Best known for her role as Bond girl Pam Bouvier in the James Bond movie License to Kill and ADA Jamie Ross in the television series Law & Order, Carey Lowell joins to discuss her career as a model, actress, and ceramicist.
Debbie Millman:
Carey Lowell has spent a lot of her life in front of a camera. First as a model in the 1980s for designers, including Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Then as an actor. She played Bond girl, Pam Bouvier, in the 1989 James Bond movie, License to Kill, and then ADA Jamie Ross in several seasons of the television show, Law and Order. After a break from acting, she reprised that role in the recent reboot of the famed long-running franchise. Carey Lowell has also spent a lot of her life in pottery studios. The pandemic helped turn a passionate hobby into a career shift, and now she has her own line of ceramics. Carey Lowell, welcome to Design Matters.
Carey Lowell:
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Carey, is it true that your nickname is Karaoke?
Carey Lowell:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Tell us all about that, please.
Carey Lowell:
Well, I have this crazy… I listen to a lot of music and therefore, know all the words to all the songs. I got the nickname Karaoke because whenever a song would come on, I knew the words and could repeat them pretty accurately. So it’s just a silly nickname I got.
Debbie Millman:
I was envisioning you in sports bars, standing up and singing Total Eclipse of the Sun and so forth.
Carey Lowell:
It’s funny, I don’t do a lot of karaoke, actually. That nickname was given to me by a writer friend, Jonathan Cot.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, well done. Well done.
Carey Lowell:
Name tag. Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Huntington, Long Island, but moved all over the world with your family until you settled in Colorado when you were about 12. Why were you moving so much and where were some of the places you lived?
Carey Lowell:
My father was a petroleum geologist and they were living in Tripoli, Libya when my mom was pregnant with me. I have an older sister, Jennifer, who was actually born in Tripoli, but my mother’s parents lived in Huntington, Long Island. And so when my mom was due to deliver, they actually happened to be on leave in Huntington, and so I was born there and then I think I went back to Tripoli when I was about maybe less than a month old and lived there for a couple of years. And then we moved to Holland and I have another sister who was born there while my father was working in the North Sea. And then we moved to Virginia and then Texas, where I have another sister who was born. And then we moved to Colorado when I was 12, and that’s where my father still lives, and two of my sisters actually.
Debbie Millman:
Your father was an award-winning geologist, and I understand he co-authored an article that defined copper models that became the standard reference for exploration geologists worldwide. Were you involved in any of the work that he did?
Carey Lowell:
No. Only in that he used to take us on tours in Colorado, on these hikes, and we thought, we would much rather be anywhere else, but on this hike while he pointed out the geological structures to us. As an adult, I wish I’d paid more attention to it because now whenever I’m out in nature looking at formations, I’m thinking, “Okay, what happened here?” I always see it through my father’s eyes.
But I think you might be confusing my father, James Lowell with another James Lowell, who was a copper geologist magnet. My dad did publish a textbook that was used for most geology college courses about structural geology because his whole area was plate tectonics and continental drift.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I got really involved in a lot of these papers. Well, we’ll have to investigate to see which James Lowell. Yeah. That’s interesting.
You took your first pottery class in high school, but even before that, I know that one of your earliest childhood memories of being creative involved finger paint when you were three or four years old. I was wondering if you could share that memory with our listeners today because it’s so visceral.
Carey Lowell:
Well, my parents bought us an easel, my older sister, Jennifer and I. We’re only two years apart. So the easel had two sides, and we would stand on either side of it and put up our waxy paper and just go to town. I just remember these pots of red, blue, and yellow, and it was really an opportunity to stick your hand in and mush it around. I just remember loving that feeling of the squeegee, gooey, wet creation of it all. I loved that. I think that clay has a similar tactile feel to it, but just that thing of just taking nothing, your hand and a substance and creating something out of it.
Debbie Millman:
It’s magic. It really is magic. And there’s something, so I don’t know what the word would be it, the word that I’m thinking of is sensual, but it feels even more than that to feel the warm paint or warm clay in your hands and have that ability to craft something from nothing.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah, that’s definitely sensual, a gift for sure.
Debbie Millman:
Would you say that this is when your love of tactile things really began?
Carey Lowell:
I have always had this, I don’t know if it’s unusual or normal, but I’ve always had a thing about of how things feel. My mother used to put my hair on pigtails and she would always tie them with a satin ribbon, and I would always take the satin ribbon out and fold it into little ribs and push it across my cheek or across my lips. It was just like a total sensual thing. I could even find the satin on the label of the seatbelt. If we were in the car and I didn’t have a ribbon, I would find it and do that. It’s like a self comforting thing. I don’t know, but I’ve always been very in tune to tactile things.
Debbie Millman:
You took your first pottery class in high school where they actually had pottery wheels, which I found so interesting. I’ve never heard of a high school having pottery wheels. What kind of pottery were you doing back then?
Carey Lowell:
At that point I was just trying to get the clay centered on the wheel. It was the learning curve. I went to a public school in Denver, Colorado called Bear Creek High School, and back then, the arts were supported in public schools. So our arts class was a pottery class and there was probably 10 wheels in it. We had a wonderful teacher and we’d all just go in there and do our best. But my pottery back then was a wonky bowl if I could ever get it centered.
