"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
LAURA LINNEY
by Peter Sobczynski

November 5, 2004

Most Hollywood actors are lucky if they get a single role in an entire career that wins them enough acclaim to inspire talk of possible awards. On the other hand, there is someone like Laura Linney, who can boast not one, but two such roles in this year alone. The acclaimed actress, best known to audiences for her Oscar-nominated turn in "You Can Count on Me", her work in films like "Primal Fear", "Mystic River" and, okay, "Congo" (where she had to hold her own against a martini-sipping ape and Joe Don Baker) and her Emmy-winning guest appearances on the final season of "Frasier", has been attracting Best Actress consideration for her work in "P.S.", in which she turns in a standout performance as a lonely woman literally confronting the ghosts of her past when she meet and falls for a younger man (Topher Grace) who might be the reincarnation of the first high-school love who died before graduation. At the same time, she has also been earning praise for her equally wonderful work as Clara Kinsey, the wife of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the upcoming biopic "Kinsey". These are two great, completely dissimilar performances that go a long way to show the astounding range that she possesses and I wouldn’t be surprised to see here wind up with nominations in both the lead and supporting actress categories in a couple of months.

THE INTERVIEW

What was it that first got you interested in acting?

It was all about connection-my fascination with human beings. I was interested in it ever since I was a child. My father was a playwright and I grew up in Manhattan, so I was lucky enough to go to the theater as a kid. The arts were all around and I just fell in love with theater at a very early age for many different reasons. It is a wonderful community of people and I love the ritual of it and the lifestyle of it-the research that you get to do in order to rehearse doing a play. I love everything about it-watching all these people come together and do something together in order to rehearse a play and put it on. I just found all of it very comforting.

You have split your career pretty steadily between theater and film. Most actors tend to rave about theater because of the immediacy of both the performance and the audience. Besides the obvious thing about having a permanent record of the work, what are the advantages, if any, to doing film over theater?

They are just very, very different. Stage acting and film acting are two wildly different creatures and it can be great fun to experience all of the different kinds of acting that exist. Even within theater, it splits into several different genres and styles. It is the same thing with film and even in television-sitcom acting is very different from drama. They all have different contexts in which they live-the technical aspects are different, the lifestyles are different, the pay is different. Everything is different and it is wonderful to be able to experience all of those different environments.

When you read the script for "P.S.", what was it about it that attracted you and made you think that you knew the character and could play her?

{Laughs} Well, you hope you can do that person. She was just so complex, so emotionally complex. She is at a very strange place in her life and there are a lot of conflicting things going on. She has great needs and yet she is a great self-sabotager. She finds herself in an unlikely pairing with a younger man and it echoes back to her first major love. There was just all sorts of stuff in there that I thought was actable.

Were you familiar with the original novel before doing the film?

I was not familiar with the book but I used it as a primary resource throughout while we were filming and it helped a lot.

When you do a film based on a book, does it always help to have that as a guide or does it hurt in the sense that it might somehow limit what you as an actor would bring to the part?

You have to let the movie be what the movie is. Literally, you are translating the material from one medium to another, so you have to give yourself permission to let it morph into another telling of the story. However, it is usually wonderful as a primary source.

A lot of the advance commentary on "P.S." has focused on the older woman/younger man angle of the story. Personally, I think this does the film a disservice because a.) it is about a lot more than that and b.)if the genders had been reversed and it had been an older man/younger woman tale, no one would have batted an eye.

Well, I think it is because our country has a very Puritanical history. These relationships have been going on forever and they will continue to go on forever. They aren’t that unusual-there have been a zillion movies on the subject in the past and there will be a zillion more. What is different are the people that are involved in the relationship. In this story, the woman that I play is this complex human being who is going through a lot of things that are highly relatable to other people. She is a woman who has worked extremely hard at her life and, for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out the way she thought it would and she can’t believe it. She is stuck in a place of wondering what happened to her life-there is that sort of life-panic that happens when you realize that you are no longer 25 and that you have both a huge history behind you and a huge future in front of you. That is when you are at the fulcrum of your life and things aren’t going the way that you hoped they would-there was that sort of identity unease and insecurity going on. There was also the whole thing about how we all carry the baggage of our past around with us.

Your character does that to an extreme-until the younger man comes along, her only relationships of note that we see are with her ex-husband and her high-school friend, both of whom betrayed her in the past. Was it hard for you to be able to relate to a character like that?

I know a lot of people like that-its not that unusual. Depending upon who you are and what you’ve done in your past, some people will cling to any connection if they are lonely. If there is a part of them that is inherently lonely, they will cling to anything-whether it is good for them or not.

For Dylan Kidd, the writer-director of "P.S.", this is a complete change-of-pace from his earlier "Roger Dodger". Considering the fact that you are pretty much the center of the entire film-I believe you appear in every scene-can you talk a little about working with him and how the actor-director dynamic develops for you?

When you are doing an independent film with a very low budget, it is fast and furious, so everybody goes into it like a speeding train and you try to make it to the finish line. There isn’t a whole lot of time to sit and talk and discuss-it just doesn’t’t happen. I love Dylan and I can’t wait to see what he does next. I’m really looking forward to seeing him continue on as a filmmaker because this is only his second film.

The other working relationship worth discussing in the film is the one between you and Topher Grace; the whole film hinges upon it and if it doesn’t work, there simply is no movie.

In auditioning, there were a lot of wonderful, wonderful young actors who tried out for this movie. He came in and I knew in about 30 seconds. There is just something about him and his approach to it that helped everything make sense to me-all of a sudden, I was understanding all sorts of things about my character because of him. There was something about his manner that made sense. If you don’t buy that relationship and understand the mutual attraction-not just the physical level-and you don’t get it, the whole movie doesn’t make any sense. We were really lucky that he came in and wanted to do it.

You have another film, "Kinsey", coming out at the same time as "P.S." in which you play the wife of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Were the two films shot at roughly the same time or did you have a break between the two?

I had 48 hours between the two-I shot "Kinsey" first and then did this one.

Is it hard to have to make such an abrupt shift from one character to the next?

No-it would be like, for you, writing two different reviews. It is what actors do. We shift and change and morph from piece to piece.

What are the particular challenges in playing a real-life person in a film and trying to balance being truthful to the character while still doing what you need to do as an actress to perform the part?

When you are playing a real person, you know that you are never going to get it fully. You just hope that you can get an honest representation of them and that you can get something about them right. With Clara Kinsey, there isn’t a whole lot about here-there are a couple of references to her in the biographies and a few photographs. What was really helpful for me was that there was an audiotape of her being interviewed by Clive Martin. That was the most important thing because by hearing her voice, there was so much that you could get from that-hearing her phrase thoughts and hearing her laugh and her wit. In the same way, it is a dramatization of a life and you do the best that you can with the utmost respect and you hope that it works.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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