Allow Jennifer Tilly to reminisce on her scrappy Oscar campaign for Bullets Over Broadway

In a new in-depth interview with Vulture, Jennifer Tilly says she didn’t set out to become the face of a horror franchise. “I was hoping I could parlay my Oscar nomination into something a little more elevated than a Chucky movie,” she admits. But before that, she also had to parlay her Bullets Over Broadway role into an Oscar nomination, because Miramax sure wasn’t doing it for her. “Dianne Wiest is obviously the lead in the movie. She had twice as many lines as me. She’s a romantic interest,” Tilly explains. “But because she’s a character actor, I had heard that the Weinstein Company thought she had a better chance of winning in the character-actor category—the supporting-actor category. And I was like, What?”

Tilly was assured that the Weinstein Company was going to promote her for an Oscar, but she later found out that she hadn’t been submitted for consideration for the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, or any of the Oscar lead-up competitions. So she took matters into her own hands: “I was very tenacious, and I just decided, I’m going to start my own campaign,” she says. “I don’t know how to do it anymore, but then you could buy a full page in Variety with pull quotes about how great your performance was. I remember it was like $400 for a black-and-white ad, which was a lot of money to me back then. So I took a picture I had of Woody Allen and I, laughing hysterically, I slapped the Weinstein logo in the corner, then I put all my quotes in and bought my ad.” Tilly also had a good relationship with Jay Leno (“because I was really good on talk shows”) and had him introduce her as a guest with “Oscar buzz for her performance” when she was invited on the show. “And I was really smugly going, She does now,” she says. 

The resulting nomination stunned even Tilly’s own publicist—and apparently pissed off Miramax, who were concerned she was going to split the vote in the Supporting Actress category. (Wiest would go on to win the trophy.) “I got flowers from everybody. I didn’t get any flowers from Harvey Weinstein or Miramax,” Tilly shares. “Now that I look back on it, I never, ever had a single audition for a Miramax film. For Bullets Over Broadway, I got cast by Woody Allen and they sold it to Miramax after it was completed. Now I think of it, I guess it was a blessing in disguise.”

In recent years, we’ve certainly learned the damage Harvey Weinstein could do to someone’s career behind the scenes. But for Tilly, who has starred in a number of cult classic films, “It was always a struggle. One role never led to another role,” she says. Chucky spin-offs and series gave her career “longevity,” and she has lots of films she’s proud of making; she also expresses excitement about the new challenge of being a cast member on The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills. “I have no complaints,” Tilly says of her career. Nevertheless, “It’s a weird kind of thing. I read about somebody, like a documentary filmmaker, and he was at the Oscars, where he won an Oscar. And he went outside to have a smoke, then he couldn’t get back in. He was going around and around the building, and they wouldn’t let him in. That’s kind of what I feel like,” she says. “Like I got nominated for an Oscar, and I stepped outside to have a smoke, and now I’m wandering around the building, looking for how I get back in.”