Patricia Arquette is one of America’s great actresses, but she has spent her career burrowing under the skin of characters in a way that keeps her just below the radar.
In an era when women were often relegated to girlfriend, wife, and mom slots, Arquette always found startling ways to make her roles feel raw and real. Think of the sweet prostitute-turned-outlaw in 1993’s Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance, the luminous new mom of David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster in 1996, the femme fatale doppelgänger in David Lynch’s Lost Highway in 1997. But Arquette didn’t get nominated for an Oscar until 2015, when she won a supporting-actress award for Boyhood. It was a movie in which we watched her mature over the film’s 12-year production—something quite remarkable in an industry that still discourages actresses from looking their age.
Her latest project, Showtime’s limited series Escape at Dannemora (premiering November 18), required Arquette to strip away any hint of glamour.
In this ripped-from-the-headlines true-crime tale, she plays Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a married prison employee who had affairs with two inmates and aided them in a wild escape plot. Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano play the fictionalized versions of these prisoners in the bleak seven-part drama, directed by Ben Stiller, whose connection to Arquette dates back to their on-screen marriage in Flirting with Disaster.
Tilly is a female character we rarely see at the center of a TV series or movie: frumpy, frustrated, middle-aged, and voraciously sexual. But it was important to give life to Tilly’s desire, since, as Arquette quipped, “You’re more likely to see a unicorn than a middle-aged woman who does not have a kind of Playboy bunny body being sexual in a movie.”
In the last few years, Arquette has been increasingly vocal about her activism. She caused a commotion at the 2015 Oscars when she used her acceptance speech to call for pay equity for women in Hollywood and beyond. She got involved in the Women’s March, spoke up in support of women who made accusations against Harvey Weinstein (one of whom was her own sister, Rosanna Arquette), and called out Oliver Stone for an uncomfortable encounter. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.)