“Whoa! NO!” Patricia Arquette screamed halfway through our interview, scrambling to her feet. We were on a sunlit terrace at a Manhattan hotel, and a room-service waiter delivering a shrimp salad had just let the door close behind him. Arquette, in a flowy blue dress and chunky glasses, was panicked that we were locked out. We weren’t. “Last time I was in New York, I got locked out on a balcony,” she said, gathering herself. “The fireman had to break the window.”
The feeling of being trapped is one of the many unsettling forces behind “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a mysterious corporation called Lumon Industries, which has developed a chip that can split its employees’ minds in two: the people they are at work (“innies”) share no memories with the people they are at home (“outties”). With its sci-fi spin on work-life balance and an uncanny, retro-futurist set of mazelike office hallways, “Severance” has attracted an obsessive following since it premièred, in February. (If you are avoiding spoilers, you might want to skip down a bit.) Like many of the characters, Arquette’s, though unsevered, is two people in one. At work, she’s the icy corporate manager Harmony Cobel. Outside Lumon, she’s posing as Mrs. Selvig, an earthy lactation consultant who bakes chamomile cookies and lives next door to the protagonist, Mark (Adam Scott).
Arquette, fifty-four, has neither Cobel’s severity nor Selvig’s flightiness, but she’s lived enough life for two people. The product of a show-biz family, including her actor siblings David and Rosanna, she spent years of her childhood on a hippie commune in Virginia, before breaking out with “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” in 1987. Her blowsy sexuality belied an undercurrent of strangeness, and her nineties films were as idiosyncratic as she was: Tony Scott’s “True Romance” (in which she had an onscreen battle with James Gandolfini), Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” In more recent decades, she turned to network TV (“Medium,” “CSI: Cyber”) and won an Oscar for her role as a single mother, in Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” which was filmed over a span of twelve years. We spoke about her borderline-campy turn on “Severance,” her bohemian upbringing, her sometimes controversial outspokenness on gender equality, and the cannabis lounge that she’s opening with her son. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
It must be exciting that everyone became so obsessed with “Severance.”
It’s so nice, because there was a part of me that was, like, “This show is very claustrophobic, and we’re coming out of this claustrophobic experience—how is that going to be for everybody?” The story was so complicated and interesting. When they gave me the first episodes, I was, like, “What is this? What is this company? Who is this lady?”
Do you know all the answers?
There are certain things I don’t want to know, because I’m scared I’m going to give a spoiler to somebody. But there are definitely a lot of things I know, so I have to be very careful.
It must have been fun but kind of tricky to construct this woman with these polar opposite sides, Harmony Cobel and Mrs. Selvig.
Weirdly, I’ve played two people in movies before, like in “Lost Highway.” It opened up a lot of questions. Even though Harmony’s not “severed,” everybody is multiple people in this. She’s severed from her own feelings, her own experiences of bonding with people outside of this corporate world. So, even though she’s insinuating herself into Mark’s life as this sort of bumbling auntie type, I think what she gets surprised by is trying on this experience of, like, “What is it to be a neighbor? Oh, we’re both laughing at this joke!” She’s playing this person but then also flirting with these feelings of bonding with somebody outside the echelon of upper management and the weird grind within the corporation.
Everybody talks about the theme of work-life balance on the show, but I wondered whether the idea of severance resonated for you as an actor. On one level, what actors do is go into work, become a different person, and then go home at the end of the day and resume their lives. Is that at all how you think of acting?
Sometimes, definitely. The weird thing about “Severance” was, we would go onto the set—they built all these crazy hallways, and then they would move doorways and entrances and exits according to the scene, so we would get lost. It was like being in a rat’s maze: “I’m lost! I’m here to rehearse, but I can’t find anyone!” And then I kept getting put into lockdown, because I was contact-traced. It was this weird claustrophobia, and then I was going back to this apartment alone and isolating. It was like “Severance” was bleeding into my whole life.
I was curious about the tactile details of your character. She has this severe white hair and corporate armor. How did you and the creators of the show develop her look?
