Rita Wilson can make a supporting character’s kindness worth paying attention to. We rate her comic sincerity in Sleepless in Seattle, and the less comforting use Kimi makes of an actor so often asked to be reassuring.
Fi1m perspective
Suzy gets emotional recounting a romantic film in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and Rita Wilson gives the business of telling someone a plot its own comic urgency. The monologue was improvised, and its subject is An Affair to Remember. Nora Ephron’s film is warm and funny, though its determined belief in destiny asks for indulgence. Wilson’s emotional retelling is one of its memorable supporting contributions, and her reputation rests on these smaller roles and her work as a producer rather than leading parts.
After television guest parts in the 1970s, her film work settled into supporting roles from the mid-1980s. Sisters, friends, mothers and aunts became familiar assignments, with It’s Complicated (2009) among the examples of that nurturing casting. There is a limitation here: the reassuring woman can be useful to everyone else without being given much to want herself. The move into producing with My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) widened her responsibilities while keeping her close to ensemble comedy. For us, though, the acting is most interesting when a script asks more of her than being good company.
Kimi (2022) makes precisely that demand. Steven Soderbergh gives her one scene as Natalie Chowdhury, a manager whose friendliness has limits, and Wilson makes the professional courtesy unsettling without overplaying it. We felt uneasy when the friendliness stopped. The casting draws on the reassurance she usually provides, so a small part has an advantage a more obviously threatening presence would lack.
Neither film is beyond criticism: Ephron’s romance dawdles, and Soderbergh’s thriller eventually settles into a familiar chase. Wilson is good in both without being the reason either holds together; that credit belongs to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in one, Zoë Kravitz in the other. For a less comfortable introduction than her familiar casting might suggest, start with Kimi.
Biography
Rita Wilson is an American actress, singer and producer. Born Margarita Ibrahimoff on 26 October 1956 in Los Angeles, she began her career with guest roles on television series including The Brady Bunch and made her feature debut in The Day It Came to Earth (1979). She has appeared in films such as Sleepless in Seattle (1993), That Thing You Do! (1996), Jingle All the Way (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), It's Complicated (2009), Larry Crowne (2011) and Asteroid City (2023), and in the series Girls and The Good Wife.
Wilson has produced several films, including My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and Mamma Mia! (2008). She performed on Broadway in Chicago and has released a number of albums as a singer-songwriter. She is married to actor Tom Hanks.
