Brit Marling Interview with Vogue 

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You can’t help but feel unaccomplished after talking to Brit Marling. The actor-screenwriter-producer seems to be constantly adding a new hyphen to her title. In her latest film,

she’s even listed in the song credits. Asked if she’s planning on putting out a single anytime soon, Marling quickly demures. “No, no,

That’s just a lullaby I’m humming in the film,” she says. “I mean, I’m going to sing with great pleasure in the shower. And I’m going to occasionally subject people to it when I’m drunk. But no, I have no plans to record an album.”

Marling, 30, plays a molecular scientist and lab partner to biologist Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), whose studies of the human eye may answer big existential questions about life, death, and spirituality. The heady film was written and directed by her friend and frequent collaborator Mike Cahill—they wrote her debut,

together—and the overarching theme of faith versus science arose from their conversations on the topic. “We were both interested for a real long time in the question of things unseen,” Marling explains. “Especially now, when we want everything to be so concrete. There’s something really appealing about two people on a quest for scientific proof of something there really shouldn’t be proof of.”

For a working actor, Marling seems remarkably grounded and relatively uninterested in the world of digital self-branding, which she dubs “generation selfie.” “All of that just seems a little empty,” she says of our cultural obsession with likes and retweets. “It doesn’t actually make anyone feel good at the end of the day. It’s like fast food, it’s like junk food socializing.” Not unlike Marling herself, her character in

Karen, focuses solely on the work she’s doing in the lab. But when your lab is Hollywood, keeping your head down and working can be tricky, as Marling well knows. “I guess I’m really weary of fame,” she says. “It seems dangerous. I think it puts you under a kind of duress where you figure out really quickly why you’re actually doing the work and how much of it is about you needing strangers to love you.”

Having acted, produced, and written screenplays, will Marling soon be sitting in the director’s chair? “I think I will at some point,” she says, “but that’s still quite far down the road. I still feel so overwhelmed by the challenge of acting that I want to get to the bottom of that.” She also wants to get to the bottom of writing, apparently. Asked about fashion—she’s a fan of Proenza Schouler and Nicolas Ghesquière—Marling brought up the 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. “There was a quote by him on the wall that said, ‘I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.’ And I just remember thinking, Oh, I want to write a character that is worthy of that idea.”

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