The night before Madeline Weinstein was slated to begin shooting “Between the Temples,” she got into a car accident. She was fine, the car was fine, she quickly reassured me when we spoke half a year later. But it was February around Kingston, New York, where the film was shot, and a snowstorm hit. Weinstein’s car slid off the road. Over the following eight days of filming, the nervy incident proved to be a gateway through which the 31-year-old actress became her character, Gabby.
“Between the Temples” is a screwball dramedy about cantor-in-crisis Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) who is revived by his former elementary school music teacher turned adult bat mitzvah student Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane). Inspired by writer-director Nathan Silver’s mother’s own adult bat mitzvah journey, the movie is a laugh-out-loud funny, viscerally recognizable and, at times, profoundly uncomfortable sketch of contemporary Jewish life and fulfillment. Alongside Schwartzman and Kane, the powerhouse ensemble cast is rounded out by Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon as Ben’s moms, Robert Smigel as Rabbi Bruce and Madeline Weinstein as Rabbi Bruce’s daughter Gabby and the specter of Ben’s dead wife, Ruth. (It’s worth mentioning that Pauline Chalamet has a brief, yet uproarious cameo as Leah, Ben’s non-Jewish JDate.)
Weinstein’s Gabby is in crisis, too. Having recently experienced a broken engagement and struggling as an actor, Gabby returns to her hometown just as lost as Cantor Ben. Anxious energy radiates off of Gabby as she navigates social situations completely off-tempo. At a temple fundraiser for a Holocaust Torah, where Gabby and Ben meet and Ben’s mom Judith (de Leon) devises the idea to set them up, Gabby struggles to perform an off-the-cuff Katharine Hepburn impression and gulps her plastic cup of wine. Later, Gabby impersonates Cantor Ben’s dead wife in order to seduce him in his car, which is parked close by Ruth’s grave plot. And in a final moment of cacophony, the Gottliebs hosts Rabbi Bruce and his family for a Shabbat dinner meant to unite Ben and Gabby. Instead, what results is an evening focused on Ben and Carla, leaving Gabby laughing painfully and rejected once more.
Madeline chatted with me over Zoom a few weeks ago to talk about improvising the Shabbat dinner scene, how “Between the Temples” represents the Yiddish concept of hereness in disapora and the love of crafting she and co-star Jason Schwartzman share.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Could you tell me about how you started acting and why you wanted to be an actor?
I was a theater kid. I grew up in the city and when I was in middle school, I joined the children’s chorus at the Metropolitan Opera.
Cute!
It’s very, very cute. It sounds very professional, but you sang “Happy Birthday” to get in. The criteria was that you were kind of mature and could sing in harmony. But it was really fun. And so my entry was through music. I did theater in high school, and I went to Northwestern because I wanted to double major. So I didn’t want to go to a conservatory. I wasn’t like, “I want to be an actor.” But they had a good theater program, and I went there, and I immediately didn’t take any other classes. It was path of least resistance in a way and I ended up being an actor without ever being like a kid who wanted to be an actor.
So fun. At the center of “Between the Temples” is Carla’s bat mitzvah. Did you have a bat mitzvah?
I did not have a bat mitzvah. I was and still have a skeptic streak in me and am kind of anti-traditionalist. I grew up with a pretty secular Upper West Side Jewish family and was always close to my Jewish grandparents. My mom was bat mitzvahed, we celebrated Hanukkah and sometimes went to temple for Rosh Hashanah. And so I was like, “Why do I have to get bat mitzvahed?” I think I really just didn’t want to have to memorize the Torah portion.
Do you feel like you have a closer personal relationship with Jewishness now as an adult? I noticed posts on your Instagram about being involved with Jewish activism through If Not Now and other organizations.
Jewishness has always been a foundational, fundamental part of who I am, in a way that is kind of inarticulable. Cultural and familial Judaism is part of who I am. But I would say it’s true that in the past few years, I’ve been more interested — and this feels like such a cliche, but I’m getting a little older and maybe toning down some of my younger reactionary streak, questioning like, “Why did I have to do that?” I’ve been more interested in what tradition for tradition’s sake has to offer. I’ve even talked to my partner about maybe checking out some synagogues. So I definitely do feel that as I’m getting older I’m becoming more curious about other ways that I could explore my own Jewish identity.