The wardrobe department really drilled down. You had to wear pantyhose. You had to wear these girdle things. It was kind of retro, these uniforms that had been created. And, because my character was from the world of Kier [the company’s founder], the earlier guard, she also often is covering her neck. I was wearing all these dickies. I had this idea that, even when you saw her in her sleep clothes at home, she’s wearing what she’s comfortable with, which is almost monastic. And I wanted to have her hair braided, because Kier comes from a more pioneer-ish time. Then I had this idea for this white wig, because it’s wizened and demands some kind of respect. You know she’s gone through a certain amount of life.
Harmony’s voice has this sort of affected quality. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but there’s an element of cartoon villain to her that’s very delicious.
I think she grew up with this corporation, looking to other people who were high-level, and created her own voice. I think there were limited films she could see growing up, with that mid-Atlantic sound. Some of the [sitcom] icons that I grew up with, like Maude and Rhoda, were more of a touchstone for Selvig. I think she grew up knowing there was a sound to authority, so she created her own sound for authority.
My pet theory is that there’s an element of Scientology in the show. Kier is this mid-century leader, like L. Ron Hubbard. There are the E-Meter-type machines. Even just the idea that you can split your mind in two.
And somebody said that Elon Musk is working on some kind of weird brain chip. I think there are a lot of layers. I’m not in Scientology, so I don’t really understand that whole system. I’ve done some reading about it, because I think it’s really fascinating. Oftentimes, it’s this getting-in-trouble situation. It’s also this pecking order. You keep going to some person to validate you who never really will. You’re always kind of doing something that puts you out of grace, and then you’re trying desperately to get back in their graces.
Did you grow up around a lot of religious dogma?
Well, my mom was Jewish and my dad was Muslim, and I went to Catholic school, and for a while my brother was Buddhist.
This is like a “COEXIST____” bumper sticker.
I know, right? And [my parents] were a part of a spiritual community called Subud. I don’t think it could ever be considered a cult, because it’s nondenominational. You don’t have to give money. You don’t ever have to disconnect from your family. If it was a cult, it would be the world’s least culty cult. I grew up with a very open kind of spirituality. My mom was supposed to marry a Jewish boy but married a lay Christian who converted to Islam. They were always talking about God and trying to foster in us our own personal relationship with God, whatever that might be.
You’ve said that you wanted to be a nun at one point?
My life really could have gone that way. I was in Catholic school, about to get my First Communion, and the phone rang—it was this lady asking for my mom, but my mom wasn’t home. And she said, “Well, you’re supposed to get your First Communion, but your mom’s Jewish and she’s going to Hell.” Even though I was really little at the time, that set me back, because it didn’t reconcile at all with the way I felt about Jesus. I can’t believe I had the wherewithal, but I said, “You know, murderers confess. Child molesters confess. You’re saying my mom’s going to go to Hell because she’s Jewish?” And they were, like, “Yeah, we don’t think you should get your catechism.” I said, “I think you’re right, because we have a different idea about Jesus.” And then I said, right before I hung up, “And Jesus was a Jew.”
You come from a show-biz family, more than most people realize. They know your siblings, but your grandfather Cliff Arquette was on “Hollywood Squares,” as his comic alter ego Charley Weaver. Your father, Lewis Arquette, was on “The Waltons.” Were you growing up amid show business? Was this a situation where Buddy Hackett would be at your house?
My great-grandparents were in vaudeville, too. We grew up for a few years in Chicago, and all around us were artists, musicians, actors, religious people. My mom was a civil-rights activist and volunteer for a lot of different causes. And my grandfather, Charley Weaver, played trumpet at speakeasies and then did live radio. So we grew up with a lot of artists, and it’s how we played as kids. We did story-theatre skits. We went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival—my dad was a musician, too.
And when you were living on this commune in Virginia—that was, what, four years?
It was four years or less. But it was a formative time, because we were very wild and running around. And we were all pretty broke. I think we saw three movies when we were there: “Dumbo,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” and “Billy Jack.” Those were the movies that we got the money together to all go see. And then all the kids created the village of Anatevka. We brought out wash basins and made little houses out of strings and sheets and put little aprons on, and we’d play every day that we were in this Russian village.