Debbie Millman:
Do you happen to have any of those old pottery creations still in your possession?
Carey Lowell:
I don’t. I do actually have one that I hand-built that actually I look back on and think, “That wasn’t so awful.” But I do have some from when I got back into pottery, because I took a little bit of a break for motherhood and acting. I wasn’t doing it so much when I was doing the James Bond stuff, but then when my daughter was born, I got back into it.
Debbie Millman:
I love that you just said the James Bond stuff. We’ll get to that shortly. At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally? Was it going to be something in the arts?
Carey Lowell:
I never considered that I could make a career in the arts. I came from a very academic family. My dad, as I said, is a geologist, and my mom was a music major at Wellesley. Even though that is in the arts, it’s funny, I always thought that I needed to do something professionally and I was always told that I’d make a good lawyer despite my mother who told me that I was very argumentative. So that was my best quality to get that career.
But looking back in hindsight, I so wish that I had pursued the arts then, in the very beginning. When I took an acting class in college, it was the first acting class I’d ever taken, and it was just an extracurricular activity. Nothing that I ever thought I would make a career at.
Debbie Millman:
You attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I understand that while you continued to pursue pottery, initially, I think your major was literature.
Carey Lowell:
It was. It was literature. I read a lot of Russian literature. I read a lot of French literature, not in French, in English.
Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting. I minored in Russian literature, but in English translation. People are always really impressed thinking that somehow I managed to learn Russian and then have a minor in Russian literature, but I’m like, “No, it was all in translation,” but I still think it counts.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah, it does count. I was so into Lermontov.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, yes.
Carey Lowell:
Like A Hero of Our Time.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Me too.
Carey Lowell:
I loved that book. I loved that book. And then I transferred to NYU from Boulder, ’cause I just did a single year at Boulder. I had been modeling that summer before I went to college, and then I went back to move to New York to continue modeling.
Debbie Millman:
How did you first get discovered in modeling? How did that first all come to happen to you? ‘Cause I understand it was really kind of a fluke.
Carey Lowell:
It was kind of a fluke. I had a high school classmate whose sister was with an agency in Denver, and she said, “You should really go in and meet this woman, Vicky Lite.” It was The Lite Company, was the name of the agency. “You should go meet Vicky.” And I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” That really made me feel anxious. But I did go in and she said, “Well, you need some photos if you’re going to do this. Here’s a name of somebody, you should go and get her to take your picture.” Well, it turned out to be this woman, and maybe you’ve heard of her before, a photographer named Pamela Hansen.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Carey Lowell:
She was living in Boulder at the time. I went up there and made an appointment with her. Pamela did all my makeup and shot me in these great photos and then gave them to the agency and they put them out there. Somebody from Fords was on a talent scout. They came to the agency, they saw my photo. I got a call. I was at my house, my parents’ house, which is in the foothills of Denver, not in town. And they said, “Somebody from Fords is here. They they’d like to meet you.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a car. I’ve got no way to get there. I’m not going to be able to do that.” And they said, “Well, you’re really missing out. This is the chance of a lifetime.” I was practically in tears, but I didn’t have any way to get into town and my parents weren’t there and I didn’t have a car.
And then about a month later, I got a contract in the mail from Ford saying, “We’d like you to come to New York this summer when you’re out of high school.” I was about to graduate. So after much negotiating with my parents and Eileen Ford on the phone with them, assuring them that I would be staying in her home and promising them that I would return to the University of Colorado for my freshman year, I was allowed to go to New York that summer and that was my first modeling.
Debbie Millman:
And you really had quite an extraordinary modeling career. You were photographed by some of the great fashion photographers of our time. Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber. You worked with Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren. What was it like? This was really at a time when the art of modeling was front and center. The supermodel era began, models were seen as muses, and I know that you were very much a part of that. What was it like for you to go from high school to the world stage of modeling?
Carey Lowell:
It was he a heady time. I have to say that when I first arrived in New York, I went to Eileen Ford’s house for the weekend. She got a call that weekend saying that a model that she had booked for a job on Monday had been injured and wasn’t going to be able to make it. And did she have anybody that could be a backup? So she had three other models there with her at the house. She brought us to this person’s house on Sunday night and said, “Are any of these girls going to work?” I was chosen. I was told to be at the airport at 7:00 AM the next morning. I literally just arrived that Friday night from Colorado and I was back on a plane to Four Corners in the West. It’s Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. I was basically back where I had been a month earlier with my senior class doing a senior seminar river rafting trip. That was just a weird circular moment of, you think you’re going somewhere and you’re right back where you started. But in a completely different context.
In terms of the supermodels, they came just after me. I think of like Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford as the supermodels. And before that, in my era, it was more like Christie Brinkley, Janice Dickinson. But I did get to travel the world. I got to meet amazing people, but I always felt a little bit self-conscious about it all. It’s not my natural state to be front and center posing. So I always felt a little awkward about it. That was something that I’ve always been working through.
