Despite having a prolific Hollywood career, star Marisa Tomei has never played a part as She Came to Me’s Katrina, a tugboat captain who’s an incurable romantic. Rebecca Miller’s latest movie just had its world premiere at 2023’s Berlinale, and while covering the festival on-site, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Tomei about what drew her towards Katrina, how Miller is a special kind of director, and how the star prepared for the role by sleeping in an actual tugboat.

She Came to Me follows multiple intertwined lives as they are pulled together while they search for love and acceptance. At the center of the movie is Steven (Peter Dinklage), an opera composer suffering from creative blockage before he meets Tomei’s Katrina, a down-to-earth woman who nevertheless becomes an unexpected muse. Miller spent six years working on the script, and getting the independent project off the ground took a while. Still, once Tomei got the script, during the pandemic, she fell immediately in love with Katrina. As Tomei puts it:

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The turmoil caused by the pandemics didn’t wave off Tomei’s interest in the role. After all, it’s not usual to find a part so filled with beautifully human contradictions “She’s wearing a corset under her jumpsuit,” Tomei underlines, revealing how Katrina is layered in unexpected ways. Tomei just couldn’t pass the opportunity to play such a character, which drew her into Miller’s project because:

“She’s [Katrina] so kind of innocent, but that she lives in a very, very real world, we have to do very real world. Labor, like real things. And very, very difficult work taxing on the body, and the hours. But at the same time, it’s like a cowboy. Like the world is just wide open. It’s like anything can happen out on those seas. And that kind of life is very epic. The more I read about it, I didn’t know that, of course at the beginning. But the more I read about I understood that the thrill of being that liberated. To play a muse that also has like a day job, that was kind of the thing that I really liked.”

Image via Berlinale

It wasn’t easy to become Katrina, though, as her day job imposed unique challenges on the star. But Tomei was ready to pour her heart and soul into the film, so she proposed to sleep on a tugboat to internalize Katrina’s quirks and habits. Telling us about her tugboat life experience, Tomei said:

“Well, I of course, I got there, and I thought ‘why did I decide to do this?’ I could have made it up. But I wanted to, I wanted to. How many times would I get that chance? So and it’s its own little world too, where these docks are in New York. I hadn’t even been there before. And so to be there and see this whole subculture was really fascinating. And I just really liked it, I felt the more that I was on the boat I needed this to seem second nature to me, I had to know my way around that boat. And then it was the boat that we shot on, which we didn’t know at the time. So I knew it so, so well. I couldn’t look like I was like, looking down to see where my foot might go. So that I didn’t trip it had to be like, ‘No, I know it like the back of my hand. I could do this if I was blindfolded, it had to have that second nature of feeling’. So staying there was something.”

The strategy does pay off, as Katrina steals the spotlight every time she shows up on the screen. It’s easy to believe Katrina is an actual captain, and it’s impressive that Tomei managed to adapt quickly to moving around a tugboat as she had truly grown in one. However, while she loved playing Katrina, there were some aspects of the character the star didn’t like so much. For instance, Tomei doesn’t agree with the character diagnosis that claims she’s addicted to romance. Tomei prefers to think of Katrina as a misunderstood romantic, and even voiced her concern about Katrina’s mental health during production. As Tomei tells us:

“I felt that that part was really a drag. But that wasn’t really something that was as important to who she was, maybe more metaphorically the idea of being so romantic that today someone would characterize it as an addiction. But if you look at… I really argued that point and I did talk to some experts in that field and nobody really felt that she was an actual addict. And that if you really look at what she’s doing … well, she had the one incident before, but big deal of it, it wasn’t like a complete history… yeah, and then with him [Peter’s character] she’s right. Is not that she’s making it up. She’s just that intuitive and that connected right away. So I think there’s a good case to say she’s not.”