What was the dress like on the commune? I want to picture it a little bit.
At first, there were seven of us living in this one-room cabin. It didn’t have insulation or anything. My dad ended up adding some to the roof, but when the wind would blow everything would fall off the walls, and it was freezing in the winter. There was no bathroom, so you had to walk to the outhouse or down the road to the gym—it had been a camp at some point. And then we ended up moving to a nicer house there. What would we wear? Kind of cute, weird hippie clothes, like cutoff jean shorts. My mom would go to thrift-store jumbo sales.
Then you moved to L.A., and, in your teen years, you ran away from home and fell in with a punk crowd?
I ran away, not for long. My best friend got hit by a car and killed when we were twelve. She just had her bat mitzvah. She just had her first kiss at camp. It made me question God. It made me wonder what the hell was going on. Her older sister befriended me, I think as a surrogate little sister. She took me to the carnival, and we ended up spending the night with the carnival. My friends started getting into punk around the time I was twelve, thirteen. I had black hair—a faux-hawk or mohawk kind of thing. I used to braid it back. But it was really more a mixture of New Wave, punk rock. There were all these underground L.A. clubs. Disco was still around. We were going to gay clubs. It was super fun.
Were you already interested in acting?
There was a period when I was twelve-ish where I wanted to act. My parents weren’t so thrilled with that. I got an agent. I started to go up for jobs. But I remember being in a waiting room, and there was some mom who was on her hands and knees, listening at the door to see how her kid did. I just felt, like, I don’t want anything to do with this weird thing. My parents were relieved. I was also very shy—like, an introverted extrovert. But at a certain point I decided I was going to give it a year to try, because it scared me, and I ended up getting work.
When you were nineteen, you became pregnant with your first child, Enzo, and soon after he was born you were a single mother. That must have been a pretty scary thing to happen to someone who’s young, who’s an actor trying to have a career.
It was. Before I got pregnant, being in love was really my main thing—more than acting, more than anything. Overnight, it was like a switch: I didn’t care what anyone was wearing, I didn’t care where anyone was going out. The pressure lit such a fire under my ass: “I have to make money. I have to succeed. I have to provide for somebody.” Even though I’d done a few acting jobs, I had no money and I wasn’t getting anything. It was all so hard to manage. So I got a waitressing job, and I was supposed to come back three days later to start training. And then I got a phone call that I got a part, so I walked away from the waitressing job.
Which part was this?
It was this movie [“Bad Influence”] where I’m supposed to have this love scene with Rob Lowe. So then they were, like, “We want to talk about this love scene.” I’m, like, “I want to talk about it, too. What exactly do you want to see?” I was nursing. I was really vulnerable. I was a kind of prudish person to begin with, so I just wanted to get my head around it. They were, like, “The director doesn’t want any boundaries.” And I was, like, “I don’t understand. Can’t we have perimeters at all?” They didn’t want to do that, so I ended up having to say no to that job—which sucks, because I literally was, like, “How much is this brand of macaroni and cheese?” I was living in a converted garage. It was kind of a nightmare.
Was this around the time you were sending Nicolas Cage on a quest to find impossible objects?
Oh, that was a couple years before. We met at Canter’s [Deli, in L.A.], and he asked me out. He said, “Give me a quest.” I thought he was joking. I gave him a list of all these things [to find], and he started doing them. It was mind-boggling.
How long did it take him to get them all?
Well, I stopped him pretty quickly, because I was supposed to marry him when he was done. We never even had a date. I was, like, “O.K., stop! Let’s just date maybe and not get married.” He did get me the J. D. Salinger autograph. I asked for a black orchid from the jungles of Peru or Brazil or something, and he spray-painted me an orchid. It was very romantic.
Probably not the best foundation for a marriage, though. [They were married years later, from 1995 to 2000.]
