Naomi Watts Wishes She ‘Had More Kids, Started Younger’
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ABC/Rick Rowell(NEW YORK) — Naomi Watts has taken huge risks on and off the screen, but she tries to limit those risks to the workplace since becoming a parent.
“I’ve skydived. I went swimming with sharks that weren’t in cages. I went on safari, where you’re sitting with lions just five feet from you. And I was photographed [by Condé Nast Traveler] for King Kong standing on a gargoyle near the top of the Chrysler Building in New York City. I had a harness and a rope, but if you fall, you’re hanging [61 floors up]!” she told the October issue of More magazine. “But now that I have kids, I don’t want to do so many daredevily things anymore.”
Watts, 45, said her partner of nine years, Liev Schreiber, is the more courageous of the two of them when it comes to parenting their two sons, Sasha, 7, and Kai, 5.
“Liev has a lot more courage than me,” she told the magazine. “He’s always saying, ‘Let the kids do it. Take the training wheels off!’ My bit of fear balances him, and he balances my fear.”
One regret Watts has regarding her family is that it’s not bigger.
“I should have had more kids, started younger,” she told More.
Meanwhile, in her career, the actress is considered a risk-taker, though she doesn’t always feel like one.
“I don’t always feel like a person who’s full of courage,” she said. “Maybe in the workplace I have more courage than other areas of my life.”
That includes moving to Hollywood at age 25 to break into acting.
“It was a gigantic risk but, thankfully, I was young and naïve enough to just do it,” she said. “As you get older, you overthink and can talk yourself out of anything. It’s good to be a bit reckless and experimental.”
Watts’ big career risks have paid off. The two-time Oscar nominee has pushed herself to emotional and physical extremes in films such as 21 Grams, King Kong, The Impossible, and Diana, last year’s widely panned biopic about the British princess.
“We all know I’m not five-ten or have any resembling features of hers except blue eyes, and I don’t speak like her,” Watts told More. “It was going to be hard. People knew her too well or felt like they owned her. I was up against that.”
Now Watts is trying her hand at comedy with two new films, Birdman and St. Vincent, both out this month.
In the latter, she plays a pregnant Russian stripper opposite comic genius Bill Murray.
“I’d bust into Bill’s trailer and say [she adopts a thick Russian accent], ‘I need a drink! Gif me a drink!'” she recalled. “I had to stick with that character because, otherwise, my fear of being not worthy would take over.”
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