kind she was, and how I got an agent.

ESCOLA: You have all these huge luminaries as guardian angels: Bette Davis, George Cukor, Vivien Leigh. Have you ever played a villain?

FARROW: Yes, in Death on the Nile, and The Omen with Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles. Julia and I had been doing a play called Fran’s Bed, then the next day we were on a plane to Prague where I played a murderer who detaches her from life support. It’s pretty great.

ESCOLA: I love the idea of you as someone evil. Have you seen the movie where Elizabeth Taylor is your mom and Robert Mitchum is your dad?

FARROW: Secret Ceremony, directed by the great Joe Losey, who did The Servant with Dirk Bogarde.

ESCOLA: Dirk Bogarde was very handsome, very hot, and a brilliant actor.

FARROW: I can barely remember it, as I was such a kid. But I think it was fun.

ESCOLA: Oh, Robert Mitchum also worked with Lillian Gish in that scary movie with the little kids and the dog. What is that called?

FARROW: Night of the Hunter. Great movie. Who directed that?

ESCOLA: Charles Laughton. His wife, Elsa Lanchester, who’s also brilliant and so funny, wrote a book called “Charles Laughton and I.” It’s his autobiography with some of her own stories. It’s a moving read.

FARROW: What a great pair they were. You’re a real movie buff. Are you seeing enough big emotions in movies these days?

ESCOLA: No, I like melodrama and high stakes that maybe don’t make sense. Silent movies, I find particularly moving right now. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid or even Joan Crawford in Dancing Daughters.

FARROW: She’s scary. And she was scary in person as well.

ESCOLA: Oh, did you meet her?

FARROW: Yes. I more than met her. I forget what movie was shooting, probably that one with Bette Davis, the scary one.

ESCOLA: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

FARROW: If that was shot at Fox, then that was what they were shooting. And for whatever reason, she started sending a whole refrigerator of Pepsi Cola for my trailer ’cause I was in a TV series called Peyton Place. I don’t particularly like Pepsi Cola, but a lot of Pepsi Cola kept coming to my trailer, more than anyone would ever want. And then she came over to see me and I got a strange vibe from her. So I’m back in New York, and she knew my mother. I hung up people’s coats for my mom when they came into the house. And I hung her coat and out falls a flask of alcohol. She grabbed it like that, and she put it in her handbag. She drank quite a lot. Then she invited me to her apartment. I thought it was a party, but I arrived, and I was the only one there.

ESCOLA: In New York?

FARROW: Yes. I was 17, and everything was green in her apartment. It just had very low lighting. And there were no other guests, just Ms. Crawford and me. And I just wasn’t very comfortable.

ESCOLA: Of course.

FARROW: So I just made up a lie that I wasn’t feeling very well and I didn’t want to give her any diseases. I think I said the word “diseases” as I walked out of the room. I was scared of Ms. Crawford. 

ESCOLA: That’s probably the apartment where she died, on 68th Street. I love walking by old stars’ apartments. Like, Marlene Dietrich’s Park Avenue apartment, 993 Park Avenue. I don’t know why. I just love walking by and knowing she walked here.

FARROW: Oh, sure. I think I got very lucky when I was 20 or 21 to get Rosemary’s Baby. Jane Fonda and other great actors had turned it down because they had never heard of Roman Polanski, and it was just a little horror movie. I’m eternally grateful because it really gave me my career. And people still watch it, at least on Halloween.

ESCOLA: I mean, I don’t like horror movies. I just don’t like being scared for the sake of being scared. But that movie is something deeper–

FARROW: It’s unsettling.

ESCOLA: It’s unsettling. Are you a night person or a morning person?

FARROW: I’m a very light sleeper, so I’ll wake up in the night and watch something on television, mostly about murderers. I’m fascinated by the behavior of the murderer, the family, and the entire array of people influenced by the murder. It’s so extraordinary and highly unusual.

ESCOLA: I guess you have to play a murderer now, with all this research.

FARROW: I did murder Jane Birkin in Death on the Nile.

ESCOLA: Were you a violent child?

FARROW: No, but you had to fight. It was a big, brawling Irish family, and we were all one year apart.

ESCOLA: I fought a lot with my little brother.

FARROW: And now?

ESCOLA: Now I’m not a violent person.

FARROW: Do you get along with that brother?

COLE ESCOLA: He passed away, but before that we did. We loved each other as babies, and then we hated each other as adolescents, and then we sort of looked up when we were old enough and said, “Wait, why are we fighting?”

FARROW: I’m sorry for your loss.

ESCOLA: Oh, thank you. He was my first friend, and I loved bossing him around. He loved doing what I said.

FARROW: How old were you when he died?

ESCOLA: This was a year ago, a year-and-a-half, during the run of the show.

FARROW: I’m so sorry.

ESCOLA: I’m sure you have similar experiences of dealing with–

FARROW: Me? I’ve just had only a happy life.

ESCOLA: Nothing bad’s ever happened? 

FARROW: Oh, come on. My favorite brother was my oldest brother. He died when I was 13 in a plane crash. My other second brother killed himself.

ESCOLA: Yeah. It was hard to do the play while going through that, but it also kind of saved me because I had somewhere to be and something to do every day, and so at least for 80 minutes—

FARROW: It was structured, so you’re not going to fall down the deep hole.

ESCOLA: Exactly. For 80 minutes a day, I got a break or a relief, whatever you want to call it.

FARROW: You were born in rural Oregon, right? I read that your father drove you out of the house and you had to flee with your mom and brother.

ESCOLA: Yeah. I lived with my grandmother for a while before my mom got on her feet. I loved that. That’s where I developed my love of old movies. My grandma and I shared a bedroom and she taught me how to read.

FARROW: How old were you when you went there?

ESCOLA: Five years old.

FARROW: Of course. She adored you.

ESCOLA: Oh, yeah. And I adored her. I would skip school every Monday to have lunch with her and her friends.

FARROW: She was a cool grandma.

ESCOLA: Yeah, she was. I don’t know why they let me do that, but they did. And I’m grateful. I thought I was a really good actor pretending to be sick, but it was every Monday, so they must’ve known. Do you have grandkids?

FARROW: I have tons of grandkids, yeah.

ESCOLA: Are you a cool grandma or a mean grandma?

FARROW: I’m such a cool grandma. Can you see a shelf full of art supplies behind me? Dolls, airplanes, chess, checkers.

ESCOLA: They’ve got everything they want. Have you ever been to Fire Island?

FARROW: No, I would love to though. I have not actually been there.

ESCOLA: I saw Patti perform on Fire Island a couple summers ago.

FARROW: That must have been crazy.

ESCOLA: It was crazy. All those queens just living for her.

FARROW: Heaven.

ESCOLA: We’ve got to get you to Fire Island this summer.

FARROW: I’ll go with you.

ESCOLA: Okay, I’ll bring you. Maybe on the red carpet at the Tony’s, I’ll put out a call. “We need two bedrooms on Fire Island.”