I mean, who knows? There’s nothing like creativity and young love. That’s why we have a species. I don’t really hate any period of the human experience. I’ve dealt with a lot of death, and loving a lot of people through their dying time, and loving other people through their birthing time, and being at a lot of births, and being young and beautiful and not even understanding that. And then getting older and becoming invisible for a period of time, and then loving that. And getting wiser and knowing which battles to fight. I’m really loving this whole painful, joyful ride of life.
Looking at the breadth of your career, you have such an interesting œuvre. Between 1993 and 1997, you did an incredible run of art-house movies: “True Romance,” “Ed Wood,” “Flirting with Disaster,” “Lost Highway.” How were you choosing material?
I could have gone toward trying to be a giant movie star, and I didn’t really want to do that. At this period of time, there were budgets for all these little movies, and directors could cast who they wanted. And I was that age where you are the object of desire, or you are the young wife. I was motivated first by the script and the director, and then the other actors. If those all come together, that’s really interesting to me. It was such a vital time in film, and I really hope we return to that. I mean, there are things on TV that are interesting, but we need to revive film, because the experience of watching a movie with people is really fun—and not having everything have to be part of a superhero universe. I’m not putting them down—I want all kinds of entertainment for people—but I don’t think they should eclipse everything else.
That era was a golden age for indie film, but it also had a dark side. Harvey Weinstein was an executive producer of “True Romance” and “Flirting with Disaster,” and your siblings Rosanna and Alexis were in “Pulp Fiction,” which Weinstein also distributed. Rosanna was one of the first people to come out with accusations against him, in The New Yorker. How do you square the fact that this really formative work you did is linked to this awful guy?
He wasn’t really around at all—kind of the guy that got the money together, but he wasn’t a big creative element. Weirdly enough, Steve Bannon produced this movie “The Indian Runner” that I did. I don’t even know if I met him. At one point [when making “Flirting with Disaster”], Harvey made us reshoot a scene where Nancy, my character, is lying in bed, waiting to make love. I had grown my armpit hair out, because that was a choice that I was making for Nancy, and also I was wearing glasses. And Harvey was, like, “No, we need to see her beautiful eyes, and why does she have armpit hair?” That really freaked him out. But that was really my only extent of having anything to do with Harvey on that movie. It’s really awful that those movies have to carry part of this weird history of Harvey Weinstein’s gross choices.
Can I ask you about Johnny Depp? Obviously, you were in “Ed Wood” with him, but you’ve known him since you were teen-agers—you’ve told a story about him pushing you around in a supermarket cart. This trial involving him and Amber Heard seemed like an inflection point for #MeToo, and I’m curious what you make of it.
I don’t really know Johnny. We haven’t really kept up through the years or anything. I feel like we’re at an inflection point right now, where we, as a species, could grow or not. There’s a reason they say in Alcoholics Anonymous that your life becomes unmanageable. If you look at drug and alcohol addiction, you could find millions of couples having very chaotic relationships, and that’s what we’re not talking about here. People are trying to choose who’s right and who’s wrong and who’s good and who’s bad. This is a big American problem, and, as long as we keep acting like [it’s a matter of] this personality or that personality, I don’t think we’re going to grow as a species.
I actually haven’t heard people talk a lot about that aspect of it.
I really wish we would. Because these are movie stars, we look at this with a certain view, and we want heroes and we want villains. How do we look at the pain we’re causing each other, and how do we heal each other? Also, with the Oscar situation—there’s no restorative justice, like, “This hurt me.” How do we move through this?
The Oscar situation?
Yeah, with Will Smith. People are talking about these movie-star situations and not looking at the bigger situations that we, as a species, need to look at. We’re just selling newspapers and picking sides. I’m looking at a bunch of injured people. I’m looking at a lot of people in pain and a lot of people trying to manage their pain with the tool kit that we have. And we see them, because they’re in front of a camera, but there are millions of people we’re not seeing with the same kind of pain, the same kind of inability to communicate.
I imagine that’s something that informs your choices of roles, wanting to represent people who are not in front of the camera and to bring human pain to light.
