Rita Wilson interview: ‘I’ve exhausted the canon of warm, nurturing wives. Give me crazy!’

There’s only one disappointment about Rita Wilson’s new album: she doesn’t rap. In March 2020, a week after her husband Tom Hanks sent shockwaves around the world by announcing the couple had come down with Covid, Wilson posted a video of herself in quarantine flawlessly rapping Naughty by Nature’s 1992 anthem “Hip Hop Hooray”. The clip has since racked up more than two million views on Instagram, earning praise from everyone from Kim Kardashian (“The best video EVER!!!!!!”) to Barack Obama (“Drop the mic, Rita!”). When news of this unlikely viral hit reached Naughty By Nature, the Grammy-winning trio released a remixed version of the single featuring Wilson on the mic to raise money for the MusiCares Covid-19 Relief Fund. Surely, then, the stage was set for Wilson to offer us her takes on Tupac and NWA? She howls with laughter. “I think that’s my next project!” she jokes. “It’s funny, Naughty by Nature said, ‘Any time you want to come up and rap that song live with us, we’ll do it!’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna find them one day on tour and just show up.’”

Rather than spitting bars, Wilson’s new album Now & Forever: Duets captures the 66-year-old actor and musician singing a collection of Seventies soft rock favourites. She’s joined by some of the greatest voices in music. Smokey Robinson assists in delivering an impassioned version of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “Where is the Love”, while Willie Nelson provides a spine-tingling counterpart on Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away”. Elsewhere there are appearances from the likes of Keith Urban, Leslie Odom Jr and Elvis Costello, with the latter lending a soulful swagger to Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire”. Today, Wilson is in London looking positively angelic in a flowing white top with a small gold crucifix around her neck. She’s in town to perform on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland, where she’ll be singing her duet with Jackson Browne, a beguiling version of The Everly Brothers’ classic “Let It Be Me”. “Jackson is the songwriter’s songwriter,” she says. “Singing with him is heaven.”

Wilson’s first album, 2012’s AM/FM, was also a collection of covers drawn from the Seventies. She’s since released three albums featuring her own songwriting, but she found herself drawn back to a decade that means so much to her. “These songs are 50 years old, so why are we still listening to them?” she asks rhetorically, before outlining her argument that the Seventies singer-songwriter scene produced material to rival the Great American Songbook, the canon of jazz standards and show tunes from the early 20th century that have been covered and reinterpreted for decades. “There’s something special about the point of view in those songs because a lot of them were written for characters in Broadway musicals,” she says. “In the late Sixties and early Seventies, with the emergence of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Jackson, you started to feel again that these were songs which tell a story from a first-person point of view.”

She points out that music from the era continues to resonate with fans who often weren’t even born when it was released, illustrating her argument with a suitably starry anecdote. “A couple of months ago I was at an Eagles show,” she explains. “There were these two young guys sitting behind me. We were singing and laughing. I asked them: ‘How do you know all the words?’ One guy was Irish, and he said, ‘Well, if you’d listened to as many Eagles albums as my parents played, you’d know all the words too.’ The other guy was Scottish and said, ‘Same with me.’ Then I asked them their names. It was Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi. We’d been harmonising and I was there thinking, ‘They’re really good at this!’”

For her part, Wilson witnessed the musical explosion of the Seventies from the front row. Born in Hollywood in 1956, she spent her teen years running around the Sunset Strip. “I had my group of girlfriends, who are still in my life, and we would all go out on a Friday night,” she remembers. “I had these big platform snake boots that I would wear with my bell bottoms and maybe a little crop top. The fashion today is not all that different from what was happening in the Seventies. We’d go out to the Whisky [A-Go-Go], the Roxy and a place called Gazzarri’s on the Strip, where the young bands would come and play. It was really fun!”

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Displaying impeccable rock’n’roll credentials, Wilson recalls her first concert – Led Zeppelin at The Forum. “It was so amazing,” she says. “They were fantastic. They played an epic, long ‘Stairway to Heaven’ that went on forever. I was wearing these really big platform shoes at the time called Corkys, with cork platforms. I was being really cool and grooving with my two girlfriends. We were running to get to The Forum in time and I completely fell flat on my face. I did meet Robert Plant once, backstage at a Patty Griffin concert, and I was just like, ‘Oh God, you’re him! I can’t believe it.’ I couldn’t tell him that I almost died for him.”

In between gig-hopping, Wilson was trying to make it as an actor. In 1972, at the age of 16, she won a small role on sitcom The Brady Bunch. She made her film debut five years later in sci-fi horror The Day It Came to Earth before landing a part opposite stoner comedy icons Cheech and Chong in 1980’s Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. “They were huge stars,” she recalls. “You have to remember, at that time we could recite Cheech and Chong routines from listening to them on vinyl so much. They were making fun of our culture and making fun of being high. It was just so funny.”

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The next year Wilson was cast on Bosom Buddies, a largely forgotten sitcom that launched the career of its lead, Tom Hanks. He was married at the time, but the pair met again in 1985 filming Peace Corps comedy Volunteers. They married in 1988. Over the following decades, Wilson built a career with memorable roles in comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle, Now and Then and Runaway Bride. As the years went on, however, she feared she was becoming typecast. “I’ve really exhausted the canon of warm, kind, nurturing mothers and wives,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Give me crazy and I’ll do that!’”

Those keen to see Wilson cast against type should look out for director Joel Gretsch’s forthcoming Start Without Me, in which she teases she plays “somebody so different” to the roles she usually finds herself in. She’s also in Wes Anderson’s next film Asteroid City, joining an ensemble that includes newcomers Margot Robbie and Jarvis Cocker as well as Anderson regulars such as Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson. “Really what he’s created is a band, it’s just a bigger band than normal,” says Wilson, who fondly reminisces about life inside the impeccably curated Covid bubble the director created in Spain. “It was the best bubble anywhere,” she says. “On weekends we’d have music nights. People from the set and the cast would play guitar, and we’d sing. Everybody would get up and do something. It’s the only way you want to work.”

Following her appearance on Later…, Wilson will head to New York for a two-week residency at The Hotel Carlyle. Since releasing her first album a decade ago she’s packed in a lifetime of memorable shows, performing everywhere from hometown venue The Troubadour to the Sydney Opera House. Strangely, though, she’s yet to play a field in Somerset. Armed with her freewheeling songbook of Seventies classics, not to mention the ever-present chance of Naughty by Nature turning up, she seems tailor-made. The “Get Rita Wilson to Glastonbury” campaign starts here. “I’ve got my wellies packed,” she grins. “I’m ready to go!”

‘Now & Forever: Duets’ is out now