Now, with almost three decades of experience to draw on, Hunter says she can “laugh a little bit” at daunting circumstances. “After you’ve done it 25 or 50 times, then you’re laughing. And you can approach it with a bit of humility about yourself. That’s a nice dividend to getting older.”
Her longtime friend Amy Madigan, who played a widow in one episode of Saving Grace last season (she and Hunter sang a duet of the pop song “Venus” while standing over a corpse in a morgue), agrees that age has brought an understanding of the need to lighten up. “If you take yourself too damn seriously, it’s annoying,” she says. “And I love that about Holly—she’ll look at you and say, ‘Hey, man!’ and crack up.”
Ego went completely out the window when Hunter was filming Thirteen, which earned her a fourth Oscar nomination in 2004. The low-budget indie film “had a very tight shooting schedule,” says cowriter-director Catherine Hardwicke, and at one point she had to rush Hunter out of the makeup trailer with only the left side of her face finished. “Who else would do that, with just one of her eyes made up? Nobody on the planet,” Hardwicke says. “I promised I’d only shoot her from the left.”
Hardwicke is also impressed with Hunter’s “childlike nature. She’s never lost touch with being a kid, being crazy and having fun.” The actress had a great rapport with her teenage costars (Evan Rachel Wood and Nikki Reed), encouraging them but also learning from them, Hardwicke adds. “She wasn’t a mom yet; I had no idea that she was even planning to be a mom, really. Except for one time somebody asked her that question: ‘How can you play a mother when you’re not one?’ and she said, ‘Well, I might be.’ ” At the time, Hunter was recently divorced from Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a relationship she does not discuss; she became involved with MacDonald and three years later, at the age of 47, she gave birth to their twins.
“I could never have had the career I’ve had if I were starting out now,” Hunter says. “Never, ever. Those movies I made would not be made or financed. Those scripts would not be nurtured. It’s a much narrower environment; that’s what I’m seeing.”
We are talking about how so many women over the age of 40—Glenn Close, Kyra Sedgwick, Mary-Louise Parker—have found success on the smaller screen. When I bring it up, Hunter crows, “Oh, the old-women-in-Hollywood thing! Bring out the old broads!” But she acknowledges that because teenagers make up the biggest audience for movies on opening weekend, mature actors—men too, but especially women, who are less likely to be cast as romantic leads in films—see their big-screen options dwindling. “TV is serving a broader audience, because it’s a different experience. And I’m totally a beneficiary of that,” says Hunter, who has often noted that she was never a box office name because her taste in projects is too odd.
Madigan explains the preponderance of women in meaty TV roles this way: “They’re not getting offers for features I mean, do you want to sugarcoat it? Or the offers they’re getting are crappy offers. Thank goodness for cable.”
Along with more and better roles, a TV series offers actors one thing a movie does not: the chance to develop a character over time, to understand his or her psyche more completely. “I feel that Grace is filled with a certain amount of rage,” Hunter says, “and I didn’t know that when we started out.” In many ways, Hunter’s first foray into episodic television has been an adventure in shaking off expectations—about what it is to be a woman, what it is to get older, what it is to have faith (and lose it), what it is to be in charge (and yet to yearn, sometimes, to surrender). To hear her talk about Saving Grace is to realize that TV has given Hunter something that for years was associated more with film: creative freedom.
“My idea of entertainment is also a lot about provocation,” Hunter says. “We live in highly moralistic times, and I revel in the glory of Grace—somebody who’s exercising an elemental muscle that is not politically correct. Grace feels like a release culturally for me, and I want toexpress that!”