While Tomei has strong opinions on Katrina, she tells us Miller has strict control over her movie’s characters. There’s no space for improving on set, but Miller still discusses the path each character will take with the cast. Due to this open dialogue, Tomei feels she could steer the boat away from Katrina’s mental health a little bit. Commenting on She Came to Me production, Tomei told us:

“We didn’t improv anything. And we didn’t workshop anything. Katrina was fully formed by Rebecca. And then she allowed me to come in and add my contribution to it, to her. I think that there were aspects that we talked about, I think I wanted to emphasize the part of her that’s the muse more than the part of her that’s the captain. The captain is like, de facto, it’s there, you see it. And it’s something that she does, but the energy of muse is something that she is. So that was where was our focus and, and Rebecca was interested in both, but really wanted to make sure that, as I was telling you, that you believed 100% that this person could drive a boat. Because I don’t really, I’m not really built that way. I mean, for a captain, you don’t really have to be built anyway. But if you started as a deckhand, and you kind of came your way up, it’s usually like a very physical job. So it’s not like typically what you would think of as a captain. So we just wanted to make it really believable, but I wasn’t really as focused on that. I was interested in that, it’s always fun to discover new worlds. That’s one of the greatest thing of being an actor. But I was really interested in the soul of her in this other space.”

Besides being a fan-favorite movie star, Tomei also has a vast experience in theater. The last time she stepped onto the stage, however, was in 2019, for The Rose Tattoo spectacle. Since She Came to Me revolves around opera and live acting, we wanted to know if Tomei missed the stage. Unfortunately, as the star pointed out, theater life is sometimes too demanding and hard to fit into her busy agenda. So, the proximity to the stage in She Came to Me:

“Just makes me want to do more movies with Rebecca. It doesn’t make me want to do something else. It did feel like a little play in some ways. But I think that making the choice to do theater, that’s a really big choice, because it takes a lot of your life and your time. So that’s more of a cyclical thing. Yeah.”

Image via Berlinale

And what does Miller have as a director, that so many cast members are eager to work with her again? To Tomei, the answer is simple. Since Miller has acted in several movies, she has a unique understanding of what happens behind and in front of the cameras. In Tomei’s words:

“She has a deep understanding of actors, because she’s been an actress herself. And so she’s just extremely clear in what she wants, but very, very kind to everyone but also, she never rushed. A lot of times on a small film you just don’t have time… But she never for one second made any of us feel like we had to rush through a scene or there was never a push, which usually means you’re going to get there sooner. The more you push it, it’s harder to arrive in a short period of time to the scene. So her approach was really just exploration all the time. Exploration, exploration, exploration, and but with a firm vision. So it’s a it’s a very important combination for a director.”

It’s a big step for Tomei to say she wants to work with Miller again in the near future because she doesn’t have a defined decision process when it comes to getting attached to a new movie. There are many different variables to consider before accepting a new role, both for blockbuster and small-scoped projects. When we asked about what draws her to projects such as the upcoming Upgraded and Best Place, Tomei said:

“You know, things are different all the time, depending on what the role is, or what the location is, or how easy it’s going to be, or if you can have the support that you need to do the job, if you can realize the vision of the character in terms of costumes and the look and have enough time to bring something to it instead of just kind of being like a machine. So it depends how the atmosphere is set up on each of the things and what the opportunity is going to be. If there’s enough breathing room to do something fun and interesting.”

Image via Berlinale

Still, for She Came to Me, the decision was easy due to Katrina but also became Tomei got to work with a phenomenal cast that also includes Joanna Kulig, Anne Hathaway, and Brian d’Arcy James. And since Mille writesr every character as a complex human being, for Tomei, it was specially interesting to see her colleagues at work. Talking about the set atmosphere, Tomei revealed that:

“Everybody came to it with their whole heart. Everyone came to it ready to play and respecting each other from the get-go. Everyone already knew each other at least a little bit. And we were just so excited to be in scenes with each other and, and see, because the characters are so complex, how is this person going to [bring them to life]… How is Anne going to bring this therapist who wants to be a nun to life? How do you do that? And I’m fascinated by each other’s characters too, and watching them unfold.”

She Came to Me had its world premiere at 2023’s Berlin Film Festival. Unfortunately, the movie still doesn’t have a release date in the United States.