Eleanor Matsuura
Image from Nuit Magazine
Eleanor Matsuura is an actress best known for her role as Yumiko in The Walking Dead as well as a variety of theatre productions, about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on artistry and the evolving power dynamic for women in the industry.
We the Women: To be totally transparent, I don’t even know what day it is anymore. It just blurs together now. I don’t know how anyone is getting anything done during this time, much less creating art. Broadway’s shut down. Production is up and down. How have you found being an artist during this time?
Eleanor Matsuura: I felt so uncreative for so long. I remember that first initial wave of, “Oh my gosh, this is happening. Everything's shut down. No one can go anywhere,” and there was an immediate response from everyone going, “I'm going to make a funny sketch” or “I'm going to write” or “ here's the time I needed to write my novel.” And I remember thinking, “Wow, I don't have an ounce of motivation.”
I really lost my sense of my playfulness and my creativity and it seemed to be compounded by this external pressure from social media that we have to be productive with our time. I sat with it for a long time and I realize now that that productivity, the pressure to be constantly busy, it's just capitalism. We're all just living in a capitalist world. Once I kind of aligned myself with this realization, I made peace with it pretty quickly. I put it to bed and I was like, “Okay, I'm just gonna be here.”
We the Women: I think there’s an expectation, as an artist, to be inspired 24/7. And I find that to be really debilitating. There’s something very necessary and healing about stepping outside our heads and just giving ourselves permission to live and not automatically think, “How can I generate this particular experience as content?”
Right. I told myself, I'm going to ride this wave of quarantine, I'm just gonna roll with it. I'm a mom, so I'm busy looking after my two and a half year old, which takes up a lot of time. I started slowly doing tasks around the house, which became creative projects. My husband and I decided to turn our shed into a library/cove space where we could come and escape and read and do meetings and have a little, colorful corner room of our own. We did that and it was really a wonderful thing even though I'm an actor by trade.
We the Women: That sounds like an incredible reset for creativity.
The juices have started flowing again. It's all starting to kind of come back, which I'm excited by because it is different. I'm looking at creativity through a different lens now. I feel like my perspective has changed: I don't want to just take acting jobs for the sake of doing them. I've become a bit like, “Well, actually, what is the point of all this? What kind of stories do I want to put out in the world? Am I happy with the kind of art that I've been making so far? And if I'm not, how can I change it?” I'm asking myself some big questions at the moment as an artist and to be honest, I don't have a lot of answers yet. But I'm not mad at being in this place. I think it's a good place for me to be.
We the Women: Introspection is such a gift. I’m noticing that even when I engage in “wind down” activities like watching television, I’m being more critical with what I choose to engage with. But we’re in a very good era of film and television, I think, which makes me hopeful that the industry is getting better for women.
The roles that are out there are definitely getting better because I can see them. I'm watching them. I spend a lot of time watching a lot of television with great, amazing female heroes of mine doing roles there's so empowering. And I'm just like, “Oh, there it is. That’s the dream, even if it’s been slow moving to get there.”
The rules have shifted: instead of just being an actor, there’s more women who want more from their roles and want more from their experience being an artist. A lot of my crew, including myself, want more than just to turn up and play a part. I want more than just to be told by a casting director, “You get this job, you don't get that job, you're too old for that, you were too young for that, you're not sexy enough for this.”
We the Women: Have you thought about what that might look like for you, specifically?
I want to look into more producing, more directing, more writing. The work that's really turning me on at the moment is all the women that are juggling all of those things, spinning all of those plates. I'm really noticing that women are more and more stepping up and going, “No, I'm not going to be in a box.” It's a bullshit box. It's okay for us to be more than just an actor now.
We the Women: I think about Michaela Coel a lot, in that category, because I genuinely think her mindset is what we should all aspire to. Her interview where she talked about walking away from Netflix and her agency because they weren’t giving her what she deserved? I got chills when I read that.
She's so extraordinary. The fact that she shared that journey has changed the system. I May Destroy You was such a unique and specific story that has become universal. If you watched her MacTaggart lecture, she used the analogy of her holding the door open for people. She felt it was her duty to say: “Come on through, it's okay, we need your voices, we need your artistry, we need you. But if I'm holding the door open for you, I need to tell you the rules of the house. And the rules of the house aren't all what they seem, I need to tell you my experience because otherwise, I'm complicit with a shitty house. A house that is not favorable to us and does not care about us. There's great things about it too, but I can't just smile and say I'm so grateful to be here because I got my dollars from Netflix.” I thought that was so refreshing and brilliantly honest. I think about it every day.
We the Women: We need more of that brutal honesty because with that comes radical change. We live in a very constructed society—a highlight reel—and I think social media, particularly Instagram, is responsible for that. We want to share the best parts of our lives and this industry, but I worry that it doesn’t tell the whole truth.
Instagram, at least for me, started off being a place to share fun photos and updates about work. Now it's very clearly become something different. It is absolutely this machine to sell things. Even if it's yourself, it’s about selling your shows, selling your face, selling your brand. I have such a strange feeling about that.
I remember posting a video and so many horrible comments appeared on my page, which I've never experienced before. I felt so exposed and so angry. But I needed to deal with that, because it was on my page and my responsibility. So I posted a video basically telling people to buck off my page if they just didn't like it and to not bring that kind of hate here in my space. And I felt so sick to my stomach posting it, even though I knew it was the right thing to do, even though it was from my heart, even though it was important, and it really forced me to sort of think twice about what am I doing here? Am I here to express myself? Or am I just here to post pretty photos of filtered things now?
We the Women: Which in itself is a great parallel to theatre, film, or any medium. Not only are we asking ourselves, “What do I want to give my attention to?” but we’re also asking ourselves, “What stories do I want to tell?” We’re all so deeply shaped by the power of storytelling—as individuals and as a society—that to undermine that potential feels lazy and harmful now. It’s not enough to just make something; we want content that stands for something now.
I completely agree. The power of stories and the power of how we tell them is so important. One of the things that I keep coming back to is, “What stories do I want to tell? What stories do I want to be a part of telling?” Because there's just a lot of noise right now. There's plenty of bad stories, average stories, even classical material that perpetuates really old, boring ideas. And I'm feeling tired of it. I want to be more discerning about what I'm putting my energy into and how that's going out into the world. Time has become so very precious now so I'm definitely getting more particular about what I give my attention to. You said something about how Black Mirror has always been this kind of lens into society and artists are a lens into our culture, from where we're at, what we're getting so wrong, and where we're headed. And stories like that— that have that kind of power and that kind of awareness—I'm into. That’s what excites me.