Debbie Millman:
You never got any headlines about what models and rock stars and so forth are often written about. It seemed like you always have been able to keep a really steady presence in your own life as well as in your professional life. Did you have to experience a lot of pressure to be a certain weight or look a certain way? How did you manage through that?
Carey Lowell:
Well, I do remember showing up for a shoot once and I had been traveling somewhere. I’d definitely put on 10 pounds and my hair was sort of orange because I’d been in the sun and it just oxidized like crazy. The client took one look at me and looked at the photographer and said, “This is not going to work.” I was fired right there on the spot.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.
Carey Lowell:
That had never happened to me before. What can you do? I didn’t go into a downward spiral or anything. I really have to credit my parents with giving me a really grounded childhood and my three sisters, we’re all very close and still are. I just feel like that’s served me in good stead in the crazy world of modeling.
Debbie Millman:
By 1987, you began to transition into acting. What made you decide to take that step?
Carey Lowell:
It was just an audition that I got for Club Paradise and my line was, “Do you have anything to smoke?” I said, “I’ve done that before. I can do that again.” The next thing I knew, I was off in Port Antonio, Jamaica and the shoot went on for it seemed five months. It was a really long shoot. Harold Ramis was the director and Robin Williams was the star. And Twiggy and Peter O’Toole and Jimmy Cliff, Andrea Martin. It was all the Second City people. It was just a crazy big cast. And I was just a beach bunny really in it. I was basically a model who had some lines, but it gave me a taste for that collaborative experience, and when you’re in a crew and when you’re in a group and how wonderful that feels to be part of something bigger.
Debbie Millman:
Were there skills and knowledge you learned while modeling that helped you make that transition into acting?
Carey Lowell:
Well, being open to being scrutinized or to be looked at or watched, learning how to lose yourself in it. You don’t always have to be present almost. In acting you have to be more present, obviously because you’re exchanging lines, but in that role especially, there was just a remove because I was wearing a bathing suit that I never in my normal life would’ve ever put on, really low cut and high cut on the hips. Anyway.
Debbie Millman:
Oh Carey, that sounds like the definition of hell to me.
Carey Lowell:
Well, you’re walking around, everybody’s got clothes on, and you’re the only one in the tiny little thing. It can be intimidating.
Debbie Millman:
What advice might you offer to models and actors starting out about their careers? What do you wish somebody had told you at that time about that work?
Carey Lowell:
Just don’t take it personally. You’re going to be rejected so many times for so many reasons that have nothing to do with you. It’s nothing that you need to take on personally because you could really get depressed with all that rejection. My daughter, Hannah, is an actress and she’s constantly going up on auditions and she has to hear, “I’m sorry, they’re going with somebody else,” or “I’m sorry, you’re not tall enough,” or “I’m sorry, they wanted brunette,” whatever. It’s a challenge. And so you really have to have a strong sense of yourself that you don’t lose it in all the rejection.
Debbie Millman:
I know you studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. What were some of the most interesting things you learned while you were there? It’s such an interesting school.
Carey Lowell:
It is, and I have to correct the record there because what I did was study with a man named William Alderson who was a teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater, but I personally did not attend the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater. That was Sandy Meisner. But the techniques were the same. It’s the repetition technique. I really loved it. I loved my class, I loved my teacher. It was really intense, but it taught me a lot about how to just respond and not think. It was a really positive experience.
Debbie Millman:
One of your biggest roles was as a Bond girl, you starred alongside Timothy Dalton’s, James Bond in Licensed to Kill. How did you get the role and what was it like for you to be catapulted onto the world stage like that? Talk about scrutiny? The Bond girls have their cinematic universe at this point.
Carey Lowell:
They do. In fact, I was just talking with a friend yesterday. I was like, “How many Bond girls have there been?” There’s been, I believe 27. No, there’s 27 Bond films and 75 Bond women, something like that. Because there’s usually two in each film, a villain and a protagonist.
But I was living in Los Angeles, I got it as a go see like any other audition that I would get. I was told it was a biker chick in a biker bar. I showed up in my leather biker jacket and my jeans and read the lines, and the casting director, Janet Hirshenson, said, “This is a Bond film. This is for a Bond girl. You look nothing the part. You need to sex it up. Come on, you can come back on Monday, but wear something different and I’ll let you have another shot at it,” which was very kind of her. She didn’t have to do that. But I went out that weekend to the mall and I found the trashiest pink lame zip up, like a halter dress. Like if I had pulled the zipper down, it would’ve come off and it was short.
I just went in there and I did the same thing in this pink halter dress, and I got the part. It was funny because I had short hair at the time, which I’ve had a lot of my life. They weren’t a hundred percent sure what to do with me and which is why they put a wig on me for the initial scenes of the movie, and then I’m supposed to have a transformation and have it cut off. But they weren’t really comfortable starting out with my short hair. I remember that being an issue. But the Broccoli family were so lovely, and Cubby was alive then, and his daughter, Barbara Broccoli, who was the producer, was fantastic. It felt like being part of a family. That everybody had worked so much together on all the past films at that point, that the art department and the special effects department and the armorer, they’d been in it for life. And my director, John Glenn, had started out as a second unit director and had made his way up the ranks. And so that’s how they did it back then.
