Susan Sarandon: 'That's the curse of the competent woman, nobody opens a door for you' "They don't set up a long shot or a medium shot," she says. "They don't say, "these are your close-ups," so you are not even aware of them. There's not a self-consciousness or a loneliness. Both my boys came to visit me and immediately hit it off with both of them. By her boys she means her sons Jack Henry, 22, and Miles, 19. She told me once that her children came out of her womb exactly how they are. Jack was very loud and came out quickly - "he is a people person, whereas Miles is more like me. My daughter [Eva, 27] could have been an alien she was such a strong presence. She told me then that in her house there were no followers, only leaders. Jack Henry and Miles still have a space in the family home, but they are not like Jeff in the film, who lives in the basement smoking weed in his basketball shorts. Would her own boys do such a thing? I don't know about that. But they do their own laundry," she says with a mixture of relief and pride. Miles attends Brown University but comes home to New York at the weekends. At the moment he's in New Orleans with his father, Tim Robbins. "Tim had a house in New Orleans even before we split," says Sarandon. She can now say the name Tim Robbins without any awkwardness or weirdness. It is two and a half years since they broke up, after 21 years together. They met on the set of the movie Bull Durham. Sarandon was 40 when she got the part of a sexy, intellectual baseball groupie - a part that, arguably, only she could play. Because she's such a strident individual, she never seemed part of a couple, and while she won acclaim for Thelma and Louise and won an Oscar playing a nun opposite Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, it seemed a given that hers and Robbins's was an equal and loving relationship. Those seemingly inured to celebrity break-ups seemed shocked at this one. People would approach her in the street, inconsolable. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have split up. Has the world come to an end?" one blog post read. Sarandon and Robbins deny all the various theories that were tossed around at the time. Particularly the one that claimed that she, being 11 years older than him, wanted a quieter life. If anything, the opposite is true. She recently finished filming the sci-fi epic Cloud Atlas, in which she cross-dresses to play "a man in different time periods." Besides Jeff, she'll soon be seen in films with Frank Langella and Liv Tyler (Robot and Frank), Robert Redford and Julie Christie (The Company You Keep) and Richard Gere and Tim Roth (Arbitrage), as well as on television in 30 Rock and The Big C. "It's important to be interested," she says of her life after the split. I thought I was going to take a few months off and then things kept coming up. Somebody said, "does it get easier?" I don't think it gets easier, but it gets better. It's a little scary, but I feel like I'm living an authentic life right now. I feel happy. I feel I have more options because the kids are older and my situation being what it is. A couple of years ago she opened a ping pong club in New York called Spin. The game appeals to her because girls can beat boys and old ladies can beat fit young men. At the time of the split with Robbins, she told me that she was "excited and terrified in equal parts." How is she now? I think I'm about there, maybe slightly less terrified, but I think so much is new and the kids are going through new stages, they are kind of educating me. It's definitely different. Everything scares me. When I take a part I take a part because it scares me. I'm used to being scared. I find that a good sign. Life is massive, you need to be awake. She looks right at me, almost through me, to make her point. I have read stories, I tell her, that say she is dating her 34-year-old ping pong business partner Jonathan Bricklin, and others that say that's not true. What to believe? "Yeah," she says, in a kind of pleased-with-herself growl. So which is it? I'd say we are collaborators in a lot of different areas. I laugh. We have a lot of projects in different areas. Does she like him? He's a great guy, but I hate that expression dating. I agree with her it's an awkward euphemism, which she imagines I won't find a way around. There's nothing else for it. Is she sleeping with him? She smiles, all coy. Don't you like the word collaborating? The thing is, no matter how brilliant an actor Sarandon is, she's a terrible fibber. I'm not a good liar, so say whatever you'll say. Collaborating in many areas is a good phrase, I admit. "Unless," she says, "it's the war and you are French." Sarandon would definitely have been in the Resistance. She loves a cause and fights with all her heart - a committed liberal in every possible way. Last year she joined the Occupy Wall Street protests and in the past she's campaigned against the death penalty, the war in Iraq, excessive mining... the list goes on. Her children didn't so much rebel against her but with her. She's very proud of the fact she's still getting tattoos at an age when other mothers would be disciplining their children for the very same thing. How old was she when she left home? I left home at 17 and never came back. My place completely disappeared. She wed her college sweetheart, Chris Sarandon, when she was just 20; they were divorced 12 years later. "He already had a job, so I went where he went," she says. Crazy. What was I thinking? Why did she get married? To say thank you. He was the first man I slept with and he was so kind and so patient and at that time to stay in school and live together was impossible at Catholic universities. Things have changed, but now it seems like there's an influx of people who want to get married, including my daughter," she says, slightly incredulous. Eva married last year. Sarandon never married again. Her daughter Eva's father was film director Franco Amurri. Their relationship was never intended to last. She got pregnant soon after they met, at 39, because she came off the pill, having been told that she had endometriosis and couldn't get pregnant. But once she was, the director John Cassavetes told her that being a