“I love to look at physically beautiful people, and obviously others do, too. But there’s such a narrow definition of what that is; the people who are my friends in life, the more I get to know them over the years, the more beautiful they are to me.”
― Holly Hunter
“I love wearing wigs because they’re instantly transformational.”
― Holly Hunter
“I guess I’m more of a direct person than an indirect one.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn’t dependent on my great, great good looks.”
― Holly Hunter
“I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.”
― Holly Hunter
“Privacy is paradise.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year. It’s always been an erratic rhythm.”
― Holly Hunter
“Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s considered a coup to become a lead on a kind of cutting-edge television series. I mean, that’s a plus for your feature film career and for your career in general. There are no walls anymore between the two.”
― Holly Hunter
“My career has never really been a vertical kind of thing. I mean, it’s always been a bit difficult for me.”
― Holly Hunter
“I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once. And you know, tennis, it’s not a good place for that.”
― Holly Hunter
“Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it’s kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I’m concerned. So is there an energy that’s higher than mine? Yes. But would I claim it as God? I would say no.”
― Holly Hunter
“There were so many lead roles available when I was in my thirties. Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called ‘Saving Grace,’ and I loved the character.”
― Holly Hunter
“I appreciate my instincts, but my instincts can be dead wrong. Circumspection can give you time.”
― Holly Hunter
“I have never been an easy fit. I’m a leading lady character actor; I don’t fit in one slot simply.”
― Holly Hunter
“The first and most important thing you need to be creative is to relax, particularly for the actors.”
― Holly Hunter
“Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don’t even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.”
― Holly Hunter
“The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There’s so much judgment going on. And I just don’t think that’s what God’s about.”
― Holly Hunter
“There’s no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one’s career. You can’t know that. You can tell young actors it’s going to be very difficult, but there’s no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.”
― Holly Hunter
“I get cold really quickly, but I don’t care. I like weather. I never understand why people move someplace so that they can avoid weather.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve never directed, but it must be humbling.”
― Holly Hunter
“The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then none.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve never had a career of that kind of box office power. I’ve always learned the hard way.”
― Holly Hunter
“I really admire people who are extraordinarily tolerant and patient.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve never worked as much as I would’ve wanted to, and that’s why I end up doing a lot of stage as well, because stage is a full course meal.”
― Holly Hunter
“More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you’re working, and I find that a real violation.”
― Holly Hunter
“I would love to work more – I really would – but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat.”
― Holly Hunter
“I act probably a lot more than you see. I happen to choose movies that don’t have much of a life, or I choose movies that are shown on cable instead of as features.”
― Holly Hunter
“I think it’s really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don’t want to think about the money. I want to see the story.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.”
― Holly Hunter
“Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you’re connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t offer advice to actors only because I’ve seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn’t work for me.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve enjoyed the process of understanding who I am through my work and who I am in relation to others: the intense collaboration that acting requires and thrives in.”
― Holly Hunter
“I always had an acting crush on Philip Seymour Hoffman. He just wowed me all the time. He was just quietly so impressive and so private.”
― Holly Hunter
“I am a huge fan of Cronenberg, all his movies.”
― Holly Hunter
“My sister took me as her own. My mum had a lot of help raising me. That’s what happens in large families: your siblings raise you.”
― Holly Hunter
“Man, I would have loved to have been fully cognisant of the power of Janis Joplin. I would have loved to have been part of the revolution.”
― Holly Hunter
“I object to the actual phrase ‘Follow me.’ You’ve gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities – they’re mine. They belong to me.”
― Holly Hunter
“I reveal all of myself. I bring all of myself to my roles. You only see me. You don’t see anything else but me. That is who’s there. They’re manifestations of my own self.”
― Holly Hunter
“I never thought about moving to L.A.; I always wanted to be in New York. I moved there, and now I still have a kind of love affair with the city.”
― Holly Hunter
“Most of the time I live a fully anonymous life, which is the way I like it.”
― Holly Hunter
“What’s great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don’t need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.”
