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RELATED LINKS

• "A Night Out With Nia Vardalos - Are You Really Her?"
• "FIRST PERSON: Nia Vardalos on Becoming a Mom - Overnight"
• My Life in Ruins
• Ms. Vardalos' bio

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Award-winning actress-writer describes her struggle in getting an acting job and turning to script writing out of necessity. (2:30)
 

Full interview. (11:21)
 

Tavis: Nia Vardalos is a Golden Globe-nominated actress who has received an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - I still love that title - a film she, of course, starred in.

Nia Vardalos: Thank you (laughter).

Tavis: Her latest project is in theaters starting today, "My Life in Ruins." The romantic comedy also stars Richard Dreyfus. Here now a scene from "My Life in Ruins."

[Clip]

Tavis: (Laughter) Hi, Nia, how are you?

Vardalos: I'm really well, thanks. How are you?

Tavis: I'm well. First of all, you look great. Somebody has lost some weight.

Vardalos: (Laughter) Yeah, I had a doctor's orders situation. I had a high blood sugar problem. I was writing for a couple of years. I was just in my office writing and I have a process called write a page, eat a snack.

Tavis: (Laughter) I like that process, though.

Vardalos: Yeah. So when I came out of it, my doctor's like "Good work. Blood sugar problem. Lose it." So I had to do something, so I just thought - you know what the secret is?

Tavis: What's the secret?

Vardalos: Eat less, move around more. It's that simple. Like take that bag of Doritos and throw it really hard and then chase after it.

Tavis: (Laughter) I like the strategy, I like the strategy. Speaking of writing, this is not something you were - we know you're such a good writer. You didn't write this one, though.

Vardalos: No, it's written by a "Simpsons" writer, Mike Reiss, and he wrote it for me, which is so nice. Gave it to me not even on my birthday and then, with his permission, I added a couple things like it's very much his cake and then I just kind of put some icing on like all the stuff about the girls butt being too small. That's for my lady friends, you know.

Just like the thing about the woman losing her mojo. It was personally what I was kind of going through. But it's a Mike Reiss "Simpsons" script and it's really funny.

Tavis: Before I get into the actual movie itself, what's the difference - this is one of those Hollywood questions I'm just curious about - the difference between somebody who writes something specifically for you and Nia writing something for herself?

Vardalos: Oh, first of all, I'm going to from now on refer to myself in third person like you just did because I like it. Nia would write that. . . (laughter).

I don't know. No one ever writes stuff for me. It was the first time. You know, with "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and my second film, "Connie and Carla," I think that people think I only be in movies that I wrote myself. So I grab the opportunity to be in something, to create a character that's also SAG nominating committee - sorry. But, you know, now I'm gonna say craft at any moment and then I have to kill myself.

But, you know, to actually be an actor, again, I only wrote out of necessity and then I realized that there's a power in it. So the difference is, he wrote the script for me; I got to go to Greece. Free trip. And I was just in.

Tavis: I think I know what you mean by this. I want to give you a chance to explain, though. When you say you wrote initially out of necessity, you mean by that what?

Vardalos: Well, I couldn't get a job. I'd been working on stage for years and doing musical theater and then doing "Second City." I came here and my agent said - she had a problem with being very direct. She said, "You're not pretty enough to be a leading lady and you're not fat enough to be a character actor." So I was like wow, wow. I felt like I was -

Tavis: (Laughter) So, was that liberating or intimidating?

Vardalos: Yeah, I was like don't hold back. Get it off your chest. So in a way, you know, it made sense. She said, "You're not a visible minority. What are you?" I said, "I'm Greek." She went, "Yeah, that's not gonna work." So I thought, well, if that's the problem, you know, I'm gonna make it a solution.

So that's why I wrote that first movie out of necessity. I thought I'd get to play a bridesmaid, you know, or Aunt Voula's lump on the back of her neck. I really didn't think they'd let me star in it. When they said I was gonna star in it, I was like walking around very quietly, making sure no one changed their mind.

Tavis: How empowering, though, was it to be forced to write out of necessity and then discover I'm pretty good at this?

Vardalos: Well, I think if you ever think you're actually good at something, then creatively you stop growing. So I have a voice in my head constantly telling me while I'm writing, you know, "You're a fraud; no one's gonna buy this." You know, I hope that it makes me try to strive and express myself more clearly than I'm doing right now and just, you know, tell these stories that I want to tell.

I try to write stories about specific situations and the surprise for me that they turn out to be universal like, in this movie, the woman having lost her mojo in "My Life in Ruins." I'm finding out we're going across the country and we're talking to people in these sneak preview screenings and I see people nodding their heads.

I realize that there's something in the zeitgeist. We have possibly lost our way with the economy or you train to do a job and it turns out not to be the be all-end all. I think that that's kind of surprising, again, for me that people are feeling this and experiencing this.

Of course, my character finds her mojo again not just because she met a guy, but because - but that helps - but because Richard Dreyfus gets on my bus on this day and just goes "Open your eyes. You're in the most beautiful setting in the world. Why are you unhappy?" I think that that happens to a lot of us. You know, the old cliché, you can't see the forest for the trees.