mother would diminish her sex appeal, make her less "sensual." "I think I laughed," she says. Three years later she met Robbins, the father of Jack Henry and Miles. Sarandon has always enjoyed passionate, consuming relationships. "Even ones that nearly killed me," she says. Is one marriage enough for her? Oh yeah. I really can't imagine it. Even when I got married, we never said it was going to be forever. It was a kind of practical decision. I don't think I ever thought of it as something that would be a huge deal. But every year we renewed. We decided not with an actual ceremony, but just said "should we go through the next year?." Actually, I think it's a good relationship strategy. We should revisit this before we have children to see if everybody is still on the same page and you have established that you have an option of it being nobody's failure. Did she renew frequently with Tim? It wasn't about renewing anything. I felt married, I felt committed. There's a slight pause here, a little nag at her heart. If you have children, they are never out of your life. She takes a sip from a brownish-purple-looking juice. It's a cold fruit tea "to keep up my strength instead of caffeine. I crash after coffee. She has a ring on her thumb which says in French "One must live, not just exist." She bought this for herself, she says, and took delivery of it on the day she attended the memorial of the French film director Louis Malle, another former boyfriend. That relationship, which began in the late Seventies after Malle directed her in Pretty Baby, was turbulent. She felt she was the one who had to permanently surrender to him because she was the actor and he was the director - she once compared it to "a hostage situation." Today she says, "I always believe that lovers and certain people come into your life, as well as certain jobs, for a reason. Even if it may not be clear at the time. There isn't even a hint of the victim about her, yet she's always managed to appear vulnerable. The aforementioned tattoo is around her wrist - it looks like a strand of barbed wire but it actually says "a new dawn a new day," a reminder not to dwell on the past. Around her neck is a piece of glass that she found in a street in New York that is the shape of a heart. In her ear is a gold safety pin and the other ear has a diamond hoop. This is my daughter's baby pin. Someone gave it to me. One ear seems to say pirate, the other ear says punk. "The virgin and the gipsy," she says as she curls her feet under herself. I can't imagine that she was ever a virgin, I say. "But I am over and over again every day," she replies. I'm wondering if this is because she wants to constantly renew everything or because of her Catholic upbringing. "One doesn't recover from that childhood," she says. In her case she's never stopped rebelling against it. Last October she caused a furore at the Hamptons Film Festival by calling Pope Benedict a "Nazi." And at one point in Jeff, Who Lives at Home, she kisses another woman. Sarandon describes it as "a starter kiss." Indeed, she is an old hand at same-sex love scenes. "Someone asked me the other day if that [kissing a woman] was upsetting, and I said I guess you never saw The Hunger," she says of the 1983 vampire film in which she shares intimate moments with Catherine Deneuve. The Hunger love scene took four days and there was much more body contact than that. In actual fact, the scene in the new film feels both authentic and romantic, something affirmed by Sarandon. Did you know it's a big trend for women who are divorced to get together with other women and start a new life? I don't know how much sex has to do with it. The question is about the courage it takes to be intimate with another person. It's not about your age, colour or gender, it is "do you ever want to be vulnerable and expose yourself to that vulnerability?." It takes courage to put your hand out to the other person and say "let's see what happens." It's huge. I can't help but wonder whether she is talking about herself and the courage it took her to, ahem, collaborate. She says she doesn't have any new tattoos but her daughter just got a very big one of a hummingbird. They are a tight-knit bunch, the family that gets tattoos together. I went with Jack to get his. And when I got the one on my back, Eva got one that said "Conscious." Miles is thinking of getting a smiley face but he's not quite sure. Most children get tattoos to rebel against their parents. How does her approval of the art form go down? "I know, it's horrible," she says. Jack was a little upset that I got one before he did. Maybe it's bad for kids when they don't have anything to rebel against. There were things that I was strict about, but not tattoos. And what were they? I was strict about how much time they would spend watching TV when they were growing up. Violence in films. Sex not so much. I was worried about the double standard. I wanted my boys to understand that b--- j--- do ruin a girl's reputation and that they were responsible as much as she was. I was strict about them keeping in touch when they go away and about them being kind to each other. It's very different from the character she plays, who is fed up with both her children. "I just don't think she gets her son," she says. Often the woman is the Wendy to everyone else's Peter Pan. You get tired with that. At one point I rebelled and stopped wearing a watch. I know nowadays everyone has a phone, but then it meant: "I'm not going to keep telling you you have a game, you have to start to figure out what time to be there." Why does it have to be me that keeps nagging? Partly because she has always taken responsibility for other people. She is the oldest of nine; it was expected of her. There's a sense that she's done with all that and feels freer. "I remember reading a book that said the mum is the entrée and dad is dessert," she says. He's not around as much and everyone wants dessert. I was the one that dealt with the school forms, the schedules, the packed lunches, the shopping. And that's the curse of the competent woman. No one opens the door for them. She flicks back her hair, looking decidedly un-cursed. "Jeff, Who Lives at Home" is released on May 11