After that film, they really changed it up and they hired a new director, I think. I want to say, was it Ramey, Sam Ramey who directed one after? I don’t remember who the next director was, but I just remember that mine felt very of the old-fashioned type of Bond films. And then the one that came after that felt much more sort of had advanced to the modern era.
Debbie Millman:
Well, your character is so unusual. In re-watching the movie, first of all, I had no idea that was a wig that you were wearing initially, but I was really surprised because I had never seen you in photos or in anything else with the long hair. And then you do have this transformation midway through the film and essentially become the first Bond girl badass. You didn’t take any BS, but you had this wonderful dichotomy of looking incredible in the casino dress with the garter belt with the gun, but then also with this slicked back, short hair that you’d never seen before in a Bond film. And at the time, I remember it being somewhat controversial.
Carey Lowell:
She wasn’t an ornament on James’s arm anymore. She was somebody who was going to go toe to toe with him. And as a CIA agent, I just remember they gave me shooting lessons, so I had to fire a gun and I would just naturally flinch every time it would go off. And they were like, “You are our CIA agent. You do not flinch. You hold your eyes steady.” And so that was something that I had to overcome in that, but it was a little different. I was definitely not your common Bond girl, and I did like that they had moved it forward in that regard.
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Carey Lowell:
But they still had a scene where, like the one on the boat where we’re just leaving that bar where we’ve had a bar fight and James and I are, it’s when we first kissed. That was shot in a studio on a boat that some guys were rocking like this. They were splashing water on us, and there was a wind machine, and the background was just these little twinkling lights that they put in the back of the studio. So what looks like we’re floating out on the sea, was all done inside. And that’s what I mean by the old-fashioned, because these days they do it on location.
Debbie Millman:
Right. Well, it’s interesting because you also are more of the aggressor in that scene. You kissed Bond. He’s usually the one that makes the first move. I loved that you were so confident in your own sense of who you were to do that.
Carey Lowell:
Well, that’s the tagline, isn’t it? He says, “Why don’t you wait until you’re asked?”
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Carey Lowell:
I’m like, “Why don’t you ask me?”
Debbie Millman:
I love it.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah, yeah. She’s more aggressive. Yeah. That’s funny.
Debbie Millman:
You then started in films like Sleepless in Seattle and Fierce Creatures, but by the 1990s you said that you never realized all the weeks you spend going on auditions and being rejected. I think you said at one point you had been on 150 auditions and not landed a role. It seemed so incredulous to me to go from being a Bond girl to then not being able to get other roles. How did you keep your spirits up? When I’m rejected from one thing I could take to my bed for a week.
Carey Lowell:
Well, in the 1990s, my daughter was born in 1990, so that kept me busy for one. I definitely had something to distract me. And honestly, I’ve always been a meditator. I learned to meditate when I was 18, and that just really grounded me, put things in perspective. I don’t want to sugarcoat it and make it sound like I didn’t have terrible days of like, “Oh, this sucks and I hate this job and I’m not any good. I’m an imposter.” But I somehow worked my way through it. It wasn’t, believe me, I thought about quitting many times, and in fact, went to enroll back in school at NYU, Tisch, The School of the Arts and was accepted into their program. Right before I was supposed to start classes, I had the audition for Law and Order, and the rest is history, as they say.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. What made you decide to go back to school? Were you thinking about becoming a filmmaker or were you going to study more acting?
Carey Lowell:
I was thinking about being a documentary filmmaker. There were some stories that I wanted to explore, and I thought that that would be a really good way to do it. It’s probably very idealistic because making documentary films is not an easy road. You have to get all the financing and you have to have a really good story and really tenacity to do it. But it just was an area of interest. And Tisch, I was living in New York. That’s one of the best film schools in the country, so it just seemed like a natural thing to do, but I wasn’t going to study acting more. I just washed my hands of that. I needed to move on.
Debbie Millman:
Two days before you were supposed to begin classes, you found out you landed the part of ADA Jamie Ross in the original Law and Order, and your first appearance was in the 1996 episode, Causa Mortis. You remained a series regular for many years and then joined the cast of the spinoff, Law and Order Trial by Jury. What was it like suddenly working on episodic television in New York?
Carey Lowell:
I loved being in New York. We shot at Chelsea Piers, that’s where our sound stages were, and it was a 10 minute ride from my house. So in that way it was ideal. I loved my cast. I love and adore and still do Sam Waterston and Jerry Orbach, who’s no longer with us, sadly, benjamin Brat and Patha Markerson. We just had this amazing group of people and I was so pleased to be a part of it. And the writing was fantastic. We had really good writers. It was just a chance to sink your teeth into a character. Even though Law and Order doesn’t really care about the characters, you never see any backstory or home life or anything like that, really. It’s all procedural. But I still got a chance to inhabit Jamie’s skin, and it was really good practice. I have to say that. I really enjoyed it and it took a lot of the stress out of acting. It felt second nature.