But I’ll also add that I’ve always felt very connected to a legacy of Jewish labor leftist organizing. My grandparents were activists, and my grandfather was a real Bernie Sanders type. So that has always been a way that I’ve very much understood my own and my family’s Jewish identity too.
Thanks for sharing that. Back to the movie, did playing Ben’s late wife Ruth in the moments when she materializes give you any insight into playing Gabby?
You know, I’ve been asked this in Q+A’s before. I wish I had a really insightful answer. I asked Nathan about it and I think he’s just – this is something I really appreciate about him – is really interested in doppelgängers. I think he thought it would be like a really cool gesture and image. And there was something mysterious about it, even to him. I tend to be a very analytical person, so I’m like, “OK, but why? What exactly is behind it?” I think it’s a part of what makes his movies really great and vibrant, but it’s a question that isn’t necessarily answered. Playing Ruth didn’t really give me insights into Gabby, but I think it might provide insights into Ben, Jason’s character. There’s something there about grieving and the way we project our past onto people.
You are friends with Nathan Silver. Did he write the part of Gabby with you in mind or did he come to you about the project?
No, he didn’t write with me in mind. Nathan basically wrote “Between the Temples” as more of like a novella than anything. He calls it “a scriptment.” But there was no like, “Ben:” It was like, “Ben runs in the cold and he sees this person.” So it really was not a screenplay, and Gabby was pretty amorphous. But I think what he told me is that he was talking to a casting director and they brought up my name, and he was like, “Oh my God, Maddie, of course.” And then he called me and sent me the script. We had wanted to work with each other for awhile, but it hadn’t been able to happen yet. So I was so excited.
What spoke to you about Gabby’s character when you were reading the scriptment?
I think the thing that was actually kind of scary about the project was that, because of the way it was written or not written, it’s really like [Gabby] could be a lot of people. It was very open-ended. I think of myself as someone who’s more interpretive than generative. I like that, theater is the words and the text is the job and the work. So not being there at all was exciting and also scary. Nathan and I talked a lot about who Gabby might be, and kind of went through different versions of her. He also sent me films that were thematically and stylistically touchstones for him, including “The Heartbreak Kid.” We ended up moving away from an idea of Gabby that was kind of in the footprint of Jeannie Berlin in that movie, who does a genius comedic performance.
But we talked about it a lot, and collaborated, and I don’t know, there’s something really fun about playing someone who’s going through it. I think we’re very different people. But I was thinking about the experience of, like, deep COVID, and just starting to be in public again with large groups of people. I had just started dating my partner, and I was meeting his friends. I think of myself as a very socially comfortable person but I was finding myself in social spaces where I felt like I was behind glass. You know what that feeling is? That is how Gabby feels all the time at this point in her life. That was my way of approaching the interiority of the character.
What was it like working with this incredible ensemble cast?
The best, the best. I wish I’d gotten to work with Carol more. There’s that big dinner scene we were in together, which is so fun. Even just sitting across from her and watching her, she has such an incredible intensity, she’s amazing. Jason is the kindest person in the world, the most generous, lovely person. The process was so quick that we Zoomed to get to know each other for a second before shooting began, and we realized we are both big crafters. We both love a craft. So getting to quickly feel super comfortable around him was lovely. And then yeah… Dolly, Caroline, Robert, I mean, they’re all really funny, just lovely, down-to-Earth people.
I loved the Shabbat dinner scene, but of course, it was so stressful to watch. Was it stressful to film?
It was all improvised. So it was filmed over two nights. Bless the editing team, it was just craziness. But it was, really, really, really fun to shoot, actually.
Did Nathan give you an idea of where he wanted it to go? Or was it a little bit more free form?
There had been different versions of that scene that had been scripted to different amounts. There was one version of it where Jason professed his love to Carla, and there was one where he didn’t. Which, of course, really fundamentally changed the movie. Going into it, it was really late at night and everyone just kind of threw out the script and people pulled ideas or shapes from the different versions they had read, but it really ended up being its own thing. The telephone game is something Jason in the moment was like, “What if we play a game of telephone?” I was like, “There’s no way this is going to make it in the movie.” And it’s the most amazing part of the movie.
