'Widow Clicquot' Star Haley Bennett's Champagne Dreams
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“If I'd waited for opportunities to come to me, they wouldn't have,” Haley Bennett says. The actress is sitting in the back of a Lower Manhattan antique and art gallery, avoiding the horrendous heatwave outside and discussing the new film Widow Clicquot, which she both stars in and produced. “Sometimes you have to create opportunities for yourself and have blind faith that they’re going to work.”
Hearing Bennett—who’s previously starred in films like Cyrano, The Devil All the Time, and The Girl on the Train, and produced projects including Swallow—discuss blazing a trail for herself, it’s easy to see what drew her to Clicquot, a period biopic of champagne pioneer Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot based on the 2008 book of the same name by Tilar J. Mazzeo.
The film, directed by Thomas Napper, tells the story of how Barbe-Nicole marries into one of France’s famed winemaking dynasties and, after the untimely death of her husband François (a marvelous Tom Sturridge) defies expectations and political turmoil—and sells off practically everything she owns—to build Veuve Clicquot the brand and revolutionize champagne making while she’s at it. “I think about her resiliency, determination, audacity, and strength—that all really inspired me,” Bennett says. “All her setbacks didn't stop her from achieving her goals. She was going to accomplish them at whatever cost.”
For Clicquot, art found a way of imitating life. The project had knocked around for years before Bennett became attached, with different writers, directors, and actors involved to varying degrees. After Bennett read a draft of one version of the script, she approached producer Christina Weiss Lurie and proposed they work together to bring the story to the screen. Things didn’t go entirely as planned.
“There was a point where the film collapsed,” Bennett says. “We had to cut our budget in half. The landscape has completely changed, and it's very difficult to make a period film set over 20 years on location in France with a female lead character played by a virtually unknown actress. We all scrambled and asked, how do we make this film?”
Plans were made with screenwriter Erin Dignam, to rewrite the script so that the action would never leave the vineyard. Cases of champagne might be smuggled across Europe only to spoil in the heat, Napoleon’s soldiers can put Clicquot in their crosshairs, and nervous backers can fret over finances from an office in Paris, but what viewers would see is how Barbe-Nicole and her staff handled it from their patch of land in Reims.
“All of these setbacks and challenges, these insurmountable problems with production that Clicquot faced, made for a parallel story with the actual making of the film,” Bennett says. “But you only know that in hindsight: wow, I was actually going through that at the time and had so much to draw upon.”
The similarities Bennett felt with her character didn’t all have to do with struggle, though. ‘Even though this movie takes place 200 years ago, it's still an incredibly timely story about resiliency,” she says, “and it also has to do with love for what one does. That's something that I could relate to; if you shine a light onto something, if you nurture something, it will grow. I very much believed that in my life. I'm a gardener as well.” Do you sing to your plants, I ask, referencing Clicquot’s habit of doing just that, among other unorthodox things, to keep her vines happy. “I do sing to them,” Benne, who's wearing Peracas earrings with grapes on them, a nod to the film, says. “They like rock ‘n’ roll.”
Bennett isn’t the only one who has found something extraordinary in Clicquot’s story. After the film premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Deadline called it “a fast-paced and hot biopic” and praised Bennett’s performance as “superb.”
While some critics have grumbled about what seems to be a trend of films exploring the histories of well-known brands, Bennett seems less concerned with celebrating the label on champagne bottles than the meaning of the history behind it. “This was an altogether different story that I was interested in telling,” she says, “which is how failure, loss, and grief, can transform by creating something new—you can start over. Think of a rose bush, you can chop it down and it grows back more fruitful than before.”
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