And I’d only done an episodic show before that for a League of their Own, that Penny Marshall created. And I had the Genie Davis character, again with some long black wig on, that was in front of a live audience with three cameras. That was all about hitting your marks and hitting your line at the right moment. So I’d had a little bit of training for it, but Law and Order was just a joy. My only problem with it, and the reason I left the show after two years, I actually asked to be let out of my three-year contract after two years was because my daughter was five at the time, and I would leave in the morning before she woke up and come home at night after she’d gone to sleep, and there would be days that I wouldn’t see her.
Debbie Millman:
And the days are 18 hours long. It started 4:00 AM. It’s insane.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah. Crazy long days. I could never go to a parent-teacher conference. I never knew if I was going to be available. They let you know the week before what your schedule is, but it had its wonderful parts about it, which I will always think of fondly.
Debbie Millman:
Dick Wolfe, the creator of the Law and Order franchise, described you as a steel fist in a velvet glove. And I was wondering if he was referring to your character, ADA Jamie Ross or you, Carey Lowell?
Carey Lowell:
I think they’re not that far apart. I remember him telling my agent, “She’s got the right mix of sex appeal and moral authority.” I am kind of a bossy boots. I do like things my way and I’m not afraid to ask for it. Now, that’s something that I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. I wasn’t like that all the time, but as I’ve matured, I’ve realized you can ask for what you want or you could say what you need. And I think that’s what Jamie Ross did. She was very forthright about her feelings and how she felt and what she wanted. So I appreciated that about my character.
Debbie Millman:
The original Law and Order was recently resurrected and you’ve made a guest appearance on the reboot. How has the character of Jamie Ross evolved and what was that like for you to go back?
Carey Lowell:
Oh, well, it was painful in that, Jamie’s gotten older, and so Jamie doesn’t look so good on camera as much as she used to. I just remember saying to the lighting guy, “Please don’t give me a raking sidelight. Can you put some diffusion up there?” So I wasn’t happy about the way I looked, but also I hadn’t acted in a long time prior to that. It felt like 10 years. And I said yes, because I knew Sam was doing it. We shot some scenes, Sam and I, but they had never made it into the final show.
So I was really disappointed that it didn’t live up to my expectations of what it was going to be. What I learned is it’s hard to go home again. The crew, the cast wasn’t my cast and I didn’t know anybody, and we didn’t have that easy flow that you get when you’ve been working with the same people for a long time. So I realized that that’s an important part of it all, and that wasn’t there. And I think that was as the first episode, the people that are the ongoing characters are still finding their groove. They hadn’t found their groove yet either. So it was a good lesson for me in that I realized that I’m in the right place today doing ceramics and not acting.
Debbie Millman:
Interesting. Oh yeah. I want to talk to you about the ceramics. I just have a few more questions about your acting career. Iterations of the Law and Order franchise have been on television now for over 30 years. What do you think makes this show resonate so powerfully with people?
Carey Lowell:
I think that Dick Wolf hit on a formula that is really self-contained in that you don’t have to have watched the prior episode or the subsequent episode without getting the full story. In that one hour slot, you know that you’re going to get the full picture from beginning to end in that one hour. And that’s powerful because you don’t feel like, “Ah, I didn’t see that one before. I’m not going to be able to watch the next one.” You get what you get in that hour. And you know the characters because you’ve seen them. Jerry would always have his little one liners, his little quippy one liner, and Sam would always have some moral outrage about how the case was being handled. And we’d always have Stephen Hill, God bless that man, he was a wonderful man, sum it all up in one little line.
It was dependable in that you knew the formula and it was unexpected because you never really knew if we were going to win the case. There were a lot of times where we didn’t win in court, or the argument didn’t hold or the perpetrator got away. And I think it closely hued to how the law operates and how difficult it can be to prosecute somebody and come away with a guilty verdict. And also, one of the main reasons, and I think it’s been a huge success, is that it’s ripped from the headlines. You could look at the New York Post and that will be the title of the next show.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting because the Law and Order main show, there was that anticipation of will they be convicted or won’t they? And there was often that big surprise at the end that left you breathless. Whereas a lot of the other spinoffs, there is a more satisfactory conclusion where the bad guys get caught.
Carey Lowell:
They get their comeuppance. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And that’s I think what makes Law and Order SVU so eternally successful is that you know, as gruesome as the crime might be, they’re going to jail. They’re getting caught, and Rush is going to beat the shit out of them and they’re going to go to jail.
Carey Lowell:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
There was a question that I asked you in the interview that we did for Print Magazine earlier this year about your biggest regret. At the time you told me that your biggest regret was marrying at 23 because it cut yourself off from many possibilities or moments when you could have been a better parent to your children or a better child to your parents. I’m wondering if you wanted to expand on that a little bit. You talked about leaving Law and Order for your daughter. Do you feel that you’ve had to compromise in life in any way, in your career and in your family?
Carey Lowell:
The part about getting married too early and then being a better daughter or a better parent were two separate thoughts. I did marry at 23 despite my parents’ protestations. I thought I knew best, and they were of course, right and I never should have done that. I did get to travel a lot and I got to see a lot of the world with my first husband, but in retrospect, I really feel like I didn’t need to get married.