It feels like something you would do in a beginning acting class but with Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Robert Smigel and everyone. That’s so cool. So you didn’t shoot with Carol a lot, but did you get to talk with her at all while filming was happening?
It’s so siloed. We occasionally had overlap in the makeup chair, but not a ton. But, she’s just… I grew up watching her in “Princess Bride” and “Annie Hall.” People always would come up to my mom on the street and ask if she was Carol Kane because they looked similar. So I always had this deep fondness for her as a cultural figure. It was just very cool being around her, and she’s just such a deeply talented, serious artist.
Absolutely. I can’t imagine having to learn a character and learn lines and then also having to learn Torah at the same time.
I know, I know. It’s really cool.
At Sundance, you talked about how “Between the Temples” made you think about doikayt, the Yiddish word for “hereness.” Could you say more about how you feel it represents doikayt?
On a literal level, the film beautifully paints a very recognizable, funny, moving portrait of diaspora Jews. As a whole it’s a very Jewish movie, but it’s also like a very specific movie of like Jews in upstate New York. It shows there is this rich Jewish life in a place where people have made their home in diaspora. But less literally, so much of the heart of the film and the spirituality of the film is not in the synagogue or vested in the rabbi, but actually exists in the very present, living relationship between these characters and their art, and even nature at the end of the film. There’s something I think that’s beautiful about that too. Where we are physically, but also where we are in time and space and emotionally is the place that we create our lives. That is where we act out our Jewish history and our expression of our Jewishness.
How did you prepare to play Gabby?
I actually got into a car accident the night before my first day shooting. I was fine. The car was fine. It was a snowstorm and I went off the road. But it was kind of a great entry point into my characters. It’s very helpful when you’re acting when you feel the thing your character is feeling. You have to act less.
Wow, yeah, in all of Gabby’s scenes it does really seem like she just got out of a car that skidded off the road, and she hasn’t pieced herself together yet.
Yeah, I think she’s trying to figure out how to like “be” at all moments. Nathan might disagree, but I think normally she is more capable of being an easy person in the world and we’re meeting her in an anxious moment.
You were also in another very Jewish project, “The Ally,” earlier this year. Do you find yourself drawn to Jewish stories? Or did these two projects just come up naturally?
I think people in general are making a lot of art about identity, and are interested in identity right now in general. And then I think people are also more concerned than they used to be about casting people who are Jewish. So in a way, it’s just accidental. But also, I read both projects and immediately loved them. They resonated with me in part because there was something I really recognized about them or felt like I could bring to them.
I know that the playwright Itamar Ben Moses wrote “The Ally” before October 7, but debuting afterwards the play became topical very quickly. How did it feel to be performing in a show about a professor grappling with criticism of Israel and his own Jewish identity as situations similar to that were playing out across the country?
It was intense. I think Itamar had written it or started writing it like six years before. But yeah, people had really strong reactions to it. I felt very grateful to be able to perform a piece of art that really moved people. I think it really allowed people to hear things and see people’s humanity that they were maybe walled off from. There’s something about sitting in a dark theater and knowing that with this play, everyone in the audience is going to be uncomfortable at some point, no matter what your identity or political background is. And everyone also might, hopefully, feel seen at one moment also, and then they might be challenged and allow themselves to, in the anonymity of a theater, kind of relax and not click out of the window or change the channel. I don’t think I’ll ever do a play again that evokes such visceral reactions from people. It was a really powerful experience.
OK last question and it’s an important one: What kind of crafts do you do? And what kind of crafts does Jason do?
I’m a big knitter. I guess this isn’t a craft, but I’m also a big gardener. I have seasonal hobbies, but I say knitting is my go-to. I actually developed a wrist injury a couple years ago because around the winter holidays I was knitting so feverishly and obsessively. So I kind of go hard into one craft. Jason, I think, is a dabbler. I forget what he had with him when he was filming the movie… He had some really funny collection of materials he was playing around with. I think he likes to have a little crafty thing to be doing when he’s working on a project, which I found very endearing.
“Between the Temples” is in theaters now.
