Patricia Arquette Talks Escape at Dannemora, The Act Roles

PREMIUM: Born into a family of actors, Patricia Arquette has been performing since she was young. She has worked with top directors, including Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton and David Lynch, and her role as the mom in Richard Linklater’s 12-year project, Boyhood, earned her an Oscar as best supporting actress. Arquette also starred in the network series Medium, CSI: Cyber and, more recently, in two projects based on real stories: Escape at Dannemora, which garnered her an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of prison employee Tilly Mitchell, who helps two inmates escape; and The Act, in which she plays a mentally ill mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who repeatedly severely harms her daughter as a way of getting attention.

WS: Why were Tilly and Dee Dee important parts for you to take? And was the physical transformation you had to undergo difficult for you personally?
ARQUETTE: I was encountering a lot of resistance before I did them. People were saying, You don’t have to gain weight for this role. You can’t look like that; you won’t work anymore. But I was thinking; you know what? I’ve done my time. I want to be able to act. [With Tilly] I wanted to have a conversation about who is allowed to be sexual. What body type? Are only young, beautiful people allowed to be loved, enjoy their sexuality and feel sexy? I don’t think that is the case. I want to have that conversation. That was important to me.

With Dee Dee, she had rosacea and diabetes; there were certain specific things about the way she looked. I was never going to look like Dee Dee. I would have to gain another 140 pounds and I would be dead! But I wanted to capture certain aspects of the way she looked because to me, she looked so innocent and disarming. She looked almost [like the doll] Holly Hobbie or a non-sexual, selfless person; all she was was a mommy. To me, that was part of her deceptiveness.

Even after Escape at Dannemora came out and people loved it, again I was dealing with stuff from people in the business like, You can’t play Dee Dee now; you have to do something where you can look beautiful. I thought, Oh my God, again we’re having this conversation?

WS: In Escape at Dannemora, were you shooting in real prisons? How did that impact you?
ARQUETTE: We did shoot in a lot of prisons. I went to visit David Sweat [one of the prisoners who Tilly helps escape] when he was in prison there and [co-stars] Paul Dano and Benicio del Toro and [director] Ben Stiller went to visit him separately. It’s very hard to be in a prison. Part of it is that you’re in this place where anyone can get killed. Everyone is in danger all the time. Everyone’s freedom is constricted. Everyone working there [in addition to the inmates] is in prison in some way. When talking to the guards, they say they are counting the days till they retire. They are putting in their days. And especially in the prisons [we were in], they are so old; [they date back to the] turn of the century. Walking down the halls with the guards, they would say, This part is really scary because it’s a dead curve. There is a little mirror there, but things happen around this bend. And it’s cold and drafty and it’s heartbreaking. There is a depressing feeling all around. And then there are a lot of prisoners with untreated mental illness. You’re watching these people who are mentally ill and they’re not getting the help they need. They are a danger to others and they are also in danger.

Also, it’s an industry. Escape at Dannemora shows a sewing machine shop in the prison. That’s cheap labor in America, and that’s a really disturbing thing, too. There was a sheriff intentionally putting people in prison so they could have cheap labor.

WS: Was it difficult for you to disconnect at the end of the day after dealing with such weighty issues?
ARQUETTE: It was very hard to disconnect at the end of the day because the prison is in the middle of the town. There is nothing to do in town. There is a dollar store. There is a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Motel 6. It’s gloomy and cold. Yeah, it’s intense.

WS: The Act is based on a true story about a mother who has Munchausen syndrome by proxy and abuses her daughter to create phantom illnesses to get attention and sympathy from others. What attracted you to the part?
ARQUETTE: I was always interested in Munchausen syndrome by proxy because it’s the opposite of all of our instincts as parents; we want to protect our kids from any pain. I didn’t know about this specific story until I got offered [the role of Dee Dee], but my kids had both seen the documentary [Mommy Dead and Dearest] and they said, Don’t play that lady; don’t do it, mom! [The character had] so many layers and doing research on this condition, I felt it’s a very disturbing and understudied mental illness.

WS: Do you need to like the characters you play? And with a character like Dee Dee, did you find a side of her that you liked?
ARQUETTE: I don’t know that I have to like the character and I don’t know that I liked Dee Dee. But I have an understanding that I’ve developed within myself about Dee Dee. I have empathy for her. Dee Dee was very mentally ill. Even if her behavior was horrendous—and I think it was, it was inexcusable—Dee Dee had a mental illness and she was self-delusional. She had no sense of self, no healthy self-esteem. It’s almost like toxic co-dependence, so she continually had to do things to prove she was worthy of love. She is doing this on a large scale to the whole world, so everyone will say, Oh, you’re such a good mom; you’re so selfless. She’s doing this so that she has an identity. Dee Dee also has such a terror of abandonment that she’s trying to convince her daughter never to leave her. She believes they are happy, and tells her daughter, “I love you so much. It’s better for both of us. This way, you won’t be with a guy who will break your heart.” She believes all these things, even though they are delusional. She has her excuses. You know what? Every person who does something bad, whether it’s cheating on their taxes or cheating on their spouse or killing people, or whatever it is, they all have excuses that make sense to them. As an actor, you have to see what those things are and how we all delude ourselves. And I think we all delude ourselves to different levels.

WS: Tell us about Boyhood and what the experience meant to you.
ARQUETTE: It’s funny that you ask that question. [I’m often asked which have been my favorite roles] but I would never say the part of the mother in Boyhood because even though I won an Oscar, to me, Boyhood is more like a whole experience [than a role I played]. A whole experience I love so much. It was so personal it was beyond a film. There were many films I had made along the way, True Romance or Indian Runner, that I cared a lot about and it was frustrating to me that they didn’t get the attention they should have or got criticism I didn’t think they deserved. But with Boyhood, I felt so fiercely protective. I don’t know how I’m going to handle if anyone says anything bad about this movie because it’s so personal. Every year we went back there it was like summer camp; like growing up together. And honestly, in America, there’s a law that you can’t sign a contract for more than seven years. So all of us just kept showing up because we gave our word; we wanted to work in this way. And the way [director] Rick [Linklater] structured everything and to work with Ethan [Hawke], which I always wanted to do, I don’t even think about Boyhood in the same way as anything else I have ever worked on.