Debbie Millman:
Same. Mine was at 26, same.
Carey Lowell:
But you live and you learn and nobody can tell you how it’s going to go. You need to live it to understand it. So in terms of having to make sacrifices, I think it’s really hard to have two actors in a family relationship. I then went on to marry two actors and I found that I was the one more, because I wasn’t working as much. Griffin was definitely working more than I was. So I was the one that was home with our daughter more often. And then when I would get a part, I remember having Hannah with me. I remember going to Paris to shoot a film and Hannah came with me, just because you’re the mom and they want to be with you.
So I really feel like I turned a lot… And then when I was with Richard, I definitely turned a lot of things down because we had our son and I wanted to be there with him. And Richard would go off and work a lot and I would be home keeping the home fires burning, as they say. So yes, I think when they say you can have it all, okay, maybe, but not at the same time.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. People ask me all the time, “How do you do what you do?” And I’m like, “For most of my career life, I wasn’t married and didn’t have children. I had a completely elastic life.” Even being married now changes how much you can do and when you can do it. And I know as much as I sometimes fantasize what it would’ve been like to have children, I would not have been able to have the career that I’ve had. And I don’t know anybody that has it all. I truly don’t.
Carey Lowell:
No, I think it’s a myth.
Debbie Millman:
Let me put it another way. I don’t know any woman that has it all.
Carey Lowell:
That has it all and has great joy in it. It’s a real juggling act if you have it all. It’s not a relaxing having it all.
Debbie Millman:
There’s a lot of guilt involved in the balancing of it all.
Carey Lowell:
Definitely.
Debbie Millman:
Your interest in pottery making and ceramics has been a through line in your life since elementary school and albeit more in the background until the last couple of years. It’s since taken a major role in your life and you have your own line of ceramics, you make porcelain objects, you make vases, bowls, plates and more. What brought you back to this particular form of artistry at this point in your life?
Carey Lowell:
It happened because I was looking for an art class for my daughter, and I used to live down in the village on Sullivan Street, and there was a place called the Children’s Aid Society, and they had some ceramics classes and I enrolled my daughter in it. One day when I went to pick her up, I saw that they were having adult classes and I thought, I would like to do that again. So I signed myself up and I started taking wheel classes again, and then I just segued over to the Greenwich House Pottery, which is just a couple blocks away, which is a big townhouse that’s devoted to ceramics basically. And I just really got into it and never looked back.
Then, again, I was going on a lot of auditions and not getting anything, and I just thought, “You know what? What gives me joy? What’s really making me happy here now these days?” And it was just doing ceramics, not going up on an audition where I had to think about how I looked, I was old, too old or anything like that. It’s just been the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s just makes me really, really happy to do it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You’ve talked about how the process of pottery gives you a sense of autonomy. You get to decide what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it, whereas when you’re acting, you’re always waiting for somebody to hire you and give you the lines to read and then tell you how they want to shoot it.
Can you talk about the evolution of your style? It seems almost from all the work that I’ve looked at of yours to have been born fully formed. Like you just have this really unique, very original style that just seems to have been born alive the way it is.
Carey Lowell:
Well, thank you. That is such a compliment because I’m daily struggling with, “I don’t know if this is going to work out,” or “I don’t know how this looks.” And maybe that’s the role of an artist is just constantly self-questioning. It’s funny, during COVID, I started signing up for a lot of online pottery classes just because I wouldn’t have to travel for them. You could see all kinds of different artists sharing their work, and you didn’t have to be there in person, which was such a gift. And there’s this one group called Gasworks in Brooklyn, and they do this thing called Women in Clay.
It’s only women artists and all of the artists were talking about their work and doing instructional videos, but many of them were Native American or they were South American, or they were Latin American. And they all were talking about their indigenous art and how you really should make pottery that’s based on your heritage because it speaks to you. And I was thinking, “Oh God, what’s my heritage? It’s what? English, French.” So then I started looking back into old English and French pottery, and this is after I’d already been working for a while. This is only in the last two years. And I realized that the style that I have does echo that kind of porcelain, more fine, refined, there’s petals, there’s details that… And I think I was unconsciously doing it. At least that’s my excuse. I don’t know.
But I just sit down with a ball of clay and let it take me where it goes. Sometimes I have an intention going into it and think I’m going to be able to create this thing and then it will go off on a side road and it will be something completely different. But I think the best thing to do is just let it go that way and not try to impose too much about my vision because I think you lose something on the journey.
Debbie Millman:
You seem to take a lot of inspiration from nature, very naturalist aesthetic, organic shapes. Many of your pieces are adorned with very intricate detailing, often in the form of piercing or pinched edging, delicate petal assemblages, which are just stunning. You said that you find this odd because you’ve always seen yourself more as a tomboy, and so I’m wondering what do you make of this dichotomy with the style of your ceramics, which are so delicate and feminine and sexy?
Carey Lowell:
Thank you. Thank you. I’ve never heard them called sexy before, but I appreciate that.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, the bowls with the petals inside, stacks of petals.
