Interview: Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler on Annie Baker’s Magical Mother-Daughter Directorial Debut, ‘Janet Planet’

Summer movies often bring to mind images from big, loud action blockbusters or zippy and bright family films. But what truly makes a perfect summer movie is its ability to transport you back to a specific feeling you had during a single summer growing up. Suddenly, you’re a preteen again, hearing the cicadas outside and rolling your mom’s car window down with a crank because she doesn’t have air conditioning. Annie Baker’s directorial debut, Janet Planet, which premiered last year at the Telluride Film Festival, has the feeling of a lost summer, with warm New England air and a touch of melancholy. 

Set in Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1991, Janet Planet is a coming-of-age tale for both 11-year-old Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler) and her free-spirit, acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). The film opens when Lacy calls her mom from camp, threatening to kill herself if she doesn’t come pick her up. When Janet arrives the next morning and Lacy no longer wants to leave (of course), it’s too late–she’s already given a morbid excuse to the camp staff and was lucky to get her deposit back. In the first few minutes of the film, Baker, a playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick, establishes the story’s wry, dry sense of humor and the similarities between the mother and daughter. For Nicholson and Ziegler, making the movie alongside Baker was its own coming-of-age experience–a return to roots for Nicholson and a brand new adventure for Ziegler. 

Julianne Nicholson, who won an Emmy in 2021 for her work as Lori Ross in Mare of Easttown, is no stranger to playing complicated mothers. Janet Planet was special, though, because of just how deeply it connected her to her childhood. Before Ziegler joined the interview, Nicholson and I spent a few minutes chatting about the joys and oddities of being raised in hippie havens by granola moms. I told her that I taught swim lessons to children raised by a group of midwives, while she told me about going to picnics and home births. We agreed that it was the best way to grow up and that it’s the type of environment rarely depicted in film.

“I lived in Western Mass from seven to eleven and then moved outside Boston. I was a camp counselor there for eight weeks every summer. My first job picking cucumbers was out there. So to be able to go back and revisit all these places was deeply personal and incredibly moving,” she shared. Baker, who is also from Western Massachusetts, was sure to incorporate trinkets and products from the time and her childhood to ground the world around the characters. It’s a level of detail found in the films of Jane Campion and Kelly Reichardt and was incredibly helpful to Nicholson in finding her character. “She’s the most detail-oriented director, from every book on the shelf, to blankets, to fruit in a fruit bowl, to types of tea. But that was what was so fun, too,” she said. “I remember there was this cream that my mom would give us every year in our stockings: Skin Trip Coconut. I mentioned that, so that lives on Janet’s dresser. The whole movie is filled with those details and memories.”

Like Baker, it’s shocking that Janet Planet is also Zoe Ziegler’s first movie and that she isn’t a seasoned veteran, given her thoughtful, wise performance. The search for Lacy was long and difficult until Baker and her team found Zoe. Candidly, it’s my favorite performance from a child actor in years; the wait paid off. “One of the parents at our school…her daughter is an actress, and they told my mom that I would be perfect for it. So, we sent Annie a video, and then we went up to New York a few times and went over lines and stuff,” Ziegler added. Being in a movie was something that Ziegler was excited to try, and she really enjoyed it, especially memorizing her lines. When Nicholson asked her if she was ever nervous about forgetting her lines, Ziegler quickly replied that she didn’t think she was. “She’s pretty cool,” Nicholson added, “Cool as a cucumber.” 

Baker’s attention to detail also helped Ziegler discover her character. One of the most prominent props in the film is a little theater in Lacy’s bedroom that she fills with miniature dolls and candy wrappers. Ziegler has something similar in her bedroom. When I mentioned that I noticed a few little horse details in the movie that reminded me of the riding outfit she wore to the screening at New York Film Festival, her face lit up. She has a horse of her own, too. Ziegler also learned to play the keyboard, a detail that particularly impressed Nicholson. “It was a little hard at first,” Ziegler noted, “but then it got easier.”

Janet and Lacy’s mother-daughter relationship feels so natural and lived-in that you would believe Nicholson and Ziegler were related. “We played a lot of Uno together,” Ziegler commented. For Nicholson, establishing that dynamic happened before they arrived on set. “I reached out to Carla, Zoe’s mom, to find out what she liked. I found out that one of her passions is horses and horseback riding, so I sent her a little sweatshirt. I like to send just a little hello and a present. And, yeah, a lot of Uno,” Nicholson laughed. Ziegler’s bright, observant performance shines especially in Lacy’s conversations with her mother and her realization that men are specifically drawn into her orbit. “They both know each other so intimately, but they’re also both so unknowable too. I was playing with both sides of that relationship,” Nicholson said. “I was so impressed by Zoe’s ability to show up and listen,” she continued. “She just came every day prepared, open, and nonjudgmental and just ready to see what the day held. It was incredible to be in scenes with her. We just had a little bit of an intrinsic thing between us that you can’t necessarily put your finger on, but we were really just with each other whenever the cameras were rolling.” 

As Janet, Nicholson is quietly brilliant, accessing the internal life of the kind of woman we never really see on screen. “I showed up with this big fat stye on my eye, and Annie was like, ‘Keep the stye. Keep the stye for Janet.’ She’s maybe the only director in the world that wants you to bring those imagined or actual physical manifestations in life and the messiness to the character,” Nicholson added. Janet can be a bit unorthodox as a mom, but Baker and Nicholson see the beauty in that, too. Nicholson continued, “I feel like people can be a little bit judgy of Janet’s parenting style. We’re not parenting in 2024 the way they were in 1991, 1981, 1971, and so on. But I feel like it was really just to shine a light on a person. She’s not perfect; she makes mistakes, and maybe something that made sense then doesn’t make sense now, but we can’t be judgmental about it. And I felt that through my experience of being a mom and observing my own mom, especially in the community that she was in when she began her herb career. I feel like Janet feels pretty lost, and I had examples of that in my mind from people I’ve met and people I’ve known, as well as the thing of always seeking outside yourself for validation or reassurance that you’re okay. That was a fun thing to explore and to dig into.”

So much of Janet Planet takes place within the sounds of summer, namely the tiny, mundane conversations between a daughter and her mother. It’s the look that Lacy gives Janet when she (hilariously) says, “You know what’s funny? Every single moment of my life is hell.” It’s in the frank sadness of Janet’s reply, “Sometimes I’m pretty unhappy too.” In speaking with Nicholson and Ziegler and observing their natural rapport, I reflected on my own relationship with my mom when I wasn’t yet a teenager and how formative the summer, without the routine of the school day, was in my understanding of her. Summer is a little patch of growth that, for a child, ends one year and begins the next. It’s the perfect setting for a story like Janet Planet that embraces the idea that perhaps the best thing about summer is that it’s contained. It ends.

A24 will release Janet Planet only in theaters in Los Angeles and New York June 21 and nationwide on June 28.