In 'Learning to Drive,' Patricia Clarkson reteams with Ben Kingsley, minus romance and sex

In Learning to Drive, Patricia Clarkson plays Wendy Shields, a lifelong New Yorker, a mother, a wife, a celebrated critic. Her husband announces that he is leaving her, and a driving instructor - a quiet, composed Indian Sikh named Darwan, played by Ben Kingsley - enters her life.

It's the second time Clarkson and the British actor and Knight of the Realm have worked together, following Elegy, the 2008 adaptation of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. And it's another plum role for Clarkson, the Oscar-, Emmy-, Golden Globe-, and Tony-nominated actress.

Last week, Clarkson pulled into Philadelphia to talk up Learning to Drive ("I feel a little like Willy Loman - just selling my goods from town to town").

Q: This project has been in development for years, with you attached to star. Was it frustrating, having to wait so long?

A: I probably really needed to wait nine years to play this character - I just didn't know it at the time. So all the doors that were slamming, all the years we couldn't get this movie made were actually beneficial in the end. Ha-ha.

How so?

Just things in my personal life. Acting is memory, it's muscle. It lives in the body. And the blows that you take as you age, and the everyday things in our lives that do really make up character. . . . And so, in the process of getting this film made, I didn't realize it, but I was moving closer and closer to Wendy. And Wendy's rage. And despair. But also the acceptance and the love. . . . I was building an arsenal. I can laugh and cry simultaneously. I think I've done that in the last several years.

"Learning to Drive" is a story about friendship, a relationship where romance and sex don't come into play, or almost don't. Was that important?

True, pure, real friendship is glorious. It can have a profound effect on your life. . . . We all have friends where maybe, for a moment, things have gotten a little bit muddled - romantically, the wires get crossed. But at the end of the day, those friendships that you have that remain chaste, something completely different happens.

Did making "Elegy" with Ben Kingsley, your history together, make playing Wendy and Darwan easier for you both?

Sir Ben and I get on very well, of course. He's divine. He's witty, charming, lovely. We got to know each other quite well in Elegy, and that held us in good stead. But we each had our own little epiphany when we came together to shoot Darwan and Wendy: that the friendship that we had as Patty and Sir Ben would not be good for this relationship, this story of strangers from different cultures. We had to be very careful not to bring our friendship into this film. . . . So, it was a quiet shoot because we remained very separate when we weren't filming together. But I always knew that he was there for me, and I was there for him.

I've read that Kingsley refers to himself as "a portrait artist." Do you see yourself as that, someone who "paints" portraits of other people and puts them on screen?

Sir Ben's portraits are beautifully crafted and etched. I think my brushes are a little wider and sloppier. I'm Pollack, or I'm Lucien Freud.

In "Cairo Time," from 2008, you played another literary type, a magazine editor who roams the Egyptian capital and falls into a romantic relationship with an Egyptian man. That role, like Wendy in "Learning to Drive," is rare these days: a female lead who is not played by an ingenue, or even by an actress in her 30s.

What's nice about being able to play these parts is that these women are still romantic, sexual, viable. And why we even have to say that is shocking. But it is important. There are so many female characters out there that are one-dimensional, maybe two-dimensional if you're lucky. But to play a truly complicated, flawed, honest, at times maybe unsympathetic woman. . . . And it is nice to be desired. To be on screen at a certain age playing the object of affection. And I just got to do it in [the Broadway revival of] The Elephant Man, opposite Bradley Cooper and Alessandro Nivola. All my friends were, like, "I hate you."

And you're back as Ava Paige, the mysterious chancellor lording over all those trapped kids in the YA dystopian sci-fi world of "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials," opening next Friday.

I'm back as Ava Paige, baby! I'm back in my lab coat, I'm back in my bun. Get ready. I'm bringing sexy back. Actually, Ava Paige is kind of sexy, in a Nurse Ratched, nurse-y dominatrix way. . . . And we will be doing Maze 3. I think we start in February or March. It's nice to work with young 'uns, too.