Jacinda Barrett is curled up on the sofa of a Four Seasons suite when I arrive to chat with her about Ladder 49, her new film in which she plays the supportive wife of Baltimore firefighter Joaquin Phoenix. In person, she’s like a lovely, delicate distant cousin to Natalie Portman. She’s also…Australian. From her perfect dialect performances in the American films The Human Stain and now Ladder 49, who would have guessed? In Ladder 49, she captures a very special dimension that matches the daring fire rescues in which the men routinely find themselves ensnarled—a quite similar sense of personal bravery and fortitude.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic: I wonder if you might begin by talking about the relationship between Joaquin and yourself in this film because I believe it’s why Ladder 49 is as effective as it is. Is that what grabbed you right up front? Did the two of you work from this principle when you were acting together? That gives the film its considerable weight.

Jacinda Barrett: It was there, on the page from the first draft. That was always the center of the movie and what held it together emotionally. So we didn’t have to actually work on bringing that to the table because it wasn’t there, which you do actually have to do with some scripts—you have to make it more emotional and more grounded. It was already there. But in our scenes together, we just worked on evolving the relationship, because we had eight years of screen time—from first meeting, falling in love, marriage, kids.

So we worked on that evolution and keeping it honest, and not over- romanticizing that. Because actually in some of the earlier drafts, it was more romantic. They were always lovey-dovey, even after eight years of marriage. It was very grounded in reality. So it was really important for those scenes to be simple and honest and truthful, because I think that added more truth to everything else that goes on. It made it more emotional.

LS: It gives you a reason to care.

JB: Yeah and it just grounds the movie in reality. So that was really important to us. And as far as us as actors working together, we didn’t rehearse at all. What you see onscreen is usually an instinctual whatever happened when we got together. And we just worked it from a place of trusting the other person and taking risks and being vulnerable and sort of being brave with the other person, because all of our scenes are really intimate.

LS: You talk about this idea of being brave. When we look at the way the film is being marketed, you see the bravery and heroism of the firefighters. But she’s really as brave as they are, in a lot of ways.

JB: Yeah, because she’s allowing him to go do what he wants to do, and taking that risk that he won’t come back. Absolutely. And that’s what people see, and they don’t see the wives so often. But the wives just as much should be on that poster, you know? They are just as much heroes in their own way. And I think that when people get to see this movie, they’re actually going to see that. And the kids.

We’re often recently seeing things about people going to war and the families they leave behind and you look at Michael Moore’s documentary, and you’re seeing how that devastates people. But these people do it all the time, across the world, regardless of what war is going on. There are firefighters who don’t come home, who leave widows, kids without dads. They do it willingly, and they should be saluted.

LS: Let’s talk about your own work in the film. You do a perfect East Coast American accent.

JB: I’ve had to do an American accent in almost every movie I’ve been in. It’s just part of what I do. I listen and I work with a coach and I listen to the sounds of the city where I’m from. So I just end up having to do it for every part. I did it for two movies right after this. One I had to play English and one I had to play French. It’s just part of my working life, to get a dialect coach, work on that stuff. The thing about this movie is the Baltimore accent is quite strong and sometimes even hard to understand. There’s a lot of slang and colloquialisms. Joaquin and John, who are sort of the big guns of the movie, set the tone of not doing a really strong Baltimore accent, doing more an East Coast accent.

So that’s more what we went for in the movie for overall tone. There are so many actors, and if you have ten actors doing a slightly different Baltimore accent and everyone is not in the same world, it’s really jarring to the ear. It’s like musicality. So I think you have to be very careful that if you’re going to do an accent, everyone is doing it or no one is doing it, and you’re all doing something similar like standard American. The musicality can throw you off from actually watching the story then.

LS: You have a more personal connection to this story than some of the other actors, don’t you?

JB: Yeah, my dad. He was a firefighter for 33 years in Australia. He’s retired now, but he was in airport crash and rescue. So my whole life- I have such sense memory of hugging my dad in his uniform before he went to work.

LS: So you’re kind of playing your mother, right?