Tavis: Yeah. Tell me more about the story line.

Vardalos: The story line is I play a tour guide who is a college professor and wants to teach people about the history of the beautiful Acropolis and the unruly bored tourists are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forget the Acropolis. Get me the picture of the Acropolis on a t-shirt. Take me to the beach."

You know, we're all guilty of that. So I think that my tour guide realizes I might be boring and she learns to just find her kefi. That's the spirit of the movie. Kefi means mojo and my character has lost her mojo, so she finds it all the way through the movie.

Tavis: When you saw this - back to the point that it wasn't something that you wrote for yourself - when you saw this, what pulled you to it?

Vardalos: I felt compelled by this story about a woman. I think that we see this a lot. I like these movies with men. You know, I like men. I like male movies.

Tavis: That's nice to here. I appreciate that.

Vardalos: (Laughter) You know, I'm not one of those people who just wants to tell female stories and saying, you know, "No men. This is a woman." I just like it when everyone gets along. I'm a middle child. But there was something so interesting about a possible career crisis from the female point of view that was also a date movie. It's a romantic comedy and I love it when men like these movies that I'm in too.

The biggest surprise for me was like, you know, big burly football player types telling me at the mall, "Don't tell anyone, but I liked 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding'." You know, it's like that's a compliment.

Tavis: I'm gonna ask this the right way.

Vardalos: You're gonna ask me out?

Tavis: No, no. I want to - that too. I want to ask this in the right way was what I was gonna say (laughter). Given that this piece was written for you, what does it mean to write a piece for Nia? What does that mean? If I were writing a piece for you, since this was written for you, that means what?

Vardalos: I'm looking for something in these scripts that is rare and hard to come across and that is a kind of humor that is not put-down humor and is not racist or mean and it's hard to find right now. I think that we have replaced common decent humor with sarcasm and outrageousness.

So the thing about Mike Reiss's writing is that it had a real honest character base to it. Everybody has an arc in this movie. We have great actors in this movie because everybody had a story. You meet these people and at first you think, "Are they stereotypes?" until you realize that the director did this great job of showing them through my unhappy character's eyes. They're actually not stereotypes at all.

And there was an underlying theme in this movie of don't judge a book by its cover, which I really related to because, in the first movie, all of a sudden I was categorized and stamped and people decided what I was when really I'd written the first movie because I didn't fit into a category.

So they said, "Overweight girl gets guy" and I was like, "Well, I thought I was pretty average looking." They said, you know, "Unattractive woman gets attractive guy." Whoa, whoa. You know, all these things that we do, we do them, and I'm as guilty of them as anyone, so I can't really be like, "How could you?"

I do them too. When I go on vacation and I see tourists, I do stereotype. I will think, "Oh, that person's from this country. Therefore, they're like this." You know, that's what I loved about the script. I thought it shows us all. It shows the light to all of us.

Tavis: To your point now, what did "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" do for you career-wise?

Vardalos: Every door in Hollywood flew open. It did. In the time that I took away - I took some time away from being on camera to deal with - you know, I couldn't quite deal with the fact that I had wanted to be a parent for a very long time and it wasn't happening for me. So I took some time away and I thought I am going to take the time to process these emotions.

I just grieved it and I pursued being a mom and I am a mom now. We adopted my daughter last year. She was three years old and she's from American foster care. But for me, the greatest thing that happened was, besides being matched with my daughter, I got to write for Tom Hanks, I got to write for Jonathan Demme, I got to write scripts and I got to earn the title of writer in these last years.

I think that I didn't feel like I deserved it at first and now, happily, I think, well, I wrote six scripts in that period and the others that I've written, I think I've written ten now and I think, yeah, yeah, I am a writer and I'm happy about that.

Tavis: Speaking about being happy, is motherhood all that you thought it would be?

Vardalos: And better, and better, yeah. It's a dirty job, I'll tell you right now.

Tavis: (Laughter) But somebody's got to do it.

Vardalos: Exactly, exactly (laughter). My daughter is like adventurous and loves to get into stuff. You know, at any given moment, I will find my shoes in the bathtub with her and I'm like that's all I've ever wanted, yeah.

Tavis: I should clarify. I was just teasing about the asking out part.

Vardalos: (Laughter) Because I'm married?

Tavis: Yeah. Just teasing about that.

Vardalos: Oh, I'm married in Los Angeles, though. No one's ever really married there (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) I wanted to clarify that before some guy who looks like him walks up behind me and hits me in the back of the head.

Vardalos: That's because we just found out we live in the same neighborhood.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly (laughter). I don't want that to happen. Anyway, "My Life in Ruins" is the new movie starring Nia Vardalos. Nice to have you on.

Vardalos: Thank you so much for having me.

Tavis: And congratulations. All the best with the film.

Vardalos: Oh, thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you on. I'll see you in the neighborhood.

Vardalos: Yeah, see you around.