Taken together, the roles are master classes in acting. Dern nails the particular shadings of both perfectly: Bobbi, the cheerfully supportive earth mother living under the shadow of her former marriage to an abusive man and coping with cancer in Wild, in contrast to Big Little Lies’ Renata, a Type-A business executive whose maternal instincts are far more ferocious.

In both Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild (2014) and the TV show Big Little Lies (2017), Dern plays a mom, but the difference between these two women could fill an ocean. Two recent roles, one for which she was nominated for an Oscar and another for which she won a Prime-Time Emmy and a Golden Globe, demonstrate Dern’s extraordinary range. Over the next three decades, she would play radically different young women in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), a drug-addled wastrel in Citizen Ruth (1996), a lethal dental hygienist in the blackly comedic film noir Novocaine (2001), and the deeply flawed heroine trying to take her life back in her series Enlightened (2011-2013). The first impression she made, not quite even an ingenue, was in a party scene in Foxes (1980) as a girl in thick glasses trying to appear worldly as she discusses birth control. In a career that began before she was old enough to drive, Laura Dern has played a dazzling array of women.

Wild hearts laura dern