After becoming pregnant with her second daughter and after devoting time to her upbringing and family, Patricia Arquette discovered in 2004 that Hollywood had no interesting roles for her. She was met with “horrible” movie scripts and roles that were “terrible” unless “you were literally 18 years old”. It was then that she had a pivotal conversation with her agent. He told her that she already knew that she "would never do television" but she did the opposite of what she expected.
It was the beginning of the new millennium. The unofficial law of the industry dictated that if you had worked your way up in movies and accepted a steady role on television, it meant you were on the decline, never again to smell nuanced star status. It was an elephant graveyard. And, having started in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and having starred in titles such as Tony Scott's Point Blank Love, Tim Burton's Ed Wood or David Lynch's Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette was an actress who in theory should not set foot on a movie set. television.
"I felt that there was an elitist attitude against television and I liked the idea of doing television on a free-to-air channel: I wanted to challenge snobbery," he confessed in an interview. This is how she accepted the role of Allison Dubois, the medium who solved a crime every week in Medium (2005-2011), which lasted seven seasons and where she starred in 130 episodes. Her performance in the Glenn Gordon Caron series earned her the Emmy for Best Dramatic Actress and from that point on she began an upward career.
It's a matter of talent, character and his astonishing ability to translate his personality in a chameleonic way. You just have to see the current television situation of him. She is embarking on the filming of the second season of Severance, a science fiction series where she plays the villain of the show: she supervises a technology company where workers undergo an intervention that separates their professional identity from their personal identity, until both parties live disconnected to such an extent with disturbing psychological consequences for the volunteers. And, waiting for the new episodes, she premiered this Wednesday High desert on Apple TV, the same platform as Severance.
If in one she is the villain of a dystopian and psychological thriller, in the other she is the anti-heroine of a comedy. In High desert she is Peggy, an addict who, after having lived off the opulence of drug trafficking, goes from precarious job to precarious job until she decides to train as a private detective. Can a disaster of a person, always on the verge of collapse, meet the obligations of her new job? She was attracted to the project, with half-hour episodes, by the voice of Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House, who had worked on series like Nurse Jackie, Grace and Frankie or Damages.
He considered that the work that was proposed to him was "funny, different, sardonic, but also hopeful and affectionate", which makes for a comedy as black as it is eccentric where Arquette can change register. In High desert, which some American media have described as unclassifiable, he shares a comic adventure with a classmate like Matt Dillon or Rupert Friend, until now known for his work in Homeland. It's seeing her comfortable, overwhelming and wondering why she doesn't lend herself to lighter roles more often.
And it is that, after fighting presences, ghosts and enigmatic premonitions in Medium, he signed in 2013 for the prestigious Boardwalk Empire by Terence Winter and produced by Martin Scorsese for one season. In 2015 he returned to television for all audiences with CSI: Cyber, a failed CSI spin-off with crimes perpetrated over the Internet, which coincided with his professional peak in cinema: when he won the Oscar for best supporting actress. for Boyhood, the film she had shot for Richard Linklater between 2002 and 2013. Her acceptance speech, in which she called for equal pay without mincing words, became a milestone for the feminist movement in Hollywood.
His momentum, however, was maintained on television where in the 2018-2019 season he showed his versatility with two miniseries based on real events. In Escape at Dannemora, under the orders of Ben Stiller as director, he got into the skin of Tilly Mitchell, a prison nurse who, after starting an affair with two inmates, helped them escape. In The Act, she played Dee Dee Blanchard, a mother with Munchausen by proxy who expressly made her daughter sick to get society's attention. She was nominated for an Emmy for both series in the same edition, she took the award for the latter.
Patricia Arquette was warned that television was a graveyard for elephants, and instead she found a way to revalidate the medium, demonstrate to what extent middle-aged actresses had better opportunities there, and built an immaculate, always award-winning reputation. , which puts her on a par with Frances McDormand. They are women with character, who mature without being influenced by the aesthetic pressure of Hollywood, with a good nose for roles and whose talent no one dares to question.
