“You’ll see”: how Patricia Arquette played the long game and stayed ahead of the curve
Patricia Arquette has long ensured that her experience of Hollywood is challenging and unconventional, whether she’s working under the direction of a surreal master like David Lynch, as she did in 1997 with Lost Highway, or dedicating herself to a time-spanning project, like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood.
While Arquette hasn’t backed away from more mainstream projects, even starring in an Adam Sandler comedy, the actor knows that there’s something to be gained from a movie that goes beyond the conventions of popular cinema, which brings up the question of why her career on the big screen began to dip in the mid-2000s.
Arquette’s appearances in movies as successful as True Romance or even Holes started to disappear, and instead she could be found on TV, specifically the supernatural procedural drama Medium, of which she starred in 130 episodes, playing a medium named Allison DuBois. Arquette earned several Golden Globe nominations for her performance over the years, although some fans thought she’d allowed her career to stoop in a less prosperous direction, regardless.
But she was working on something else in the meantime, which would eventually pay off when it was released in 2014, 12 years after filming began. She was cast as the mother in Boyhood, with Ethan Hawke playing her husband and Ellar Coltrane as her son, Mason. Linklater chose to shoot the film in real time as the characters aged, allowing for a cinematic experiment unlike anything done before (or had it?). It really made the idea of coming-of-age cinema take on a new meaning.
While she was filming this, she took on the role in Medium, not only knowing that she was playing the long game with Boyhood, but also aware that TV was only becoming bigger with the arrival of streaming in the 2000s.
She told The New Yorker, “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?’”
Arquette was aware it looked like she wasn’t interested in movies anymore, but she stuck with Boyhood. “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’,” she explained.
Boyhood earned Arquette an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, while she also picked up awards from the likes of Bafta and the Golden Globes. Clearly, her dedication to the part paid off, even if people assumed she’d given up on interesting films in the time it took to shoot the movie.
Additionally, her interest in TV paid off, too, with her coming to star in some acclaimed shows, like Boardwalk Empire, Escape at Dannemora, and, of course, Severance, during the 2010s and beyond. But Boyhood will perhaps always be her biggest achievement, albeit one that took 12 years to see results.
