Sally Field on Being a Mom Who Supports Her Gay Son in Spoiler Alert
She’s “another mother,” Sally Field says, explaining her character Marilyn in Spoiler Alert, the film based on TVLine founder Michael Ausiello’s memoir about loving and losing his husband Kit Cowan to a rare form of cancer in 2015.
It’s true that double Oscar and three-time Emmy winner Field has played a slate of moms in her 50-plus-year career, but she’s never been just another mother — not on screen and not in life.On the big screen, she’s starred as the fierce mother to Julia Roberts’s terminal Shelby in Steel Magnolias, the loving, supportive mother to Tom Hanks’s Forrest in Forrest Gump, and as an avenging mom in Not Without My Daughter and the thriller An Eye for an Eye.
On TV, she won an Emmy for her portrayal of Abby’s (Maura Tierney) schizophrenic mom on ER and another for starring as a loving mom (Nora Walker) to a gay son played by Matthew Rhys on Brothers and Sisters at a time when gay characters on primetime were rare.
In life, Field is an outspoken equality activist for all marginalized groups, and along with her son Sam Greisman, who is gay, she’s been particularly outspoken about pushing to pass the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and more.Field credits Brothers and Sisters showrunner and Spoiler Alert writer David Marshall Grant and director Michael Showalter (who directed her in the indie gem Hello, My Name is Doris) for bringing her on to Spoiler Alert to play mom to Ben Aldrich’s Kit and mother-in-law to Jim Parsons’s Michael.“It’s a lovely piece,” Field says of the film that dropped in theaters in December.
