Ms. Russell can carry her own
Those close to Keri Russell joke that she needs a crash course in actress attitude.
Russell finds cleaning her house “therapeutic,” does her own wash and buys her own clothes. Her bag isn’t a Balenciaga but an off-white cotton satchel emblazoned with “Certified Organic Mom.”
And because she doesn’t have a nanny, when she needs to leave 5-month-old son River at home to fulfill her press duties, her mother flies in from Texas to baby-sit – like she did as Russell promoted her new film, “August Rush,” which opened Wednesday.
“I want to raise my kid. I was totally being a martyr at first, thinking I could totally do it on my own. And I did, for a while,” says Russell, 31, who finally hired a sitter a few weeks ago so she and her husband could go out for a night.
As far as a full-time caretaker goes, she says, “for a control freak like me, it ain’t going to happen.”
Russell and her carpenter husband live in Brooklyn, where they’re renovating a brownstone themselves.
Like most appliance-deprived New Yorkers, she dreams of having her own laundry room.
In the urban fable “August Rush,” Russell is cellist Lyla, a music whiz who has one romantic night with a fellow musician (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), becomes pregnant and thinks her baby dies in a car crash.
But in fact, her ambitious father has secretly given the infant up for adoption. Years later, her musical prodigy son (Freddie Highmore) is back in Manhattan, and their worlds collide.
It’s Russell’s second consecutive time playing a mother, after the critical darling “Waitress.”
Now that Russell is a mother herself, watching “Rush,” she says, “is so much more emotional.
“No one tells you that when you have a baby, you literally take a crazy pill and anything to do with kids – it’s not even remotely your kid – and you burst into tears.
“I can’t imagine having a kid and knowing that they’re out there. I’m sort of glad I wasn’t a mom when I was shooting it.”
But she’s glad she understands being a child performer, like her “Rush” character.
Russell started out on the “Mickey Mouse Club” with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears and could understand Lyla’s need to escape from her regimented life.
She did her own breaking out after finishing her WB series “Felicity” in 2002.
“I made a little bit of money on ‘Felicity,’ and I was really the only one of my friends on the show who didn’t buy a house, who didn’t have a really fancy car,” she says. “So I could move to New York and live in an apartment and not have to work for a year.
“I was a kid that year. I went dancing. I didn’t get to do any of that when I had to be at work at 5 a.m.”
Her routine these days is relaxed, hitting coffee shops in the morning, reading a book with River along in a sling.
“As much as I don’t regret my life,” she says, “I value so much being at home for dinner with my family.”
The birthday bunch
Impressionist Rich Little is 69. Singer Tina Turner is 68. Bassist John McVie (Fleetwood Mac) is 62. Actress Jamie Rose (“Falcon Crest,” “St. Elsewhere”) is 48. Country singer Joe Nichols is 31. Singer Lil Fizz (B2K) is 22.