NEW YORK – Patricia Arquette has a problem. The veteran actress from a storied clan of thespians – including siblings Rosanna and David – just can’t sit still.
“There’s a part of me that forgets how to turn off,” says Arquette, 55, whose latest project is the Apple TV+ comedy series “High Desert” (first three episodes streaming Wednesday).
“I’m working on this, and I’m working on that, or I’m writing this thing and I’m painting and I’m cooking and I’m learning to spackle …”
Wait. Learning to spackle?
“Yeah, like at 10 at night I’ll think, ‘Hmm, that wall’s dirty, I’m going to have to paint it right now,’” she says. “I think, honestly, it’s an avoidance thing. It’s a healthy way to avoid something.”
And her family – son Enzo Rossi, 33, daughter Harlow, 20, and boyfriend Eric White – are OK with all this?
“No, everyone tells me to slow down,” she laughs. “My kids are like, ‘you gotta stop.’ And my boyfriend says, ‘Honey, honey, other people can paint the house.’”
Not on Arquette’s watch. The woman is not to be denied. Over the past few years, Arquette has delivered a series of searing all-in performances that have brought critical acclaim and industry accolades.
These include a 2015 Oscar for her motherly role in the feature film “Boyhood,” which was filmed over 12 years; 2019 Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for her portrayal of an enabling prison worker in Showtime’s “Escape at Dannemora”; and another Golden Globe in 2020 for her work in Hulu’s true-crime drama “The Act.”
Arquette also is no stranger to the small screen. In 2005, she made the jump to television, winning Emmys and Golden Globes for her portrayal of a psychic on “Medium,” which ran for six seasons and 130 episodes on NBC and later CBS. In 2015, she took a short-lived role in another CBS show, “CSI: Cyber.”
In ‘High Desert,’ Arquette is mourning for her mother and ‘all these people we’ve lost’
In a career that has found Arquette ping-ponging with ease between movies and TV projects, she’s doubling down on television, with her Emmy-nominated performance as a creepy boss in Apple TV+’s “Severance” and now, the streamer’s latest show, “High Desert.”
In the new series, Arquette plays Peggy, a kooky recovering drug addict who is grappling with the death of her mother while trying to start a new career as a private investigator. Matt Dillon plays Peggy’s ex and Bernadette Peters appears in dual roles best left unexplained for spoiler reasons.
“Addiction is a health situation, and it doesn’t mean those people are throwaway people without beautiful qualities,” Arquette says of Peggy. “This show is a celebration of love. We’re celebrating my mom, Nancy’s mom (series co-creator Nancy Fichman), and all these people we’ve lost along the way, and how you carry them with you.”
Arquette brought “High Desert” to friend and frequent collaborator Ben Stiller – they acted together in 1996’s “Flirting With Disaster” and he directed her in “Dannemora” and “Severance” – who tapped Jay Roach (from Stiller’s “Meet the Parents” films) to direct their latest project.
Arquette says the laughs in “High Desert” are all “on the page,” scripted moments that include fake barroom brawls in the touristy Pioneer Town amusement park where Peggy works, and a scene that finds a blotto Peggy absent-mindedly severing the top of her dilapidated car.
“She’s like a rock-and-roll Lucy Ricardo: She can’t be beaten, you can’t keep her down for a second,” says Roach of the actress’ work. “The attitude, the way she attacks the dialog, it’s just so Patricia.”
A defining snaggletooth that was almost fixed at age 12
Arquette’s blond Rubenesque looks are also part of her costume. In “Severance,” her look is aptly severe; in “Dannemora,” bedraggled. In “High Desert,” she’s lustily disheveled.
And then there’s her snaggletooth, a humanizing touch that’s delightfully out of sync with typical Hollywood perfection. And to think that Arquette, who grew up in Chicago and Virginia before settling in Los Angeles as a teenager, almost fixed the tooth at age 12.
“My parents asked if I wanted to straighten my teeth, even though I knew they couldn’t afford it,” she recalls. “At the same time, a boy in school said, ‘I’m putting you down for best looking, and you know you could be in Playboy if you fixed your teeth.’ Well, my sexuality was just beginning then. I was getting noticed, but I didn’t feel like this perfect blond girl-next-door person,” she says. “I felt, I’m more complicated than that. And I don’t want to look, or be treated, like something I’m not in the world.”
She came up with that revelation at age 12?
Arquette nods. “I had so many weird moments of deep thoughts in my childhood that I can’t really explain,” she says. “My mom was Jewish, my dad was Muslim, I went to Catholic school, I was the No. 1 person in my catechism class, I wanted to get my first communion, I wanted to be a nun.”
But acting for Arquette ran in the bloodline. Her future, and those of her siblings, almost seemed preordained. “I’m a fourth-generation actor,” she says. “My great grandfather was in vaudeville, my grandfather was in live radio and TV, my dad was an actor.”
Arquette has worked with directing giants, but it was her first, Tony Scott, who made a lasting impact
Roach says Arquette brings both fierce self-confidence and keen instincts to the set.
“There were dozens of times in the show where I went with her ideas,” he says. “If you are open as a director, she’ll give you great stuff … that, of course, I’ll take credit for later. But seriously, the truth is she has great directing instincts.”
Those chops will be on display later this year with Arquette’s directorial debut in “Gonzo Girl,” a feature film based on the 2016 novel by Cheryl Della Pietra, the assistant to the late “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Arquette has worked with a Who’s Who of directors, including Tim Burton (“Ed Wood”), David Lynch (“Lost Highway”) and Martin Scorsese (“Bringing Out The Dead”). But she credits one of her earliest mentors, the late Tony Scott (in his 1993 film “True Romance,” Arquette played endearing prostitute Alabama Whitman), with empowering her 25-year-old self.
“Tony was the perfect girl-dad to me. I was very young and an ingenue, and I’d have an idea, and he’d say, ‘Hey, ‘Bama has an idea,’ and we’d shoot it,” she says.
“What that did for me at that age was instill in me a sense of, your instincts are good, they’re smart, ask for that, try that.
“Of all the things any director has given me, that has informed my work in every single scene, every single day, for the rest of my career.”