A lot of the time, acting is about the subconscious. This person does not have the capacity to deal with that pain, didn’t get that thing they were supposed to get. What does love mean to them if they didn’t have a mother? Or what does love mean to this person who was abandoned, or who was beaten every time that they needed something? My mom was a therapist, and I feel like my acting and my choices are really a fusion of my mom’s and dad’s skill sets.
This makes me think about “Boyhood,” because those characters had problems and frustrations that we see play out over twelve years of their lives—and the actors’ lives. You have that incredible scene toward the end, where it all comes up to the surface, as your character is about to send her son off to college, taking stock of her entire life.
The movie was very autobiographical for Rick [Linklater], and my character was based a lot on his mom, and also reminded me of my mom. The whole experience was so incredibly beautiful in ways that I can’t even describe. [When] I had to drop my son off at college, I was, like, “Do you want me to help you unload the car?” “No. Yes. No.” He wasn’t sure. I got in my car and started driving back from San Francisco to L.A., and I just cried all the way home. Like, “My baby’s grown up! And I was a baby when I had him, and we grew up together!” Oh, my God, I feel like crying right now. And then I got home, and a few hours later he’s, like, “Hey, where do I get quarters? I have to do my own laundry. Where do I get more socks?” I was, like, “Oh, I’ll never be done being a mom. It’s all going to be fine.”
I imagine that, over the twelve years, you all had milestones that mirrored the ones in this alternative life of the movie.
I had a baby, I had a divorce, I got married. So many things happened. Ethan [Hawke] had a divorce. Rick had twins. It was wild. Also, I was doing “Medium” during this period. I chose to do “Medium” because art movies were already dying off, and my grandparents were in vaudeville, and to me that was an affordable kind of entertainment. Movie actors weren’t wanting to do TV, because they thought it was a lesser art. And I thought, It’s on network. It’s free. If somebody is housebound or living in a trailer park, why shouldn’t we be entertaining them, too? Meanwhile, people would say, “You don’t make movies anymore.” And I’d say, “I’m actually making a movie right now. You’ll see.”
Around the time you started shooting “Boyhood,” your sister Rosanna directed “Searching for Debra Winger,” a documentary about what it’s like to be a Hollywood actress in middle age. You were in your mid-thirties, and it was a period of adjustment in your career. How did you feel about that transitionary period?
It became, like, “Oh, you’re not the object of desire anymore. You can be the wife now. You’re in the scene where he’s coming home for dinner, or he’s cheating on you and you cry.” So that was kind of a bummer. “Medium” was different, because it was well written. There really was a kind of tunnel that you were funnelled into that got smaller and smaller and squeezed you out. But my career has been an anomaly. I reached middle age at a moment where more opened up. And I was a little bit a part of that conversation when I won the Oscar. I was a producer on this movie [“Equal Means Equal”], so I knew that, in ninety-eight per cent of all jobs, women were paid less. So, when I was talking about equal pay and equal rights for women in America, I really wasn’t talking about the movie industry. But it did support a conversation that people have been trying to have for a long time.
Rewatching your speech again recently, I noticed a moment after you do the thank-yous where you almost start to vibrate as you get to the message you want to send. It reminds me of someone playing a guitar riff. How did it feel in that moment?
I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about stuff like that, having grown up as a good girl and pleasing everyone. They want to have this happy broadcast, no drama. But [I was] winning for this part of this woman who was the primary caretaker, the primary breadwinner—how would her life have been different, and her kid’s life, if she had earned her whole dollar? So it was, like, “Oh, shit, here I go.” I didn’t hire a publicist [to mount an Oscar campaign]. I was doing these weird-ass movies. I never thought I’d be here, so, if this is supposed to come to me, I want something good to happen for everybody, because otherwise, why?
And it got Meryl Streep cheering. I’m sure you’ve seen that meme which is used a thousand times per day.
Yeah! It was really quite amazing. The minute they called my name, I thought someone shot me up with elephant tranquilizers. And then I walked offstage, and I almost vomited.