― Holly Hunter
“For every movie that you go see, how many leading male roles are there in any given movie, and how many leading female roles are there? There may be 5 or 6 really good roles for guys and maybe one for a woman. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re 25. That’s just the logistics.”
― Holly Hunter
“I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn’t work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good – and then I got ‘The Piano.’”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m a leading lady character actor; I don’t fit in one slot simply. I’ve always been used to a certain amount of struggle, and that prepared me wonderfully for a mature age.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes it’s very difficult to do a movie that’s good and then have that movie make it to the light of day.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes I take a movie that I know is not great; it’s not great on the page, but I need to work. Sometimes I need to make the money. I need dough. I want to work, and so I’ll take something that is compromised in some arena. But it’s like, actors gotta act.”
― Holly Hunter
“The unknown makes people uncomfortable.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m not religious. I’m not an atheist. Would I say I’m an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I’m much more interested in.”
― Holly Hunter
“I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there’s higher purpose to all of this? I don’t think so.”
― Holly Hunter
“I really would love to take a big break and not be photographed, not perform.”
― Holly Hunter
“I grew up on a farm. The worst-looking chickens are the best layers. The ones that are the scraggliest… those are usually the ones that are really cooking.”
― Holly Hunter
“I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn’t even go spend the night at a friend’s unless they had a piano. But I didn’t have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.”
― Holly Hunter
“I found acting when I was 14, when I got cast in the chorus in a high school play, ‘The Boyfriend.’ In my high school, we did mainly musicals, so I just started doing nothing but musicals for years and loved it.”
― Holly Hunter
“To me, being creative is a very fragile thing. The environment in which one can create is a very particular one, and somehow, I’ve always felt the need to be very protective of that.”
― Holly Hunter
“Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I’ve never been a box office name.”
― Holly Hunter
“’Saving Grace’ was a full stretch-out – literally, physically, spiritually, psychologically. And I needed to take a year-and-a-half off when it was over.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes you have to marinate instead of making a quick decision. I appreciate my instincts, but my instincts can be dead wrong. Circumspection can give you time.”
― Holly Hunter
“So much European cinema has open arms to stories carried by women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And America is a little behind in that.”
― Holly Hunter
“With longevity comes, ‘Nothing is going to kill me; I cannot irreparably damage my career.’ Those days are over. The most I can sustain are fender benders.”
― Holly Hunter
“People have always searched for answers. That’s why we have religion; people have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.”
― Holly Hunter
“’Top Of The Lake’ is a great story with a beginning, and a middle and an end, about darkness – it’s like the heart of darkness. And everybody has got one. When I was reading it, I couldn’t put it down, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s always been my way to move about a little more horizontally. My career has never been like a shooting star.”
― Holly Hunter
“I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it. And then I also like to work nonstop, maybe for a year-and-a-half, and then take a year off.”
― Holly Hunter
“I think Ada in ‘The Piano’ is the most interior character I’ve ever had the chance to play, either on the stage or in anything I’ve done for film or TV.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t mind at all venturing off to do a television movie if it’s gonna give me something new to mess around in my mind, to turn around in.”
― Holly Hunter
“The forcefulness of life is where vitality kind of intersects.”
― Holly Hunter
“I love fiction, you know? I find it fascinating. So when film really does go into fictional places, that’s the most exciting for me. And when the fiction is about the person rather than about the place, that’s even more exciting.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t believe in angels, and I’m not a religious person.”
― Holly Hunter
“What is God, and how do you believe in him – how do you not believe? It’s a question the world continues to tussle with. People’s beliefs get them in a lot of conflicts.”
― Holly Hunter
“Feature films seem geared toward very large budgets, action, broad comedy. That seems to dominate all year where it used to be relegated to summer.”
― Holly Hunter
“After ‘Broadcast News,’ I could have played that same part, but I didn’t want to. So I didn’t follow it up with a hit.”
― Holly Hunter
“A play is a hard thing, particularly in L.A. It’s less expensive than in New York, but there’s also less of a commitment to people doing plays than in New York. So it’s a strange battle.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t make decisions just on the character I’m supposed to play. Sometimes it’s based on the director, sometimes it’s based on the story, sometimes I need money, or sometimes I’m just starved to work.”
