Laura Linney's father has just died of cancer and now she's starring as terminally ill Cathy in TV comedy The Big C. She talks about how the show has touched her, and the viewers
While growing up, Laura Linney spent many happy hours putting together Joseph Cornell boxes ? collections of objects that represented an idea, a fantasy, or a person. "I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word," she says, "so when teachers asked for a book report, I would try to fudge my way through. For Tom Sawyer, I made a whole creation based on what would have been in Tom Sawyer's pocket, and then I did another one for the story of Anastasia. It was the groovy 60s, so they let me get away with it."
I ask what a Cornell box representing Cathy Jamison, Linney's character in the new comedy series The Big C, would consist of. Cathy is a teacher living in Minneapolis, whose plodding existence loses its footing when she is given an advanced skin cancer diagnosis. The first episodes show a woman stumbling between responses: refusing punishing treatment that might prolong her life slightly; cartwheeling down corridors; deciding not to tell her family about the diagnosis; flashing her doctor; keeping her juvenile husband at arm's length; and trying desperately, skittishly, to fix her teenage son's brattish behaviour before it's too late. Desperation collides with exhilaration. In the very first scenes, inspired by happy childhood memories, she decides to build a pool ? despite her garden being much, much too small for one.
Linney pauses, thinking about the question. In fact, she is silent so long I find myself glancing nervously at the wall, the ceiling, a chair. Finally she says: "There would be a picture of a swan dive, definitely. And a big blue sky. There's something very symbolic about diving, and the pool, and I watched a lot of tapes of [legendary US Olympian] Greg Louganis diving over and over and over again while I was preparing for the role. I had pictures of divers up everywhere; images of falling, and the beauty of falling; the leap up and the moment of suspense before you start to fall, knowing you'll finally hit the water."
The interview with Linney, which necessarily revolves around cancer, illness and death, feels raw-nerved and tentative for the saddest of reasons. Just a few weeks ago her father, acclaimed off-Broadway playwright Romulus Linney, died of lung cancer, aged 80. The pair were very close. He and her mother, a nurse at a cancer hospital, divorced when Linney was six months old, but they all lived in Manhattan, and she would bond with him even more deeply while studying acting at college, through phone conversations in which he'd explain the meaning of Ibsen.
Linney is, at heart, a theatre animal. She grew up expecting a career in regional theatre, spent eight years at college studying the stage ? only leaving at the age of 26 ? named her dog after 19th-century Italian actor Eleanora Duse, and once said her father's profession meant that, when it came to the theatre, she "was like a homing pigeon. I just went there, like a deep instinct, and I've known it my entire life."
His death kept Linney from the Golden Globes, where she won an award for her portrayal of Cathy, but she was conscientiously back on stage within days, finishing a Broadway run of the play Time Stands Still. Then, almost immediately, she came to the UK for publicity, bringing long-time friend and colleague John Benjamin Hickey, who plays her brother in The Big C, as her prompt and protector through the interview. When I commiserate about the overnight flight that brought them here, Linney gives a wry grimace. "There are much worse things in life."
When I ask what attracted her to the role, she says it "intersected with a lot of things I had been really thinking about and obsessing about", including time, life and the nature of ageing. She also cites the fact that a comedy about cancer seemed "an almost impossible task. I could really see the way we could use this mercurial kind of comedy, which would either bring people closer to the story, or push them away."
The show's use of comedy is certainly subtle, and shifting; this isn't a sitcom with a slap bass and a laughter track. Some of the comedy comes from Cathy's sudden, stubborn embrace of life ? her decision to confine her restaurant dinner to "desserts and liquor" ? but most arises in these early episodes from moments of shock and discomfort, laughs that are more gasp than chuckle. They break the tension when, for instance, Cathy tells her student, played by Gabourey Sidibe, star of Precious, "you can either be fat and jolly, or a skinny bitch. It's up to you." They're there again when she tells her neighbour Marlene that she's "a fucking cunt". They're there too when Cathy responds to her son's attempt to scare her with some frights of her own. After he pretends to cut off his finger while chopping vegetables, he arrives home to find his mother lying in the bath in a pool of blood, apparently unconscious.
