Cover story
May. 2nd, 2005 03:44 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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nbc_mediumPatricia is on the cover of Orange Coast magazine.
Extra Sensory Powerhouse
Patricia Arquette talks about the unexpected success of her NBC drama, speaking up for herself, and being an Arquette
by Greg Hernandez
Patricia Arquette’s agent originally considered not even bothering to pass along the script of Medium to his movie star client. He assumed that the actress, who gained fame in such feature films as True Romance, Flirting with Disaster, and Stigmata, would never be interested in working on a television series.
Fortunately for the show’s many fans and for NBC, her agent was dead wrong.
“I was reading features, and I thought they were so poorly written I kept throwing them across the room,” says Arquette. “In television, you have more things you can explore, the writing is better for a woman, and more interesting.”
Medium made its debut on Monday nights in January with low expectations and little fanfare. But the audience quickly connected with this show about the life of Allison Dubois, a suburban wife and mother with psychic powers. Dubois uses her ability to see dead people and hear the thoughts of those around her to help law enforcement solve mysteries.
“I was really interested in the conflict between being a good mom and normal person, and having this extraordinary ability that she doesn’t really want to have,” says Arquette. “That adds all this confusion to her personal life and her emotional life.”
On this day, the actress is on her way to the studio to shoot her 15th episode of the show, which attracted a stunning 16.5 million viewers to its debut, nearly matching the ratings of its time slot competition, CBS’s CSI: Miami.
“It’s kind of like an endurance test, being a marathon winner,” Arquette says of the show’s grueling filming schedule this season. “We had a small order, then they added more, and we were playing catch-up. It will be easier next season because we will have had more prep time.”
The network has ordered 16 shows in all, extraordinary for a show that bowed in January as a mid-season replacement. Most mid-season shows don’t even survive their first year on the air.
“Being in [Medium] feels great because apparently it’s very rare in television for this kind of show to make it so quickly,” she says. “We were kind of a dark horse since we came at the middle of the year, and it was so different than the normal formula show.”Still, the actress and mother of two is still adjusting to the rigors of starring in a one-hour drama where much of the action revolves around her character.
“I’m in every scene, and there’s no real breaks in between,” Arquette says. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s the best job in the world. I literally love acting, and I love everyone I work with. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
Arquette, 37, was a bit surprised the network had sought her out to headline the series.
“I don’t look like your normal female lead, so all that was kind of a gamble,” she says. “But I always had a feeling that women in particular wanted to see something different, different types of body shapes, different looks of faces. It was important for everything to feel normal and real and imperfect, just how life is, so you could believe this extraordinary circumstance.”
Aware that television networks are notorious for interfering with the creative vision of a show if they feel it will turn off viewers or upset advertisers, Arquette feels blessed to have Glenn Gordon Caron as executive producer. Caron had major success with Moonlighting in the 1980s and with the acclaimed drama Now and Again, which ended its run a few years ago.
“Glenn was given a lot of freedom because he has had such success,” she says. “They don’t really mess with his vision much, so I don’t have to deal with that. I have a problem with authority.”
A professional actress for nearly 20 years now, Arquette is part of a three-generation show business family and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. She once refused to proceed with a scene requiring nudity when she learned that a producer, whose behavior she found to be offensive, was still on the set after she had been assured he would be gone.
“I’ve always spoken up for myself,” she says. “When they’d say things like, ‘Your teeth should be straight,’ I’ve just said, ‘You’re wrong!’ ” When Arquette decided to pursue acting in her late teens, her older sister, Rosanna Arquette, had already achieved stardom in such films as Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours, and Nobody’s Fool.
“I was painfully shy with strangers. But my sister told me that I could,” she recalls. “I decided I would give it one year, from 18 to 19, to try. If I got work, great. I would be brave enough to go for it.”
She did get work, and right away—even though her first film, the forgettable comedy Pretty Smart, was an unpleasant experience for the young actress, and she came away discouraged.
“My sister said, ‘Honey don’t give up, that’s not the way movies are.’ ”
Arquette’s second feature film appearance was a far more memorable one. She was cast in the role of Kristen Parker, a psychic who really wanted to be a gymnast, in the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, written and produced by Wes Craven.“I always enjoyed those kind of [horror] movies,” she says. “But I thought people would look down on it, and I wanted to be a serious actress.”
But the part in Elm Street put her on the radar in Hollywood. The film was not only a major box office hit, but it is generally considered to be the best of the popular series.
Younger by more than eight years, Arquette and her big sister have remained close as they navigate the ups and downs of the movie business. Anyone who would doubt their genuine bond would only have to take one look at a scene from Rosanna’s well-regarded documentary, Searching for Debra Winger, where the older sister weeps at the Cannes Film Festival when discussing how proud her late parents would be of Arquette, who was having a film screened there.
