Amy Ryan interview: ‘Doubt’ and ‘Sugar’
It’s been quite the banner year for Amy Ryan. The Tony and Oscar nominated actress played an alcoholic rock star on the Apple TV+ crime drama “Sugar,” and has earned her third career Tony nomination for her leading role in a revival of John Patrick Shanley‘s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Doubt.” In a recent chat with Gold Derby (watch the video above), Ryan says her recent work is just apart of what drives her as an actor. “If there’s a thread through everything I’ve done in the past 30 years,” she says, “it’s trying to find something new, not retrace old steps.”
In “Sugar,” Ryan plays Melanie Matthews, an alcoholic former rock star whose stepdaughter has gone missing. Melanie eventually crosses paths with John Sugar (Colin Farrell), the private detective hired to find the missing girl. Ryan describes what drew her to the character. “Melanie is cool to her core, but not without trouble and not without conflict,” she says. “She seems content with having moved on from her twenties where she was this star musician. But she still struggles with alcohol and struggles with the truth. I think the two go hand in hand, but I liked seeing that conflict on the page.”
The friendship between Melanie and Sugar is at the core of the series, and Ryan loves that their relationship is a modern spin on the male/female dynamic that was a part of the film noir genre of the mid-20th century. “There’s an instant chemistry and kinship that happens with them, but there’s also a big wall around them,” she says. “Melanie in the forties and fifties would be the typical femme fatale, woman in distress and here comes the handsome guy to fix her problems. Here we lean more intro true friendship as opposed to two people who lust after each other.”
The role of Melanie is the polar opposite of Sister Aloysius in “Doubt.” For Ryan, who only had a week to prepare for the role after original star Tyne Daly left due to health issues, the title of the play had multiple parallels to the actual experience. “Even when I was onstage I was questioning whether I’m going to pull this off,” she jokes. “Fear is a great motivator, and it made me get up at the crack of dawn and keep pounding the script. I’d read it twice a day and just drill it for hours before I would get to the theater. It was running a marathon that I hadn’t trained for.”
This revival of “Doubt” marks the 20th anniversary of the original production. For Ryan, who has performed classic works by Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, believe that “Doubt” will be just as relevant and entertaining in another 20 years. “I do believe in 20 years this play can be easily performed again and we’ll be talking about how it’s resonant,” she argues. “If you strip all of the power headlines out of it today, you still have a wonderful, well-crafted drama with a lot of humor in it in 90 minutes.
Ryan’s versatility as a performer has allowed her to go between stage, television and film with relative ease, a skill that isn’t lost on her. “I see it as my ticket to longevity,” she says. “I didn’t aspire to be an ingenue. Even before I was hired as a professional, I just liked making my family laugh around the dinner table. It was taking on different voices, taking on different costumes. I didn’t have a set character. I would imitate everybody. It was gleaning bits of other people’s personalities all the time that got me excited.