There was a line in the speech, when you’re talking about women’s rights and say, “We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” which opened up a conversation that was a bit contentious. Can you dig into that idea a little more?
There were several lines I said that opened up a can of worms. “We’ve given birth to every citizen” opened up a can of worms, because people were, like, “Well, I’ve never given birth. Don’t I have the right to equal pay?” Or “I’m sterile. Why can’t I have equal rights?” I grew up with this mother who was an activist. She was a white woman, but she marched for civil rights. I volunteered with people of all different colors, fighting for all different people, whether straight people fighting for gay rights or Black women fighting for progressive candidates. I’ve seen women across the board fighting for people, and I don’t know why they always have to be at the bottom of everyone else’s list. “Oh, it’s women? Forget it. Fend for yourself.” They say that change comes ten times faster when a man suggests it for women. Who can wait ten times longer? And look at us now. I was fucking right! Our rights are getting peeled off left and right.
Right now we’re waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which may have happened by the time this interview comes out. [It did.] Do you feel that way now, that women’s rights are still coming last?
All the same people who’ve been discriminated against historically are still being discriminated against. L.G.B.T. people are getting their rights pulled away, and Black people are getting voting rights taken away. Clinics are drying up in predominantly Black neighborhoods. And women’s rights, for sure. But, when I said that in that speech, there were lesbians who were pissed: “Hey, I’m a lesbian and I’m a woman, so what are you talking about?” Or they said, “You want us to stand up for some rich white actress?” But I never said that. I don’t think I, as an actress, gave birth to every citizen. And they’re right, it shouldn’t be just about birthing women. I know I had good intentions, but it hurt people in the end. Actually, a Black woman came up to me the next day—already this backlash was happening—and said, “Oh, my God, your speech. My boss brought me into the room and said, ‘We’re giving you a raise. We looked at the books, and we’ve been paying you less than the men.’ ” I mean, women are twice as likely to retire in poverty as men. It carries through your whole life. And if you’re a Black woman you’re paid even less. If you’re a trans Black woman, good luck.
Speaking of L.G.B.T. issues, I rewatched “Ed Wood” yesterday and had forgotten how much of that movie is about gender nonconformity. You have this beautiful scene with Ed on your first date, where he tells you, during a ride at a carnival, “I like to wear women’s clothes.” And, after confirming that he still likes sex with girls, you think for a second and say, “O.K.” It made me wonder how that resonated with you, as someone with a trans sister. I don’t know where Alexis was in her transition at the time.
She was already cross-dressing a lot and doing drag shows. She didn’t come out as trans verbally until both of our parents died, and I don’t think that was accidental. But I already knew that Alexis had been going into a world I was afraid of, a world I was afraid for her for. And I was very excited about being able to say “O.K.” in that movie. I was playing a real woman [Kathy O’Hara], and I met her. And she said, “O.K.” She was madly in love with [Ed] and didn’t have a problem with that. I wanted to celebrate her. I wanted to celebrate him. I wanted to celebrate everyone who loves somebody and says, “O.K.” And everybody who likes to wear panties.
Lastly, I saw that you and Enzo are opening a cannabis lounge in West Hollywood. What can you tell me about that?
It’s called Fantom Flower. It just started construction. I had an interesting relationship with weed, because, of course, growing up in California, we smoked weed. But also my dad was a big stoner, and it caused a lot of frustration between my mom and dad. She ended up kicking him out because he smoked with my brother, and he lived outside of our house in a van for a couple years. And then, when my mom had cancer, Rosanna had to go out and score her weed on the street for her chemo, to help her nausea. Alexis used weed for neuropathy and different things—she died of AIDS. I mean, it’s a beautiful herb. They found it in temples in Jerusalem. They think maybe it was part of the oracles at Delphi. All over the world, there’s a history of cannabis—medicinally, spiritually. During COVID, edibles really helped me deal with anxiety. So I’m super excited about [the lounge]. I’m going to interview people. So, fusing great music, great cannabis, activism. It’s going to be really fun. A very vital, alive place. ♦