“She’s such a powerful woman,” Arquette says of Rosanna. “She’s been my biggest fan during this whole show. She’ll call me the next day and tell me how good it was.”
Brothers David Arquette (Scream, Never Been Kissed) and Alexis Arquette (The Wedding Singer, She’s All That) are also stars in their own right, and brother Richmond Arquette has extensive film and television credits. There is much star-wattage in this family, which also includes David’s wife, Friends star Courteney Cox-Arquette, and actor Thomas Jane (The Punisher), who is the father of Arquette’s 2-year-old daughter, Harlow. (She also has a 16-year-old son, Enzo, from her relationship with Paul Rossi).
Arquette was previously married to actor Nicolas Cage, and Rosanna was involved for many years with musician Peter Gabriel, then Steve Lukather, lead singer of Toto, who wrote the Grammy-award winning song, Rosanna, about her. “We are all well-known, but for us it’s very normal,” she explains. “We just happen to be actors. But we don’t talk about that a lot because it’s all we’ve ever known.”
The five Arquette children have continued in show business in the tradition of their grandfather, Cliff Arquette, the actor better known by the name of his famous character, Charley Weaver, which he created for The Jack Paar Show and continued to play for a decade on The Hollywood Squares.
Their father, actor Lewis Arquette, acted on the Broadway stage, and was in more than 100 television programs and movies. He was also an in-demand voiceover performer up until the final years of his life. He died in 2001, two years after receiving a liver transplant that his daughter said prolonged his life before he died from other ailments.
“He didn’t survive, but we had two more years with him because of someone’s kindness and generosity in their moment of grief,” she says. “It’s a beautiful way to stay alive in a way.”
The death of Lewis Arquette came four years after their mother, poet and political activist Mardi Arquette, died from breast cancer. It’s a disease that Patricia says “pretty much touches every family,” and since her mother’s death, she has worked to support breast cancer awareness, encouraging self-exams for women and regular mammograms.
While their parents are gone, they left the Arquette children with a strong legacy.
“We were always acting,” Arquette says. “At one point, we were in a hippie commune. My father was on Broadway and [Paul Sills’] Story Theater, and we always learned about the theater with games and skits and small plays. It felt very comfortable to me.”After her success in Elm Street, Arquette landed the lead role in the television film Wildflower, which was directed by Diane Keaton. She played an abused and partially deaf girl who is helped back into society by two resourceful children. It won her the Cable Ace Award for best actress in a movie or miniseries.
Acting offers poured in during the 1990s, and Arquette worked nonstop in such films as the comedy Human Nature; the acclaimed Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton; the drama Beyond Rangoon, in which she was the lead; the comedy Little Nicky, opposite Adam Sandler; and Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch. She also starred opposite then-husband Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Arquette shined in the memorable 1996 comedy Flirting with Disaster, about a young man (Ben Stiller), his wife (Arquette), and his incompetent case worker (Tea Leoni) traveling across the country to find his birth parents (Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda).“I love that movie, and I knew when we were making it that it was good,” Arquette says. “Things would go wrong during the filming and I’d say, ‘Don’t complain. You will be so glad you did this movie.’ I thought it was hilarious.”
While Arquette has starred in her share of memorable films, many of her movies are not well-known, some barely making it off of the film festival circuit. That doesn’t bother her. When choosing a role, she says, she is thinking more about the part itself rather than box office potential.
“I’ve read scripts where I said, ‘This will be a huge movie, but I don’t like it.’ I want to grow as an artist. Because I’m a woman, I want to explore women through different periods of time, with different personality traits, and different stories women have experienced.”This path has enabled her to work with some of the most well-regarded directors in movies, including Scorcese, Burton, and Lynch.“I feel very grateful for the career that I’ve been able to have,” Arquette says “I was fortunate enough to start when directors had a lot to say. That has been whittled away with businesspeople looking at the numbers. They’ve taken away a lot of freedom of choice of storytelling away from directors.”
So Arquette finds herself adjusting nicely to the world of series television and to the new level of fame the success of Medium has brought to her life.
“For years, I’ve been somewhere with a friend … and people keep looking at you, staring at you. But I don’t really notice. Now it’s kind of the same thing, but a few more people come up and say, ‘We like your show.’ That’s just nice. I’ve always had really nice fans.”
She is looking forward to a bit of a break before the second season of the series begins shooting in mid-July. There might be a part in a movie before that, but Arquette doesn’t sound too eager to tackle much else besides the show these days.
“I’m reading things right now, but I’m not super anxious to work unless it’s something incredible,” she says. “I might run away in the deep woods and play with sticks.’’