Carey Lowell:
Oh, the gazing bowls. Thank you. Those are the gazing bowls. Well, I think it’s the expression of that. It’s that I don’t express that side of myself in my daily life. I don’t dress that way. I rarely wear makeup or heels. I am a tomboy in my dressing. I don’t know if that’s my Colorado upbringing or what, but I feel like my ceramics is the expression of my feminine side. It’s the expression of the woman who makes the cooking pot or makes the household objects or adorns herself in flowers or I don’t know. I’m also a very avid gardener, so they all cross over with each other. I remember in the questionnaire you had about in the print thing, are you religious?Is there an afterlife? And what does it look like? And I think I wrote, nope.
I have to preface that with, as the daughter of a geologist, I never had a religious upbringing. I was always, the earth was created in a hundred million years. That’s the way it is, and that’s what it is. And so I never really questioned that. But nature is my church and I’m constantly trying to recreate it in my ceramics. If there was a worship that I have, it’s worshiping nature in the creation of my ceramics, and that’s why I’m always repeating flowers or floral motifs. Flowers to me are just the most amazing gift that we have. Flowers and birds.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. We wouldn’t exist without them. I think we forget that a lot.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You work mainly in porcelain, and you’ve also used gold luster in the style of Japanese art called Kintsugi. Can you talk about what that is?
Carey Lowell:
Kintsugi is a Japanese technique that’s made to repair broken pottery. They use this sort of resin to join the pieces and then brush gold dust over the top of it. So when you have a broken piece, it becomes even more special because you’ve repaired it and adorned it even with the gold. I often will have a crack or a breakage or something, a mistake in my ceramics. And so instead of chucking it or tossing it, I will put some gold luster on it to accentuate it and just show the flaws. I think we all have them. We might as well embrace them instead of trying to hide them.
Debbie Millman:
You said this about pride and ceramics and I found it really fascinating and I want to share it with you again so that we can talk about it. You state, “Ceramics has removed any pride that I might have in my abilities. Ceramics teaches you to let go of pride because there are just so many variables that can go wrong. There are so many steps along the way in the making and the firing and the glazing that you can ruin a piece. So you never really know what you’re going to get until you’ve unloaded the kiln at the final firing. If you do actually come up with something you like or that exceeds your expectations, that is a moment of pride.” And Carey, I’m wondering, how do you manage all of the not knowing in the process of making something?
Carey Lowell:
It’s trial and error. It’s time and time again, having things that don’t work out and learning from your mistakes. It really just takes a lot of practice and a lot of experiments. What if I put this here? What if I try that and, oh, nope, that didn’t work, or that temperature was too hot, or this glaze runs or that clay body slumps. There are just so many variables that go into making something and that’s part of the joy of it. You just never know what’s going to be a happy accident.
I learned early to take notes so that I can try and recreate if something does go well. You’re never finished with ceramics. That’s one of the things I love about it is that there’s always another possibility. There’s always a different way to do it. There’s always another test tile. There’s always another glaze, there’s always another clay body. It’s endless.
Debbie Millman:
Can you talk a little bit about your color palette? It’s very neutral, very white. What made you decide to take that direction with your work?
Carey Lowell:
The simple answer is that I could get some really good white glaze that was working in my studio and I thought, “Well, this is working. Let me stick with that.” But I also like the purity of it. In my own home, I have a lot of white ceramics and I also like that porcelain is a clay body that I work with often because I like its translucence and it’s elasticity. And if I were to put a color on it, it feels like it would almost mask it in a way that I don’t want to do. I realize that now ceramics has taken a different tack in that everybody’s using a lot of color and globs and texture and…
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Things are very blobby now. I did notice that.
Carey Lowell:
They’re blobby and they’re also flaky. Everybody’s using that sodium silicate that looks like a riverbed, a dry riverbed. I’m actually trying to move into a little bit more color because I was getting bored with the white. And so I’m working with paper clay now, which is a clay body that has a lot of paper fiber in it. It’s great because it can go really big scale. That’s another thing I’m trying to do is scale up, but the white just always feels quiet to me. There’s something about it that just feels serene. And often because my pieces do have so much going on with the petals and the stuff and the pinching and the piercing, the white just calms it all down.
Debbie Millman:
How have you gotten your ceramics to look so thin and delicate? I’m thinking particularly of the eggshells.
Carey Lowell:
Those, I made a mold. I learned how to do plaster mold making of a big gourd, like a big squash. And then I slip cast it, but I slip cast it with a really, really thin layer and I don’t fill it up all the way and I pour it upside down and then the edges go the way they go.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they’re so unusual. It’s taking something that you’d either throw into a compost or throw away and making a piece of art out of an eggshell of what looks really, truly looks as delicate as an eggshell. It’s magnificent. But you also are a part of a group of artists who use discarded gun parts to make incredible hand glazed candle holders and other ceramic wears. Can you talk a little bit about how that line of work came to be?
