Photo: Erik Tanner When Laura Linney starred in a 2002 Broadway revival of The Crucible, her favorite part was Act Three, when her character, Elizabeth Proctor, doesn’t appear onstage. “I would be underneath the floorboards of the theater, just listening,” she says. “You could hear the orchestration of the voices. Liam Neeson tromping around. Then you realize just what a fucking genius Arthur Miller was. When you’re in the work like that, it just envelops you and moves through your body.
Absolutely. I loved that. I could talk to him in a way that I think he enjoyed and that I enjoyed. It was something that we shared from a really early age. I was really interested, and he was the only one who would talk to me about theater at that level. It wasn’t just a hobby. It was fun to talk shop with him.
Did you feel like there were specific difficulties of how young women could get chewed up in the industry? To learn technique is so you can help yourself when there’s no one around to help you. You can learn how to be diagnostic about the scene, a play, a script, and then learn how to help yourself. It gives you a whole bag of tools to further your understanding and your execution of work.
Is the attitude the same when you’re going into something like Congo as it is for an indie like You Can Count on Me? That’s the big moment: the quiet. The creative quiet is a good place to be. It’s so intriguing because there’s such a difference between being alone and being lonely. All of my prep work I do alone. I just dig in there. It’s my favorite time. I do all of that work and I roll around in it. But feeling lonely around other people while you’re working is brutal. It’s demoralizing.
No, it’s fine. This is just what my experience in doing it is. What its overall result is or how it affects other people, I don’t have an agenda about that. I don’t think about results — like, what it all means, what it all does. I don’t know. I think about the little, tiny moments leading up to that and then it’s going to be whatever it is, and I don’t have anything to do with that. That’s not my job.
I got a letter from Richard Curtis, who said his casting director had finally just lost her cool with him because they were auditioning people for that role and he kept saying, “I want a Laura Linney type.” And she finally just turned to him and said, “Well, just get Laura Linney.” And so he wrote me a letter asking if I would do it. I was like, “Yes, I will, Mr. Richard Curtis. You bet. When do you want me to show up?”Well, I was just offered something, which is lovely.