There’s a moment from the new Elton John biopic, Rocketman, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s when Elton (Taron Egerton) comes out to his mother, Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), via a phone-booth call just minutes before performing at Royal Albert Hall. Sheila’s response is less than enthusiastic: She tells her son—now a global pop icon—that she’s always known his sexuality, and he’s “choosing” a life of loneliness.
As a gay man myself, it’s a hard scene to watch. I was fortunate enough to have a positive coming-out experience, but I know all too well this isn’t the case for everyone. Realizing that even Elton John, someone who paved the way for many LGBTQ+ people, had a painful coming-out journey is a reminder that no one is safe from homophobia. Even now. My friends who have had similar conversations with their families are proof of that.
The weight of this moment wasn’t lost on Bryce Dallas Howard, who talked to several people about their coming-out stories to prepare. And when the scene finally wrapped, she was relieved. “It’s not fun, something like that,” she tells Glamour. “So we did it with just a small number of takes and got that pretty quickly.”
It’s a quick moment, sure, but a powerful one. Not only does it inform so much of what Elton does in the movie; it crystallizes Sheila’s character: This is a woman whose profound unhappiness with her own life prevented her from being the mom she needed to be. That’s Rocketman‘s interpretation, at least. I’m sure the real-life Sheila, who passed away in December 2017, had her own viewpoint on things.
Bryce Dallas Howard as Elton John’s mother, Sheila, in Rocketman
David Appleby / © Paramount / Courtesy Everett Collection“I feel like sometimes in life—and certainly in movies—we look at people in a very binary way; they’re either good or they’re bad,” Howard says. “And the truth is everyone is normally a little bit of both. And in the case of Sheila, she’s someone who had a very big personality, was extremely charismatic, witty, funny—but then also was a very unhappy person. As a result, she was able to inflict a lot of damage.”
How Sheila reacts to Elton’s sexuality is, hypothetically, enough for viewers to write her off as “bad,” but Howard’s performance ensures this doesn’t happen. “It was important to not just go pure villain and yet also paint a picture of ‘Yeah, this was not a happy childhood.'”
When we meet Sheila, she’s lively and energetic but harboring a lot of frustration. She’s unsatisfied with her marriage to Elton’s father, Stanley, who ultimately leaves her to start another family. Sheila eventually remarries too, but the movie paints her as never fully recovering from Stanley’s indiscretions. That’s why I think she responds to Elton’s coming-out in the way she does: If she doesn’t have a positive outlook on her own relationships, it’d be hard to have one on Elton’s.
This dynamic illuminated something important to Howard about her actual life as a mom. (She has two children with her husband, actor Seth Gabel.) “It’s a healthy reminder, as a parent, to see what the impact can be on a child when the parent is perpetually unhappy and they’re not managing their own mental well-being,” she says. “How that can snowball into a dynamic that is very difficult to extricate yourself from. Kind words—they go far within a family.”
Tom Bennett plays Sheila’s second husband in Rocketman, while Gemma Jones plays her mother.
David Appleby / © Paramount / Courtesy Everett CollectionKind words and an open mind. Two things Sheila didn’t have with Elton—in this fictionalized version of his life, at least—but Howard has with her kids. “My children get revealed to me over time,” she says. “Just because I’ve happened to know them since they were born doesn’t mean I know everything about them. Make space for that, as well, to be surprised—to be taken on an adventure by your child. To go places and in directions and explore things you never thought you would. But it’s because this person is in your life, and you’re connected to them forever.”