Extra Sensory Powerhouse
Patricia Arquette talks about the unexpected success of her NBC drama, speaking up for herself, and being an Arquette
by Greg Hernandez
Patricia Arquette’s agent originally considered not even bothering to pass along the script of Medium to his movie star client. He assumed that the actress, who gained fame in such feature films as True Romance, Flirting with Disaster, and Stigmata, would never be interested in working on a television series.
Fortunately for the show’s many fans and for NBC, her agent was dead wrong.
“I was reading features, and I thought they were so poorly written I kept throwing them across the room,” says Arquette. “In television, you have more things you can explore, the writing is better for a woman, and more interesting.”
Medium made its debut on Monday nights in January with low expectations and little fanfare. But the audience quickly connected with this show about the life of Allison Dubois, a suburban wife and mother with psychic powers. Dubois uses her ability to see dead people and hear the thoughts of those around her to help law enforcement solve mysteries.
“I was really interested in the conflict between being a good mom and normal person, and having this extraordinary ability that she doesn’t really want to have,” says Arquette. “That adds all this confusion to her personal life and her emotional life.”
On this day, the actress is on her way to the studio to shoot her 15th episode of the show, which attracted a stunning 16.5 million viewers to its debut, nearly matching the ratings of its time slot competition, CBS’s CSI: Miami.
“It’s kind of like an endurance test, being a marathon winner,” Arquette says of the show’s grueling filming schedule this season. “We had a small order, then they added more, and we were playing catch-up. It will be easier next season because we will have had more prep time.”
The network has ordered 16 shows in all, extraordinary for a show that bowed in January as a mid-season replacement. Most mid-season shows don’t even survive their first year on the air.
“Being in [Medium] feels great because apparently it’s very rare in television for this kind of show to make it so quickly,” she says. “We were kind of a dark horse since we came at the middle of the year, and it was so different than the normal formula show.”Still, the actress and mother of two is still adjusting to the rigors of starring in a one-hour drama where much of the action revolves around her character.
“I’m in every scene, and there’s no real breaks in between,” Arquette says. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s the best job in the world. I literally love acting, and I love everyone I work with. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
Arquette, 37, was a bit surprised the network had sought her out to headline the series.
“I don’t look like your normal female lead, so all that was kind of a gamble,” she says. “But I always had a feeling that women in particular wanted to see something different, different types of body shapes, different looks of faces. It was important for everything to feel normal and real and imperfect, just how life is, so you could believe this extraordinary circumstance.”
Aware that television networks are notorious for interfering with the creative vision of a show if they feel it will turn off viewers or upset advertisers, Arquette feels blessed to have Glenn Gordon Caron as executive producer. Caron had major success with Moonlighting in the 1980s and with the acclaimed drama Now and Again, which ended its run a few years ago.
“Glenn was given a lot of freedom because he has had such success,” she says. “They don’t really mess with his vision much, so I don’t have to deal with that. I have a problem with authority.”
A professional actress for nearly 20 years now, Arquette is part of a three-generation show business family and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. She once refused to proceed with a scene requiring nudity when she learned that a producer, whose behavior she found to be offensive, was still on the set after she had been assured he would be gone.
“I’ve always spoken up for myself,” she says. “When they’d say things like, ‘Your teeth should be straight,’ I’ve just said, ‘You’re wrong!’ ” When Arquette decided to pursue acting in her late teens, her older sister, Rosanna Arquette, had already achieved stardom in such films as Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours, and Nobody’s Fool.
“I was painfully shy with strangers. But my sister told me that I could,” she recalls. “I decided I would give it one year, from 18 to 19, to try. If I got work, great. I would be brave enough to go for it.”
She did get work, and right away—even though her first film, the forgettable comedy Pretty Smart, was an unpleasant experience for the young actress, and she came away discouraged.
“My sister said, ‘Honey don’t give up, that’s not the way movies are.’ ”
Arquette’s second feature film appearance was a far more memorable one. She was cast in the role of Kristen Parker, a psychic who really wanted to be a gymnast, in the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, written and produced by Wes Craven.“I always enjoyed those kind of [horror] movies,” she says. “But I thought people would look down on it, and I wanted to be a serious actress.”
But the part in Elm Street put her on the radar in Hollywood. The film was not only a major box office hit, but it is generally considered to be the best of the popular series.
Younger by more than eight years, Arquette and her big sister have remained close as they navigate the ups and downs of the movie business. Anyone who would doubt their genuine bond would only have to take one look at a scene from Rosanna’s well-regarded documentary, Searching for Debra Winger, where the older sister weeps at the Cannes Film Festival when discussing how proud her late parents would be of Arquette, who was having a film screened there.
