Uma Thurman recently chatted with the Times of London. She’s got multiple projects this summer – a role in Dexter: Resurrection and a role in The Old Guard 2, with Charlize Theron. The Dexter role seems like something she’s doing for fun and because it films in NYC (where she’s mostly based). It sounds like Charlize came to her with the role in The Old Guard 2 and asked Uma to get back to her Kill Bill-esque action heroine vibe. Uma seems to be in a good place right now – in her 50s, with two of her kids out of the house and living their adult lives and one teenager still at home. She works when she wants and the work is interesting. Some highlights from Uma’s interview:

She was offered so many action movies after Kill Bill: Instead she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms, contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. “I did anything but, many times. I didn’t grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it. But at the same time I can’t stay out of it for ever.”

Why she agreed to do The Old Guard 2: “With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,” Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. “Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.”

How she got cast in Dexter: Resurrection: “I do think the showrunners are big Tarantino fans. So that’s baked in, but you can’t really throw a rock in the film industry without it hitting a Tarantino fan.”

Making Pulp Fiction when she was 24: Thurman says she didn’t realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. “I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.”

How she was raised: “I didn’t really understand that I was an American until I was about 13. I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn’t really a Swedish girl.”

A mother of two daughters: As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl “mind-boggling. I mean, it’s unimaginable. Those were different times.”

On her daughter Maya Hawke: “Oh, she knows what she’s doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank God. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it’s really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.” She has let Hawke have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics — Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. “There’s very little left of it. She’s done a good job. I don’t spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.”

She’s entered her “sunset period” of mothering. “It’s beautiful and there’s not that much time left in the day,” she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn’t have to invest so much energy in “shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do”. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she’s still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. “Now non-fiction is just too brutal,” she says. I ask what she does read. “Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It’s a great alternative to the newspapers right now.”

[From The Times]

As I read this, I realized how many projects Uma has probably been offered specifically because of her work with Quentin Tarantino. As she says, she runs into Tarantino fans all the time in the industry. I wonder if that makes her a bit wary – while she and QT are still friends, I bet she’s not wild about his fanboys. Still, I bet the Dexter franchise is fun to drop into. It’s cool that she shrugs off Maya raiding her closet too… except that I always find Maya’s style so offbeat and very “young woman finding her style,” whereas Uma was always such a style vanguard, wearing Prada (before everyone else) and Gaultier and McQueen in really special ways.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.