Brooke Shields has a brand new workplace. It’s empty, and she or he hasn’t discovered how she desires to furnish it, and even how usually she’ll be there, nevertheless it’s an indication of her new and surprising standing, as president of Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing theater actors and stage managers in the US.

Shields’s candidacy was a shock, even to herself. However when Kate Shindle, who had led the union for nine years, introduced in April that she was stepping down, Shields’s music director urged she contemplate the opening, and shortly sufficient, she had tossed her hat within the ring, and in Might she won the vote by members, defeating two more-seasoned labor activists. She’s already led her first assembly of the union’s council, and got here away realizing she has loads to study, beginning with parliamentary process.

Shields, after all, is a kind of individuals who has been well-known for thus lengthy, and in so some ways, that even she will’t bear in mind a unique time. She was a childhood mannequin, a preteen film star, a intercourse object and an icon of magnificence, all earlier than she went off to school (Princeton, thanks very a lot). Within the years since, she has acted onscreen and onstage, has written books, has spoken broadly, significantly about depression, and has turn into a symbol and a subject for an evolving dialogue about how ladies and women have been sexualized by the leisure and vogue industries.

She has had 5 roles on Broadway, every time changing a principal in an already-running present (“Grease,” “Chicago,” “Cabaret,” “Great City” and “The Addams Household”). She has additionally carried out often at regional theaters (“The Exorcist” on the Geffen in Los Angeles, for instance) and Off Broadway (within the star autos “Love Letters,” “The Vagina Monologues,” and “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” amongst others).

Now, at 59, she is considering loads about center age. She is recovering from a foot surgical procedure that attracted attention when she wore Crocs (yellow, matching her costume) to the Tony Awards. She has simply started a new beauty business, Commence, with hair-care merchandise developed for ladies over 40; she is writing one other guide, additionally aging-focused; and she or he is looking for new methods to harness the celeb she will by no means shed. That’s the place Fairness is available in — she says actors and stage managers had been terribly supportive of her when she wanted to leap rapidly into an unfamiliar present. Now she desires to offer again.

Over lunch at B’artusi, an Italian restaurant within the West Village, she talked about her time in theater, and her crash course as a labor chief. These are edited excerpts from the dialog.

How’s the foot?

It’s each toes. It’s going to be OK. That is my sixth surgical procedure. I actually blew my toes out on Broadway, from dancing in reveals — being thrown in, with no coaching and raked phases and jamming my toes into the footwear and abusing them. I’m positive it’s hereditary too — it’s most likely yet another factor I can blame my mom for.

You simply began an organization, you’re appearing, and the Fairness presidency doesn’t pay. Why add this place to the combination?

There’s one thing that I grapple with and have struggled with my total life: being a public persona. You will have this factor you need to reside with, and it’s fixed. So how do I flip it into one thing I don’t resent? How do I exploit Brooke Shields — that factor that’s separate from me, that’s a job, and is a commodity of some kind — to make a distinction for a group that’s given nothing however love and acceptance to me when it was not cool to forged any person who had zero Broadway coaching? My expertise with Broadway, and regional theater, and Off Broadway, is that this welcoming group. These are the people who had my again.

Union activism is new for you.

That is going to be an enormous studying curve for me. My first time chairing a gathering was one thing out of Monty Python. I hadn’t realized the vernacular. Robert’s Rules? I’ll get to know them! But when that’s my weakest place, then I’m OK, ’trigger I can study it, or somebody who can do it higher can do it and I can sit proper by them.

You don’t like battle?

That’s going to be laborious for me. On this stage of my life, I’m letting go of the tug of warfare rope. I don’t prefer to battle; I like to debate.

However you’ve taken a job the place you’re going to should ask producers for issues they don’t wish to give. It’s adversarial.

I’m prepared. I’ve needed to do it in my firm — letting folks go, saying no. That’s a ability to observe and study.

The union simply introduced a strike in opposition to developmental work, saying negotiations weren’t making progress. What’s the difficulty?

Individuals aren’t being compensated pretty.

Additionally, Disney’s theme park performers simply voted to unionize with Fairness.

We have now to determine what they need of their contracts, after which we now have to place ahead individuals who might be good in that negotiation.

What’s your sense of how theater is doing?

It’s not totally recovered, clearly, from the pandemic. But it surely’s actually nice to see what number of new reveals there have been. There’s one thing for everyone. You possibly can have a “Merrily” and a “Stereophonic” and an “Illinoise” and “Applicable” and “Mom Play.” It’s refreshing that it’s not one be aware.

One thing I usually hear from readers is that they marvel why there can’t be extra streaming of staged reveals.

That’s a difficult one. The a part of theater that’s theater is being in individual. There’s a unique efficiency each night time.

What’s the primary present you bear in mind seeing?

My mother took me to “The Fantasticks” after which Mummenschanz. These had been the massive ones. After which it was “Jesus Christ Famous person.” I used to be 9 after I noticed “Grease” on Broadway and through the preshow there was a hula hoop contest and the winner of the hula hoop contest would get to satisfy the forged. By the grace of one thing, I ended up successful it. And my mother, from that day on, each time I had a second of doubt, she would say, “Keep in mind the hula hoop.”

And when was the primary time you carried out onstage?

I used to be in a single scene in “After the Fall” [a 1974 teleplay]. I stroll on, I am going sit on Christopher Plummer’s lap, after which I stroll off. I used to be like 8.

You had been all the time doing movie and business work. Did you do theater at school?

I did each Triangle Present [The Princeton Triangle Club is a musical comedy troupe] in school. I attempted out for the dance firm, and I didn’t get in my freshman 12 months. That summer time I took 4 or 5 dance lessons a day. I went again and bought into the dance firm.

Are you going to proceed to behave whereas main the union?

So long as I’m needed. I’ve bought a few issues proper now that I’m engaged on. Netflix did rather well with the last movie that I did. I’ve a present in growth. What could be supreme is to be on a present right here in New York as a result of then I might do all of it. And by no means sleep.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I hope I’m in a position to carry via most of the little modifications that may make a much bigger distinction, and that I go away the affiliation feeling kinder and extra inclusive and never offended or fractured.