Exclusive: Annette Bening Swims Toward the Role of a Lifetime in ‘Nyad’

Vasarhelyi helmed Nyad alongside her husband and creative partner, Jimmy Chin, in what marks their narrative directorial debut. Oscar winners for 2018’s Free Solo, the documentarians had been looking to try their hand at fiction filmmaking and were presented with a story rather neatly matching their established cinematic interests. “We love telling these stories where somebody’s pushing the edge of the human experience,” says Chin, a professional mountain athlete. “We hope when audiences leave the theater, they feel like they’ve gotten an expanded perspective of the human experience.” Vasarhelyi says that Nyad’s story “defies the frontiers of what you can imagine”—a solid one-line descriptor for this duo’s filmography as a whole.

Nyad has been a noted athlete since the 1970s, when her swims around Manhattan, New York, and in the Caribbean brought her national attention. At the age of 28, she attempted to swim from Havana to Key West, in the aftermath of the Kennedy-era travel restrictions being lifted, but, in part due to inclement weather, could not complete the task. She went on to write books and launch motivational speaking tours, but her athletic career faded as she got into her 30s and 40s. Then in 2010, at age 60, she firmly decided to finish what she’d started decades ago—and though she didn’t make it to Florida over several more attempts, eventually she did. “This film asks: What do we give ourselves permission to do in our lives?” Bening says. “Diana said, ‘I’m actually going to ignore all of these norms about what women in their 60s do.’”

Yet Nyad is no glossy tale of heroism and triumph. The film embraces its eponymous character’s complexity, presenting her as determined if abrasive, as caustic as she is relentless, and of a bracing intelligence matched only by her ego. That’s evident both in Julia Cox’s screenplay, adapted from Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, and Bening’s bold portrayal. And it comes alive through the beating heart of the film—the tricky, rich, hard-earned bond between Diana and her best friend and eventual coach, Bonnie Stoll.