Holly Hunter names her four career-defining roles: “I learned so much”
It’s a mark of how much television budgets have increased when Paramount can make a Star Trek spin-off and get not just Paul Giamatti to star in it but Holly Hunter too, but that’s the case with Starfleet Academy, the first two episodes of which hit screens this week.
Hunter is in the lead role as the half-human captain of the USS Athena and head of the academy in the show, a development which surprised the writers, as although they had her in mind when creating the character, they didn’t expect her to say yes to it.
After all, she is a four-time Academy Award-nominated actor with five decades of success at the top of the industry behind her, and not someone who has done much, if any, TV sci-fi in the past. But Hunter does have experience with science fiction in terms of movies, having made Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and voiced the mum from Pixar’s The Incredibles twice, so she probably wasn’t too far out of her comfort zone.
Hunter has spent the majority of her career in drama, going from sharing a room with Frances McDormand as youngsters starting out in New York to roles in the theatre to an uncredited part in the first Coen brothers movie, Blood Simple, in 1984.
Following that, she continued to take parts, mostly in TV, before another Coen brothers film, Raising Arizona, starring Nicolas Cage, proved to be a hit in 1987, the year she also won an Academy Award nomination for Broadcast News. However, it was undoubtedly 1993 when she went stratospheric, becoming one of only 12 people in history to be Oscar-nominated for two different films in the same year.
Her first was for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in the Tom Cruise-starring John Grisham thriller The Firm, but her win came thanks to the second one for The Piano, Jane Campion’s epic historical romance that was nominated for eight Oscars in total and won ‘Best Screenplay’ for Campion as well.
Speaking about her earlier years to Backstage, Hunter said: “My career started off with a sort of defining element. I would say I was lucky to have my first big movie be Raising Arizona, because it’s still one of my most favourite movies. And I could say the same about Broadcast News, which came immediately after it. I learned so much right off the bat from people who were doing exactly what they should be doing in life.”
She then paid tribute to her director on the film that completely changed her profile in the industry, the movie that co-starred Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill and earned $140m at the box office against a budget of just $7m, saying: “Of course, The Piano established a great friendship with Jane Campion, which has been important to me. And doing (2007 TV drama) Saving Grace that was a formidable influence on what I learned. The learning curve was so steep doing that show; I had so much fun and got to take so many chances. So many chances! Stuff that I’d never done before, I got to do on Saving Grace“.
Saving Grace was a crime drama that ran for three seasons and featured Hunter as a hard-drinking, promiscuous Oklahoma detective who runs down and kills a man, leading her to seek divine inspiration in the form of a visiting angel. It was well reviewed, and Hunter was nominated for a Golden Globe, two Emmys and three SAG awards for her performance up until 2010.
