Patricia Arquette in Severance, premiering February 18 on Apple TV+.Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+
“I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” Patricia Arquette admitted during a recent interview. It’s instructive to ponder why that might be.
Arquette, who is 53, has more than proven herself as a fascinating actress. She began at 19, came of age in independent films, and worked with one notable director after another: Sean Penn, Diane Keaton, Tony Scott, David O. Russell, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese. For five seasons, she played the title character on the hit TV series Medium. She’s won every major award – two Emmys, three Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a BAFTA and an Oscar – many of those for playing the multi-faceted mother in Boyhood (2014), which was filmed over 12 years. Her new series, Severance, directed by her frequent collaborator Ben Stiller, arrives on AppleTV+ on Feb. 18 – more on that in a minute.
Arquette also spends about a third of her time on activism. In her Oscar acceptance speech, she made a passionate plea for equal pay for women. (Meryl Streep’s response – enthusiastic clapping, pointing, and “Yes!”-ing – became an instant meme.) On Twitter, she’s an outspoken Democrat who calls out political hypocrisy, and an advocate for transgender rights and community arts programs.
So maybe that’s one explanation to the not-everyone’s-tea thing. Hollywood is not alone in preferring a woman not to make too much noise, about money or anything else.
You would think that a public face for equal pay would get job offers that were scrupulously fair, but that’s not the case, Arquette says – not in the first project she was offered after Boyhood, nor in one she was offered last year. She’s sitting back in a comfy-looking chair, pale skin and blond hair glowing. Her voice is an ASMR dream, light, scratchy, musical.
“It’s not all about the money, but it’s fair to ask for what you’ve earned,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’ve been in the business for 34 years, I bring an audience from other projects, I tick a lot of the boxes they look at. So I don’t understand why different rules apply to me.”
This might be another reason: Arquette is drawn to roles that explore what society finds scary in women. In the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora (2018), based on a true story, she played a prison employee who had sex with and abetted an inmate, damping down her beauty to give us a complex take on the frustrations and yearnings of an ordinary woman. In the Hulu series The Act (2019), based on another true story, she played a monstrous mother who fabricated illnesses and disabilities for her daughter.
“I don’t know that I’m consciously drawn that way,” Arquette demurs. Then she laughs. “Although I am shooting something now” – the black-comedy series High Desert, also for AppleTV+, directed by the distinctly political Jay Roach – “where my character has some scary aspects in her personality that aren’t usually what we think of in a woman. She’s failed at things women usually make their priority. And even when I was an ingenue, in True Romance and Lost Highway, I always looked at how my characters got their needs met, by using whatever society considered a bartering chip, any kind of value they had.”
Her character in Severance, the deliberately inaptly named Harmony, may be Arquette’s scariest yet. Harmony is an ambitious manager at a shadowy, powerful corporation in a dystopian near-future. Employees must undergo “severance” – a chip implanted in their brains blocks all memory of their personal lives when they’re at work, and vice-versa. After-hours, Harmony poses as a hippie/herbalist/lactation consultant, the better to keep tabs on her underlings. (It’s darkly hilarious that for this girdled-up, blandly cruel woman, the least threatening alter-ego she could concoct would be a warm nurturer.) Her company is her politics, her family and her religion, and when a cadre of numbers-crunchers led by Adam Scott threaten to rebel, Harmony’s fierceness becomes truly terrifying.
Severance speaks to a lot of the questions Arquette is asking herself these days: “Who are we, as humans, really?” she rhymes off. “What is our nature? How much control do we want to give away? Am I still black-and-white about everything, or am I at a point in my life where I can see the grey areas? I’m a political person, and in many of the causes I espouse, there is no ‘other side.’ During the pandemic, for example, there was a month where 100 per cent of the job losses were women’s jobs. That’s crazy-making. To take away the child tax credit will most impact women and kids. These things weigh on me all the time.
“But the groups out there taking actions that I disagree with – they think what they’re doing is right,” she continues. “They want to be heroic, but they’ve been misinformed. I’m starting to think, if I could sit down and talk to somebody, in a nonadversarial way, to say, ‘Hey, we all want to do the right thing, we all want everyone to be okay.’ With equal pay, you could argue that white men have held the advantage for a long time, so why would they want to give that up? But many of them have been struggling, too – they don’t feel advantaged, they’re treading water. I don’t think we have to take anything away from anyone. We want to set up a situation where we can all do well. But how do we communicate that?”
When I ask Arquette about her relationship to her own power, she laughs. “I never imagined I’d have any,” she says. “Winning the Oscar came as a surprise. I never worked my career that way. I did wonder if it came for a reason, to help me help other people. But as it turns out, I don’t have that much power. I can’t control anything, or save the world. I feel out of balance a lot. So now I’m just trying to make some kind of peace with myself.” She’s her own cup of tea, and that’s enough.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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