― Holly Hunter
“My nucleus of friends or something protects me from the machinery that is Hollywood. I don’t think I’m on the same quest that a lot of people are. I guess that could be a limitation.”
― Holly Hunter
“What people have thought of me, of the turns that I’ve taken, has never really played into my decisions.”
― Holly Hunter
“Some actors say they don’t know themselves at all, and that’s why they act: because they can disappear into other people.”
― Holly Hunter
“Helen Mirren is, I think, one of the fascinating actresses. Period. She captivates people and has tremendous power and charisma because she has never cashed in on being an exquisite beauty, even though I think she is. I can’t say I’m anything like her, but I hope something similar will happen with me.”
― Holly Hunter
“People think I disappear sporadically, but I just do projects that don’t get international acclaim.”
― Holly Hunter
“Characters never live with me in film the way they do on stage, and they have certain ramifications that movies just never have.”
― Holly Hunter
“In my real life, I see people who are really enjoying their lives – I mean, really enjoying their lives – and they take joy in their daily obligations; they just do. And I believe that at a certain point, you’ve got to choose to be that way. You choose to approach your life that way. Or it’s all kind of a drag until Friday.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play… We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?”
― Holly Hunter
“In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For ‘The Piano,’ I went, ‘I’m going to learn these piano pieces. I’m going to learn this sign language, and I’m going to do them all day every day, five days a week.’ It was a totally physical thing.”
― Holly Hunter
“Crazy people are my people? Really? I think that’s silly. That’s another one of those pigeonhole things. Lay somebody on an ironing board and put a scalding hot iron on them, get that going real good: ‘Oh, this is who Holly Hunter is.’”
― Holly Hunter
“As an actor, I always like some tension, some distance, between me and the character I’m playing.”
― Holly Hunter
“I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation – as an actor and as a person – perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it’s cute.”
― Holly Hunter
“People don’t come to New York out of resignation. They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.”
― Holly Hunter
“If you’ve had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen. I mean, come on – I didn’t know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.”
― Holly Hunter
“The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.”
― Holly Hunter
“There’s a tremendous amount of humor… in very unexpected places.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve worked with a lot of female directors over the course of my career: Martha Coolidge, Catherine Hardwicke, Jodie Foster.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t offer advice to actors only because I’ve seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn’t work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.”
― Holly Hunter
“I liked to carry the script into an audition because, for me, it reminded people that this was not the final performance. I’m still a work in progress.”
― Holly Hunter
“You can tell young actors it’s going to be very difficult, but there’s no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it. It’s a very difficult career in the long run, but at the same time, there’s no long-haul career I’d rather be involved with.”
― Holly Hunter
“Minibars are very appealing, especially when someone else is paying.”
― Holly Hunter
“I bring all of myself to my roles. You only see me. You don’t see anything else but me. That is who’s there. They’re manifestations of my own self.”
― Holly Hunter
“There was a drama club in our high school, and I just did plays.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m not a media personality, I’m an actress. I want to protect that thing: the suspension of disbelief. The rest of it is just distraction.”
― Holly Hunter
“In the life of a director – these days in particular – when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they’re great friends.”
― Holly Hunter
“After I did ‘Broadcast News’ and got an Academy Award nomination, the first thing I did was ‘Roe vs. Wade’ at NBC.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t suffer the decisions the studio world makes.”
― Holly Hunter
“My life has a great degree of dimension without making movies.”
― Holly Hunter
“This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don’t like that.”
― Holly Hunter
“The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that’s as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there’s so many things I don’t know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures – maybe even 18 or 19 of them – when I get on a subway car every day.”
― Holly Hunter
“New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.”
― Holly Hunter
“I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.”
― Holly Hunter
“Being somebody who’s like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.”
― Holly Hunter
“I got the Mr. Incredible mold – the 3D, you know – it’s cool.”
― Holly Hunter
“I like to do research. It gives me a sense of ownership. That’s very powerful for me as an actor to just own it.”
― Holly Hunter
“I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it.”
― Holly Hunter
“The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it’s nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that’s why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.”
