It is morning in New Orleans and Beth Ditto is getting ready for the day: plucking her chin hairs as she speaks to me over the phone, while picking out a black dress light enough for the heavy southern heat.
She is in Louisiana for several months, working as an actor. Best known for the 17 years she spent as frontwoman of the band Gossip, and for 2017’s solo record Fake Sugar, her second major acting role – the one she is now filming – is in Kirsten Dunst’s new series, On Becoming a God in Central Florida. Her first reaches the UK this week, a supporting role in Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.
The Van Sant film is an adaptation of the memoir of the cartoonist John Callahan, who became quadriplegic at 21, after a day spent drinking ended in a car accident. Ditto plays Reba, a fulsome, enlightening redneck woman Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) meets through Alcoholics Anonymous. The role of Reba has extra power in the current political climate. Ditto plays her with the full bloom of her own rural Arkansas accent, aware of many preconceptions about southern redneck culture. Even in the audition, she felt a fierce connection to the part: “She makes me think of my aunt Jannie and my aunt Linda Gail,” she says. “The description had said ‘redneck loud woman’ and I was like: ‘Oh! I was related to all those women. I can do this!’”
Van Sant encouraged her contributions to the role and the script. “There’s a part where I tell the story of a titty rock, and that story really happened,” she says. (Her aunt Jannie carried a rock to use in fights with other women.) “That story is a real story from my childhood! He kept wanting to hear stories about my aunts, and one day when we were filming, he said: ‘Would you tell the story about the titty rock?’ And I said: ‘You got it!’” She laughs. “I think he liked it because it was real. I mean, it wasn’t really acting. That’s the thing, I don’t think I can act. I think I’m just really good at talking.”
She is aware, of course, that in the popular imagination redneck women are small-minded, racist and Republican, but in her own experience this was far from the truth. “I’ll tell you why,” she says. “Growing up, I didn’t know any Republican southern women, not one, no matter how redneck you were. It wasn’t until the second George Bush administration that it started to connect. Also, remember that I’m from Clinton country – the Clintons were from Little Rock [the capital of Arkansas].
“The redneck women that I knew, I think people don’t see,” she continues. “They had this very butch side to them, which is very interesting in itself. And then there’s this gentle side to them that gives them empathy, that comes from putting up with the men’s shit their whole lives, from the lack of education, working hard, raising the children that the men left behind, just dealing with reality. I feel like all of my friends would say the same – that the men who were rednecks, they were the problems, but these rough-and-tumble ladies, they were the saving grace.”
Many of those women are gone now – her aunt Linda Gail died earlier this year. The women of her childhood, who she remembers with their “flat-tops and slicked-back hair”, who were “domestic abuse and rape survivors”, are harder to find these days. But they are the ones she still feels attached to. “All of my family are Democrats,” she says. “My aunt Jannie and my aunt Linda Gail were avid lovers of people. My aunt Jannie specifically was very, very knowledgable about politics and she was very anti-Republican and very vocally anti-racist and anti-sexist, but at the same time she was in this relationship that was toxic and she’d been in it since she was a 14-year-old girl.”
She is impassioned now. “There was all this beautiful empathy that comes along with redneck women that people don’t really see because they don’t live it,” she says. “Because there’s a stereotype and because they’re physically associated with a lot of really fucked-up movements. But at the same time, a lot of their physical characteristics have to do with poverty, with how they dress, their teeth … but poverty can come from putting your children first. It’s really interesting. So to me, it didn’t feel I was playing this person who was full of bullshit, but more that I was giving a perspective on redneck women that people don’t really see all the time.”
When Gossip first found success in 2006, Ditto was a glorious shock to the mainstream: a voice like a juggernaut, 5ft 1in (1.55 metres) and 15st (95kg), queer, feminist, an advocate for body positivity who lived in Portland’s liberal bubble but hailed from Arkansas, where she was born in a trailer park and grew up with six siblings.
The band’s breakthrough came with the single Standing in the Way of Control, which was first released in 2005 and reached No 7 in the UK charts two years later. Then it was a juddering call to arms, written in response to the federal marriage amendment that would have outlawed same-sex marriage in the US. Today the song has acquired a new weight, a resistant force to the many looming infringements to human rights brought about by the Trump administration.
Ditto feels the new force of the song too. Around the time of Trump’s election, she was asked to play at a party for the designer Stella McCartney. In the weeks leading up to the event, McCartney’s team suggested she play Standing in the Way of Control, and Ditto declined. “Not because I don’t want to,” she laughs, “I’m a people-pleaser, I’d much rather give people what they want. That’s the difference between me and an artist – I would much rather make you happy. But I said: ‘I don’t feel like it’s going to be very relevant.’” Then the election happened. “And I thought, now that song is more relevant than ever. And that’s what blows my mind. Now it’s just really fucking weird.”
The peculiar thing she noticed as she toured Fake Sugar over the past year was that, wherever she played, she always seemed to be in the wrong city to attend a march or a protest rally, “and so you feel detached from your real community and the people it’s going to affect”, she says. The exception was that on the evening of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, she happened to find herself in Washington DC to play a show with Florence + the Machine. “It was so sweet,” she says, “because Florence said: ‘We’ll smash the patriarchy!’” She gives a rueful laugh. “There was still hope.”
She has a strange relationship with Arkansas now. A few years ago, Nathan Howdeshell, one of Gossip’s founding members and one of her closest friends, returned to the state, set up home and found God again. Ditto still sounds stunned as she talks about it. “I think it’s partly straight white male privilege to be able to move back in the pursuit of happiness,” she says. “I could never do that and feel happy and fulfilled and feel my truest self. He can.” She does not talk to him about it. “I kind of see him as a distant family member now. I’ll see him at Thanksgiving and not bring things up, keep things on very surface topics. And it’s painful.”
She takes a breath. “I moved away [from Arkansas] with three other people and we’re all like, there’s no fucking way we could go back there,” she says. “One is a woman and one is a queer boy. And there’s no way we could survive there – we’re not talking about Little Rock, we’re talking about small towns where a Confederate flag is still flying. I can’t,” she says sadly, defiantly. “I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t.”