Robin Wright is currently promoting The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime. It’s a limited series or series, I guess depending on how well it does. Robin plays a wealthy mother who doesn’t like her only son’s new girlfriend, and shenanigans ensue. It looks fun and not particularly deep. Robin recently chatted with the Times of London about the series and about how she’s now living in the UK because of “sh-tshow” that is America. She also talked a bit about Sean Penn and her kids. Some highlights:

Being the mom who hates her children’s new partners. “I felt like that with a couple of girls my son brought home, where I was, like, ‘No, this is not going to work.’ And it didn’t work, thank God. You’re always going to have that intrinsic mummy radar.” Hopper, an actor and model, has spoken about struggling with an addiction to crystal meth and being put into rehab by his father. “Every day if the phone rings you’re, like, ‘Is he alive? Is she alive?’ I went through that for so many years with both of them.” Was Dylan, who is also an actress, rebellious too? “Oh yeah,” she says, letting out an almighty sigh. “But they’re both in a really good place right now.”

Her big regret about motherhood: “I have a huge regret as a mother and have experienced the fallout of this regret for many years with my kids — I wasn’t hard enough on them.” Penn, now 65, who won Oscars for Mystic River in 2003 and Milk in 2008, was the tougher parent. “But he was gone so much of the time. He’d come back and be the policeman and then he’d leave me with the residue,” Wright recalls. “Then I would soften the blow. We were both extremes. They didn’t get that grey area in the middle, which is stern, and that is what they needed.”

Moving to the UK: “America is a sh-tshow,” she says. For the past few years she has been largely working in the UK, renting a succession of homes in the Chilterns where she and her stepsister spend weekends. Half of Hollywood, it seems, is currently down the road in the Cotswolds. “I love being in this country. There’s a freedom of self here. People are so kind. They’re living. They’re not in the car in traffic, panicked on a phone call, eating a sandwich. That’s most of America. Everything’s rush, competition and speed.”

What it’s like in LA: “Everyone’s building a huge house and I’m just done with all that — I love the quiet. And I’ve met my person. Finally.”

Her new man: Then came Henry Smith, a British-born, Australian-raised architect, whom she met in the very English setting of a country pub. Rusty the labrador was nosing around Wright’s seat; she asked the man sitting behind her if she could feed his dog some of her steak. “He goes, ‘No, it’s not my dog, it’s his dog,’ ” she says, leaping off the sofa to act out the scene, pointing across the room. “And Henry was standing at the bar, 6ft 2in, and he put his pint down, came over to me and grabbed my shoulders. He goes, ‘Who the f*** are you?’ And I said, ‘Who the f*** are you?’ And that was it.”

Long Covid: This extraordinary meet-cute happened almost a year ago. Not long afterwards they were both struck down with Covid. Wright talks about suffering with brain fog for five months and still struggles with extreme fatigue. “Getting to know each other in deep long Covid was like what’s that called at the airport? The fast track. We did a fast-track getting to know you because we were lying in bed deathly ill, crying, laughing, hugging, loving, snogging, f***ing. Just like, ‘I want to know you.’ You have to be a sensualist and tactile or I’m out.” Would she marry again? “No. God no. Why? That’s just unnecessary.”

She may have manifested Henry into her life. “That’s exactly what I wanted. I’m turning 60 and I’m, like, ‘Is this it?’ I love being alone and I’ve done that many times. But I’m, like, I want to grow old with somebody, and travel and see the world.” The couple’s plan is to take some time off work, move to a rented home at the English seaside with Rusty and Rocky, the puppy they bought together, and simply enjoy life. “It’s liberating to be done,” she says, grinning. “Be done with searching, looking and getting 60 per cent of what you wanted.”

The British class system: “It’s very evident when you’re in a room and you feel the judgment or the praise of someone who’s more elevated. I’m trying to figure it out. Why are you guys so obsessed with who went to this boarding school or this university? Who gives a sh-t?”

[From The Times]

I’m happy that she found her “person” and she sounds really happy. It also sounds like Robin has just been working in the UK a lot in recent years, so she decided to make the move permanent, and the move is more about her relationship as well. But I agree, America is a sh-tshow and the American grind-mindset is exhausting.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.