Rita Wilson: ‘I’m an extremely private person, and it’s served me well, but it doesn’t fit any more’

Time and place: ‘I wouldn’t have been able to write this album even 10 years ago,’ says Rita Wilson - (Press)

A few years ago, the actor and musician Rita Wilson said that she’d grown tired of playing “warm, kind, nurturing mothers and wives”. Movies tended to cast her as emotional cheerleaders, dealers of hard truths, or supportive BFFs – to her future real-life husband Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, or to Michelle Pfeiffer in The Story of Us, or to Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated. I get not wanting to be typecast, but as I find for myself while sat having coffee with her in the bright, airy restaurant of a Mayfair hotel, Wilson is just really good at this kind of thing. For today, it seems, I am Meryl Streep.

“Are you a musician?” she asks me suddenly. Nothing serious, I tell her. Just a bit of piano. She leans forward animatedly: “You shouldn’t say that, OK? ‘Nothing serious.’ Those are the things we say to ourselves that actually block us from doing the thing we want!”