Naomi Watts has two Oscar nominations and was a 2024 Emmy nominee, but there’s something different about the latest honor she is about to receive. The thought that her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame will be there for family, friends and industry compatriots to see — not to mention fans, tourists and any-one else who happens to stroll past that stretch of sidewalk —makes it feel, well … concrete. Literally.
“I can’t even believe it,” she says of the accolade, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s interesting, because I have all kinds of imposter syndrome. I’ve always felt like I’m supposed to struggle, I’m supposed to keep proving myself, and this sort of just came out of the blue. It’s really lovely.”
The Oct. 13 ceremony will be a milestone moment for a career that’s now spanned more than two decades, from her breakout role in David Lynch’s L.A. neo-noir “Mulholland Drive” to her recent run of collaborations with Ryan Murphy (current project count: four, including the soon-to-debut legal drama “All’s Fair”).
Watts was drawn to acting at an early age. The actor, who was born in England, recalls watching her mother perform in a local play in Shoreham, Kent, when she was around 4 or 5 years old, and not understanding why she wouldn’t acknowledge her daughter waving from the audience. Finally, “to put me out of my frustration,” her mother gave her a little wink and wave — and the young Watts was transported: “I thought, that’s a world I want to be a part of.”
That love of acting carried her through a move from England to Australia at age 14 — her mother promised to put her in an acting class to ease the transition — and then her early years working Down Under and struggling to find her footing in Hollywood. “I pretty much was deemed as unhireable,” Watts remembers of that late 1990s period. “I was flunking auditions over and over again, or I’d get in a movie and it would get cut down or out. It was just bad luck.” But those fortunes reversed when casting director Johanna Ray called her in for a television pilot Lynch was working on.
Lynch’s method of casting, choosing actors to consider based on headshots, meant her odds were better, and she cut a family vacation short to meet with him. “The minute I walked in, it just felt different,” Watts remembers. “He was present. He was asking me questions. It felt very different than any previous audition I’d gone to — there were so many where it’s a line of people, you’ve had to wait two hours, you’ve had to drive across town to get there and then go back the next day, and people would barely look at you. But David just lit up, and I was able to connect with him in a different way.”
When ABC rejected the pilot, Lynch re-fashioned it as a movie, and his Hollywood story became Watts’ Hollywood breakout. Released in 2001, “Mulholland Drive” received widespread critical acclaim, as did Watts’ dual performances as fresh-faced ingenue Betty Elms and the bitter, hardened Diane Selwyn, two very different shades of the L.A. experience.
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Lynch (who died in January 2025) told the L.A. Times in 2001 that he “saw someone that I felt had a tremendous talent, and I saw someone who had a beautiful soul, an intelligence — possibilities for a lot of different roles, so it was a beautiful full package.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, both the film and Watts’ tour-de-force portrayal(s) are still spoken of reverently. She hasn’t seen the film in some 20 years, though she does want to revisit it. “It would have a whole other meaning now, with David gone. I just wish he could be there,” she says.
“Mulholland’s” triumph put Watts on the map, and on the radar of other major filmmakers. In the years that followed, she appeared in films from Gore Verbinski (“The Ring”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“21 Grams,” and her first Oscar nomination), David O. Russell (“I Heart Huckabees”), Peter Jackson (“King Kong”), David Cronenberg (“Eastern Promises”) and J.A. Bayona (“The Impossible,” her second Oscar nod), to name a few. That impressive resume spans blockbuster spectacle and intimate drama, with much of it tying back to themes of grief and identity, things she’s had to probe in her own life. “I lost my father very young, and then we moved around a lot. My mom was trying to find her feet, [I went through] several different schools and counties in the U.K., then moving countries. So [that concept of] having to reshape myself. How do I fit in?”
In recent years, while Watts has kept up a stream of film credits (among them dramas like “Emmanuelle,” “Penguin Bloom” and acting against a canine co-star in “The Friend”), she’s done some of her best work on the small screen, much of it with Murphy. After starring in his 2022 thriller series “The Watcher,” Watts has joined the roster of actors Murphy turns to again and again.
Working with him “has been incredibly meaningful at this point in my life,” Watts says, adding, “I trust him wholeheartedly. … He’s very good to women. It’s so rare that you get to even work opposite other women — it’s usually you and a bunch of guys. But more than once now, I’ve worked with a bunch of great women” in his projects. Those collaborations also include her Emmy-nominated work as Babe Paley in “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”; the “escapism” and “juicy drama” of “All’s Fair”; and a three-episode guest arc as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the upcoming “American Love Story,” focusing on John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
Watts will be the first to note her career hasn’t been a straight-upward trajectory: she makes an up-and-down motion to illustrate, versus the up-up-up others might experience. Part of that is because she’s taken risks, or took time to be present for her children. But that awareness that none of this came easy or fast is part of what continues to drive her — and she has no plans to slow down.
While she loves her work with Murphy and the family she’s found in him and that team, she’s also excited to stretch herself by “working with new and exciting people doing bold things, things that take me out of my comfort zone.” She has projects on the horizon that fall into that realm, she says, and she’s keen to do more comedy in the wake of her appearance in Lena Dunham’s rom-com series “Too Much.”
But first, there’s a Walk of Fame star to unveil. Murphy will be a speaker at the ceremony, and other attendees could include her “Mulholland” co-star Justin Theroux and Edward Norton, who worked with her on “The Painted Veil.” She hopes some of the “All’s Fair” ladies will attend, and perhaps her “St. Vincent” and “The Friend” co-star Bill Murray too (“You never know with him!” she notes with a laugh).
The magnitude of the moment isn’t lost on her. “I struggled for so long. I’m so familiar with that side of things more than this incredible good fortune, celebrations like this. It’s wonderful.” You could even call it the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of.
Tipsheet
WHAT Naomi Watts receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
when 11:30 a.m., Oct. 13
WHERE 6201 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
WEB http://www.walkoffame.com
From Variety US