Her famous folks are still showing her the way

Laura Dern talks about playing three-dimensional women in 'Jay Kelly' and 'Is This Thing On?' and why her parents' influence will always stay with her

- Story by Margy Rochlin

WHEN LAURA DERN’S daughter Jaya was little, she paid a visit to the set of HBO's “Enlightened” and told her mother that she noticed something different about her.

“She was like, ‘Mom, you seem more at home here than at home,’” recalls Dern, adding that what Jaya spotted was the ease of someone who, as the child of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, has been on soundstages and location shoots since infancy. “I’ve spent my life on set. I love it. I feel so comfortable.”

Dern’s journey into the family profession began at age 6, when she appeared as an extra alongside Ladd in the Burt Reynolds car-chase film “White Lighting.” The following year she was a bespectacled “girl at counter” in mom’s vicinity in “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” where Martin Scorsese famously gave her an early lesson in moviemaking rigor, having her eat 19 ice cream cones, across an equal amount of takes, until he was satisfied with the shot.

By the time her old friend Bradley Cooper reached out and asked if she'd be in “Is This Thing On?,” directed by Cooper and co-written by Cooper, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, she was aware of the stamina that would be required of her. Though she'd never acted in one of Cooper's films, he had, for years, passed along his script drafts, shared audition tapes and screened different cuts of films he’s directed.

“I have never seen a harder worker in my life in any profession,” says Dern. “To know someone like that inspires a level of discipline in me I don’t think I’ve had before.”