― Holly Hunter
“Drama is all about the moment of ultimate conflict for a person.”
― Holly Hunter
“When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don’t even have to mention that.”
― Holly Hunter
“Giving up something personal to the public, you are surrendering something.”
― Holly Hunter
“Each project, I can almost feel like I’m like a different person.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes I go, ‘Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,’ like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m almost 60. I’ve been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you’re an actress.”
― Holly Hunter
“Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you’re depicting.”
― Holly Hunter
“In my career, I’ve never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I’d do other movies which make very little money, or they’re not seen that much.”
― Holly Hunter
“Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called ‘Saving Grace,’ and I loved the character.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s great to go to the cinema and have a conversation about something that is almost taboo.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m too small and too short. I thought that was odd; that should be a non-issue to me.”
― Holly Hunter
“With ‘Broadcast News,’ it became a non-issue, and with ‘The Piano,’ it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people’s minds about that, because that’s neither here nor there.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m from Oklahoma City, and there’s a statue across from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Jesus. It’s called ‘Jesus Wept.’ And I love this statue because it’s a statue of Jesus with his head in his hand. And his sadness and his pain at some of the choices that are made here – that just breaks his heart.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s huge in my life.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t think it’s wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.”
― Holly Hunter
“I would say, yeah, I’m a spiritual person.”
― Holly Hunter
“Do I believe in God? I don’t know what that really means. I don’t know what my personal connections with G-o-d are. But spirituality is soulfulness.”
― Holly Hunter
“Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it’s kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I’m concerned. So is there an energy that’s higher than mine? Yes.”
― Holly Hunter
“I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.”
― Holly Hunter
“I got a horror film, ‘The Burning,’ and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in ‘The Burning,’ Jason Alexander.”
― Holly Hunter
“I was playing ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn’t remember it.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes it’s the script or an opportunity to work with an incredible director.”
― Holly Hunter
“Sometimes it’s the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it’s an interesting supporting character, or there’s a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let’s have a good laugh about that one.”
― Holly Hunter
“So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.”
― Holly Hunter
“I’m not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.”
― Holly Hunter
“There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They’re different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.”
― Holly Hunter
“The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there’s a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there’s less money at stake.”
― Holly Hunter
“It’s not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.”
― Holly Hunter
“I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she’s so instantly lovable.”
― Holly Hunter
“As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible – literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.”
― Holly Hunter
“This is one of the reasons I like to act – it’s because acting forces you into situations you don’t know.”
― Holly Hunter
“There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That’s absolutely certain.”
― Holly Hunter
“I am often offered roles or women who are very strong, uncompromising. But it’s fun to do ‘Manglehorn,’ where I’m playing somebody who’s very open, very optimistic, very positive. I don’t want to bore myself.”
― Holly Hunter
“Pixar has the integrity to not rush.”
― Holly Hunter
“I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.”
― Holly Hunter
“I wouldn’t even go spend the night at a friend’s unless they had a piano. But I didn’t have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.”
― Holly Hunter
“I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who’s a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator – we were the only two people in there – and she’s been one of my very dearest friends since.”
― Holly Hunter
“It is difficult to love people; even when you do love them, it is difficult to know how – how to express it.”
― Holly Hunter
“When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year’s Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That’s what we do.”
― Holly Hunter
“Am I going to go to Heaven or Hell when I die? No. Is there going to be a second coming, and people are going to be stricken down? I find all that exclusionary.”
― Holly Hunter
“I had such total, unequivocal, enthusiastic encouragement to be an actress. Looking back, I really find that to be a total mystery. Don’t ask me why. My father was just in love with the idea that I would be an actress.”
― Holly Hunter
“Good female parts are hard to come by, so I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage.”
― Holly Hunter
“I don’t want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it’s a great place to come from. It’s also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.”
― Holly Hunter
“I think that ‘Saving Grace’ is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.”
― Holly Hunter
“What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that’s not fact but faith?”
― Holly Hunter
“I’ve moved laterally, as opposed to vertically. I was never a superstar. I’ve always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year.”
― Holly Hunter
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