Valerie Mahaffey on Creating the Scene-Stealing Madame Reynard in ‘French Exit’

French Exit stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price, a Manhattan socialite and widow whose dwindling fortune and increasing depression lead her to flee to Paris with her son (Lucas Hedges). Early buzz out of the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival told of Pfeiffer’s best role in years. Certainly, she often dominates the film with her dry wit and glamorous melancholy.

But early buzz also revealed the film contained a true gem of a supporting performance as delivered by Emmy-winner and recent Independent Spirit nominee Valerie Mahaffey.

Mahaffey’s Madame Reynard is a bizarre and entirely unexpected breath of fresh air. When she hosts a dinner party for three, the film kicks into another gear completely, thanks to her honest joy masking an intense loneliness. While so much of the character lives in Patrick deWitt’s script, Mahaffey used his original novel to fill in the details and fully flesh out the character and performance. And what a great performance it is — a delicate balance of a performance that feels custom made for Mahaffey’s bold talents.

“I had reached a place in my life where something’s happened to me, and I’ve dropped artifice. I wanted to play her from a place of absolute honesty,” Mahaffey shared. “I know how to be funny. I know sitcom timing. But I wanted Madame Reynard to be true.”

One of the best aspects of Mahaffey’s performance is the brutal honesty coupled with a charming, near-manic grin. Like Pfeiffer’s Frances, Mahaffey’s Madame Reynard is a widow facing her twilight years. Yet, unlike Frances, Madame Reynard looks to quell her loneliness with new people, new encounters, and new adventures. Through the bizarre journey she takes in the film, she approaches each new revelation as an incredible source of joy and excitement.

But Mahaffey realizes Madame Reynard could come across as a bit of an annoyance. It’s the sweet desperation and joy for life that makes her character (and her performance) so appealing.

“I also had the human being part of me realize that there are people, as you go through life, that you find desperately annoying. Being an actor and playing a person that could conceivably be considered very annoying, you pity them,” Mahaffey mused. “But you will learn things from that perspective, and you regret that you missed people in your life so easily when they were just excited to be around you. It’s kind of a wonderful thing being an actor to realize things like that about human nature.”

But an important distinction about Mahaffey’s performance as Madame Reynard is that she’s full of honesty. She wants to please people, yes, but she’s not doing so at her own expense.

Early in the dinner party sequence, Madame Reynard recognizes Frances is politely but very deliberately making fun of her. Because she’s a bit of a Frances Price fan girl, she doesn’t take offense at the slight. Instead, she turns it back around on Frances with charming and poignant honesty.

“Please don’t be cruel to me. It was difficult to get up the nerve to ask you over.”

With that line, Valerie Mahaffey touches the audience in a deeply meaningful way. She has us in the palm of her hands.

But as with most great performances, she leaves audiences wanting so much more. We receive flashes of information about Madame Reynard, but the whole details are often left out. We know her husband died from choking on lamb, but we don’t know her freezer contains a… well, I’ll let you find that one out.

Mahaffey also considers it very interesting that we don’t ever find out Madame Reynard’s first name.

“She must have something invested about being a rich expatriate who was married to Bernard Reynard was, and she never ever says her first name. She’s so proud of being associated with him and with being French. Who knows? I do suspect her first name is something like Doris. Something very provincial.”

It’s just another facet of an on-the-surface uncomplicated character that proves anything but uncomplicated in the expert hands of Valerie Mahaffey.

French Exit opens in theaters on February 12.