Linney says another factor that attracted her to the show is that "comedy is a way to make sense of chaos. It's a way of dealing with things that are overwhelming, that threaten you; it's a way to survive and get closer to the truth." She felt the series could address issues "beyond just cancer ? it could address death. And by that I mean," she mouths the word silently, "'death'. Just the fact that we're all going there, like it or not. It's the one common experience, no matter what race you are, what country you live in, your religious beliefs. That's the one thing we all share."
In the US, while Linney's performance has been almost universally lauded, responses to the show itself have been varied. There have been the people who have come backstage to congratulate her on The Big C over the course of her Broadway run. "I'm very happy that the people who are dealing with cancer themselves have shown such gratitude. That has been really, really nice," she says with feeling. But the show has also faced criticism. There are those who feel it's not funny enough ? that it doesn't go dark enough, deep enough. And the most visceral reactions have been reserved for her character's decision not to tell her family about her diagnosis. "People have taken that very personally," says Linney, "which was a surprise to me."
Hickey jumps in. "What if it had happened to a man, if he had got cancer and didn't tell, I wonder if they would have reacted so strongly? Don't you think it's a sexist thing? The fact that the wife and the mother fails to tell her family really pushes buttons for people."
"In some ways I think you're right," says Linney. "It makes them ask: where are her responsibilities? What is she doing? That really touches a nerve with people, very, very strongly."
Linney's body language is prim, self-contained, only hinting at what lies beneath; a quality that she brings to her most famous roles. She first entered the public consciousness in the early 90s, when she seemed to walk straight out of the pages of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, into the role of wide-eyed, strait-laced midwesterner, Mary Ann Singleton in the TV adaptation. The way the well-scrubbed, apple-cheeked Linney embodied that role was astonishing. And Singleton would set the tone for many of her later performances. Yes, she was super-straight on the surface, yes she found it difficult to negotiate swinging 70s San Francisco, but beneath that facade was an intelligence, an ambition, and a wildness. Within the first episode of the show, for instance, she was sleeping with her married boss.
She slept with her married boss in You Can Count On Me, too, in 2000 ? the film won her her first Oscar nomination. She played Sammy, the kind, religious single mother, orphaned as a child, trying to pull her younger brother out of his emotional morass. She was nominated again for her role in Kinsey as Clara McMillen, the famous sex researcher's wife, who was practical, studious and domestic on the surface ? and also, less obviously, a great enthusiast for anal sex. Her third nomination came for her role as a neurotic, troubled playwright in The Savages, trying to cope with both her abusive father's dementia and her brother's response to it, keen to put a more positive spin on the situation, until finally admitting defeat and letting it all hang out.
Cathy provides another chance for Linney to explore a complicated character, to take a forensic look beneath a life that has, for years, comprised an endless search for the perfect couch, and an equally endless attempt to keep a sweet-but-shallow husband, and an over-indulged son, fed and happy. Linney has just turned 47, and for years people have been asking her whether she's struggling to find good material as she gets older ? a question that is pretty well answered by her string of complex roles and her constant work (she has been known to make as many as seven films in a year). It's a question that she seems to find insulting, not because of her age, but because of what it reveals about the fear of ageing, in Hollywood particularly.
"I find the whole disdain for ageing crazy," she says. "There's no respect for the privilege of it. For a community, for a country, for a world, to be wasteful of time in that way is really unhealthy. When people ask me about that, I get deeply insulted on behalf of people who have not had a long, full life. I hear someone complain about ageing and I just feel almost violent, you know? I don't want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I'm 50, and I will have missed a whole decade! I think it's pretty damn good to age and I hope I always feel this way.
"I hope I'm able to accept the time that's been given to me, and enjoy it, you know? Because," she pauses, "people need to realise: it's a gift."
? The Big C starts on Channel 4 tonight at 11.05pm
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/feb/08/laura-linney-comedy-big-c
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