She’s worked steadily ever since,
winning acclaim for dual roles in
David Lynch’s Lost Highway and
supernatural thriller Stigmata before
turning to TV with supernatural
thriller Medium in 2005. Coming
before such top-tier talent as
Glenn Close, Nicole Kidman and
Renée Zellweger accepted small
screen roles, it could have been a
risky move. “But I thought the film
business was becoming more and
more about tentpole movies and less
and less small films. People were
kind of snotty about it but I was like,
‘I think there are going to be good
things happening in TV’. It was a
strategic decision.”
26 • AUGUST 2019
Nine years later she won the best
actress Oscar for Boyhood, a labour
of love that took 12 years of on-and-
off filming, but Arquette finds the
juiciest roles are on television these
days—especially when it means she
gets to play down the glamour in The
Act, where her Dee Dee is dowdy
and dumpy. “Starting out as a young
woman and an ingénue I never got
opportunities like this,” she says of
the transformation. “Whenever I
tried people would say I had to play
‘the girl’ and I still get pushback
from studios going, ‘You can’t look
like that on screen’.” She grins.
“My reply is: ‘Yes I can and I’m
going to’.”INTERVIEW: PATRICIA ARQUETTE
VERETT COLLECTION INC / ALAMY STOCK PHOTOWith Jake Weber in the
TV series Medium