“She’s such a powerful woman,” Arquette says of Rosanna. “She’s been my biggest fan during this whole show. She’ll call me the next day and tell me how good it was.”
Brothers David Arquette (Scream, Never Been Kissed) and Alexis Arquette (The Wedding Singer, She’s All That) are also stars in their own right, and brother Richmond Arquette has extensive film and television credits. There is much star-wattage in this family, which also includes David’s wife, Friends star Courteney Cox-Arquette, and actor Thomas Jane (The Punisher), who is the father of Arquette’s 2-year-old daughter, Harlow. (She also has a 16-year-old son, Enzo, from her relationship with Paul Rossi).
Arquette was previously married to actor Nicolas Cage, and Rosanna was involved for many years with musician Peter Gabriel, then Steve Lukather, lead singer of Toto, who wrote the Grammy-award winning song, Rosanna, about her. “We are all well-known, but for us it’s very normal,” she explains. “We just happen to be actors. But we don’t talk about that a lot because it’s all we’ve ever known.”
The five Arquette children have continued in show business in the tradition of their grandfather, Cliff Arquette, the actor better known by the name of his famous character, Charley Weaver, which he created for The Jack Paar Show and continued to play for a decade on The Hollywood Squares.
Their father, actor Lewis Arquette, acted on the Broadway stage, and was in more than 100 television programs and movies. He was also an in-demand voiceover performer up until the final years of his life. He died in 2001, two years after receiving a liver transplant that his daughter said prolonged his life before he died from other ailments.
“He didn’t survive, but we had two more years with him because of someone’s kindness and generosity in their moment of grief,” she says. “It’s a beautiful way to stay alive in a way.”
The death of Lewis Arquette came four years after their mother, poet and political activist Mardi Arquette, died from breast cancer. It’s a disease that Patricia says “pretty much touches every family,” and since her mother’s death, she has worked to support breast cancer awareness, encouraging self-exams for women and regular mammograms.
While their parents are gone, they left the Arquette children with a strong legacy.
“We were always acting,” Arquette says. “At one point, we were in a hippie commune. My father was on Broadway and [Paul Sills’] Story Theater, and we always learned about the theater with games and skits and small plays. It felt very comfortable to me.”After her success in Elm Street, Arquette landed the lead role in the television film Wildflower, which was directed by Diane Keaton. She played an abused and partially deaf girl who is helped back into society by two resourceful children. It won her the Cable Ace Award for best actress in a movie or miniseries.
Acting offers poured in during the 1990s, and Arquette worked nonstop in such films as the comedy Human Nature; the acclaimed Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton; the drama Beyond Rangoon, in which she was the lead; the comedy Little Nicky, opposite Adam Sandler; and Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch. She also starred opposite then-husband Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Arquette shined in the memorable 1996 comedy Flirting with Disaster, about a young man (Ben Stiller), his wife (Arquette), and his incompetent case worker (Tea Leoni) traveling across the country to find his birth parents (Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda).“I love that movie, and I knew when we were making it that it was good,” Arquette says. “Things would go wrong during the filming and I’d say, ‘Don’t complain. You will be so glad you did this movie.’ I thought it was hilarious.”
While Arquette has starred in her share of memorable films, many of her movies are not well-known, some barely making it off of the film festival circuit. That doesn’t bother her. When choosing a role, she says, she is thinking more about the part itself rather than box office potential.
“I’ve read scripts where I said, ‘This will be a huge movie, but I don’t like it.’ I want to grow as an artist. Because I’m a woman, I want to explore women through different periods of time, with different personality traits, and different stories women have experienced.”This path has enabled her to work with some of the most well-regarded directors in movies, including Scorcese, Burton, and Lynch.“I feel very grateful for the career that I’ve been able to have,” Arquette says “I was fortunate enough to start when directors had a lot to say. That has been whittled away with businesspeople looking at the numbers. They’ve taken away a lot of freedom of choice of storytelling away from directors.”
So Arquette finds herself adjusting nicely to the world of series television and to the new level of fame the success of Medium has brought to her life.
“For years, I’ve been somewhere with a friend … and people keep looking at you, staring at you. But I don’t really notice. Now it’s kind of the same thing, but a few more people come up and say, ‘We like your show.’ That’s just nice. I’ve always had really nice fans.”
She is looking forward to a bit of a break before the second season of the series begins shooting in mid-July. There might be a part in a movie before that, but Arquette doesn’t sound too eager to tackle much else besides the show these days.
“I’m reading things right now, but I’m not super anxious to work unless it’s something incredible,” she says. “I might run away in the deep woods and play with sticks.’’
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Date: 2005-05-02 11:11 pm (UTC)But yeah, thanks for posting that!
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Date: 2005-05-03 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-03 10:18 am (UTC)