JB: (laughs) No, she’s not my mom. I mean culturally Australia- from Brisbane to Baltimore, things are so different. So I’m definitely not playing my mom, and a lot of the ways character wise, she’s not like my mom. My mom has a very different personality. I did take ideas from my mom and I did take ideas from my dad about their early years and what it was like for them first getting married, and from my dad in his early years, what it was like being a firefighter. I incorporated them in little ways. I got them each to write forty pages. They just wrote all this stuff I didn’t know about the early years. That was pretty cool for me to see that.

One thing I noticed that was interesting was that Linda dives into this relationship with somewhat naiveté about what he does and what risks and sacrifices it would require for her to make if she fell in love with him and planned a future with him. And my mom did the same thing when she married my dad. My dad, because he was in airport crash and rescue, he had to move airports every three months across Papua New Guinea where he was working at the time, and the ship work and the danger and everything. And my mom just knew my dad for a month and married him, moved to Papua New Guinea without anyone at the wedding and married my dad. And just this sense of barreling in and taking a risk because you’re in love, and a sense of learning as you go, was so much of the story. I found that interesting. There is a lot that’s asked of you that you accept if you’re going to be a firefighter’s wife. And my mom, like Linda, just had to learn it while she was already married.

LS: You must have not only gotten insights into your character but also into your parents lives—the kinds of things we can’t come to grips with when we’re kids.

JB: Yeah, because you’re too young to know some of that stuff. It was an insight into their lives as well. It was really fascinating for me. I learned that my dad started in 1958 as a firefighter, and they didn’t even have tanks back then. They didn’t have any kind of breathing apparatus. They’d go into fire with asbestos blankets over their heads, which is just insane to think of, just staying as close to the ground as they could, almost like breathing on the ground so that the smoke would rise. Firefighting has really evolved over the last 40 years.

LS: When you think about the job of acting, what exactly is it that makes the process worthwhile?

JB: For me it’s been times when you go through a real emotional scene, it could be an elated scene or like in this movie we had to do really tragic scenes. It’s fun for me to go through all of those feelings and the freedom of it. You get out of yourself. You’re not objective; you’re not worried about things. It’s like flying. It’s like swimming. It’s just such a freeing experience and I love this feeling.

LS: Talking about the craft of acting, let’s discuss the career of an actor today. In a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine, there’s a story about why we can’t find the next Julia Roberts…

JB: Ah, I read that!

LS: I don’t know that anybody really wants to be the next Julia Roberts. But as an actress just kind of poised on the edge of a huge career, do you feel that pressure to select projects that will give you longevity and keep you working for years to come? Or is there a desire to be, I guess, what we would call a star?

JB: There’s a desire to keep working. And the whole choosing projects thing is so difficult because there are so many times when a project will seem to be so great and something will happen to it along the way, and it gets messed up and it doesn’t turn out how you want it to turn out. So that part is really hard and I’m struggling with learning how to do that to pick the right things. Because usually what you’re going to get offered is not the thing that is going to stretch you the most. It’s going to be what they’ve already seen you do. So it’s learning to make the right decisions and not. Because half the time you can’t. You’ve just got to take a risk. And you never know how the movie is going to turn out.

The Human Stain was a smaller part. I saw on that movie that working with a really talented director and strong actors changes everything. You become a better actor. The director knows how to talk to you better so you take the right risks. And you trust the director so you’re willing to go further. I learned that from doing The Human Stain. And it’s hard then because if you go back to someone who is maybe not as talented or not as experienced actors and directors, it’s hard for you to be as good. So I learned that doing The Human Stain, and I wanted to step up and do a bigger role with a bigger arc, and then I got this and I was so excited. I tested, and there were other girls testing. I went and read with Joaquin and I didn’t know if I was going to get it. I think I tested Wednesday and they called me Friday. And I was very excited!

LS: What can you tell me about your upcoming role in the new Bridget Jones film?

JB: I can tell you that the movie picks up two months after the first one leaves off, and Bridget and Mark and in love and in their honeymoon period. And Bridget gets how she gets and becomes very neurotic, and I work for Mark, played by Colin Firth, and she becomes obsessed, in her very crazy, neurotic Bridget way, that something is going on. And that’s how my character falls into it. There’s so much more. Hugh Grant is back and he’s devilish, and the parents and friends are back. And she goes to Thailand and Austria. It’s really a fun movie.