Carey Lowell:
I was approached by a woman named Jessica Mindich, who had this group called Caliber Collection, where she had initially started trying to raise money to do gun buybacks in communities that had a lot of gun violence. And so she would go into the sheriff’s office and everybody would get $50 to bring in their gun. So that’s what a gun buyback is, and the gun would be destroyed. She dealt a lot with different detectives and they would give her gun parts. She asked for parts of the guns that had been destroyed as well as the casings that had been found at scenes of crime, crime scenes. Hello. She asked me and a few other artists if we would create something out of the gun parts. So I took the barrels, the gun cartridge, where there all the bullets go in and I cast them and made them into candlestick holders, but you wouldn’t know it was a gun part unless-
Debbie Millman:
No, yeah.
Carey Lowell:
Unless you knew it was a gun. But then we would sell them and a portion of the profit would go back into Caliber Collection for the gun buybacks.
Debbie Millman:
So ingenious. There’s a quote on your website that I love and you state, “There’s a distinct calling to lose yourself that is apparent in both acting and throwing ceramics. Each are transcendent in their own way, in the sense that something is always operating through you.” I’ve been talking to a lot of artists about this notion of this sense of a muse moving through you instead of by you. I talked to Rick Rubin about that recently, who writes quite a lot about it in his book. Can you talk about the difference of the creative spirit moving through you instead of created by you?
Carey Lowell:
Well, I think it goes back to what I was saying before is about, I’ll start with an intention, and then if I’m in the flow, and I do call it a flow because you’re not thinking about it, you’re hands are doing it and you could be listening to Design Matters, which I often do in my studio, but your brain could be somewhere completely else, but your hands are going through the process and making something.
I think when I can get in that zone, the things that I end up with at the end, I’m not saying they’re always great, but they usually lead me in a direction that I can then develop more. And I think it’s about paying attention to that divergence from your initial goal or initial intention that allows you to sort of create in a more free flow sort of way. I love the space, when you’re done, you go, “Wait, what? I just did that?”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And also, how much time has passed that you have no notion of having passed. It feels like five minutes and it’s three hours. Sometimes when I’m doing my research, I look up and I can’t even believe that several hours have passed since I started because I was just so intrigued by what I was doing. But I do find in the making of things, there’s a real distinct difference between something moving through you, which tends to feel much easier and the work feels more relaxed and something being created by you more cerebrally, which always tends to me to feel more tortured, at least in my case. And I’m wondering if you have that too.
Carey Lowell:
Well, it is more tortured. I find that I will create a piece and somebody will ask for it again, and that’s when I’m making it and I’m just reproducing. It’s a very distinct difference for me because I’m like, “Okay, I got to make this, I got to make that,” and I know the program, I know the steps, which is a reason I don’t really like to do a production pottery. I don’t want to make the same iteration over and over again. But I do relish the times that I get to just have a ball of clay in front of me and say, “Well, where’s this going to take me?”
In fact, I don’t throw anymore. I still have my wheel, but I just don’t tend to use it so much because it feels mechanical to me, and I don’t really want that element in the making. I’d rather do it with my hands and see the mark of my hands. It feels freer and it feels more authentic.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It reminds me of something that Joni Mitchell said on one of our live albums. I think it was Miles of Aisles where somebody yelled out for her to play something, one of her hits, and she was like, “Nobody ever asked Van Gogh to repaint Starry Night.”
Carey Lowell:
Love Joni.
Debbie Millman:
It’s typical Joni. It’s so perfect.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah, it’s great.
Debbie Millman:
Carey, the last thing I want to talk to you about today is longevity. I know you had a milestone birthday recently, a couple of years ago. I also had one last year. Yeah, same grim-
Carey Lowell:
Happy birthday.
Debbie Millman:
What have you learned about aging, because you have been really open about your age and your experience, what have you learned about aging both from your experience in modeling and in front of the camera and from your experiences now making art?
Carey Lowell:
Well, I am just really grateful that I have my art at my age, because I can do that at any age without judgment and only will gain from my experience and my longevity in it, if my body will keep up. My hands are a little bit arthritic. But in terms of acting and modeling, I don’t want to have to try to stay young. I don’t want to have to try to be beautiful every time I step out.r it’s too much pressure and it makes me anxious and I’m really happy to have been able to step away from it. Ceramics has allowed me to step away from it because my creative energies have been able to be focused elsewhere and not on my appearance. I just feel really fortunate that I have clay to engage me.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting in the way that you’ve, whether consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or just by accident, created this arc of your career with so many different chapters, doing so many different things that in many ways have all informed the subsequent chapters.
Carey Lowell:
Yeah, without any pre-planning. They just sort of fell from one into another. I guess that’s the way to do it is just take it as it comes and try to be open to the possibilities and say yes. Just trying to say yes to it all. I’ve just had a very fortunate run. That’s all I can say. I’ve been healthy and I have beautiful children, and I like where I am right now in my life. I wouldn’t trade any of it, but I’m really happy to be where I am.
Debbie Millman:
Carey Lowell, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you so very, very much for joining me today on Design Matters.
Carey Lowell:
Thank you, Debbie. It was my pleasure.
Debbie Millman:
You can see what Carey Lowell has been working on in her studio at careylowellceramics.com and the 1818collective.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.