Patricia Arquette has spent her entire adult life in front of the camera. She made her feature film debut in 1987 at age 18 in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.” Since then, she’s performed critically-acclaimed roles in movies like “True Romance,” “Flirting with Disaster,” and “Boyhood.” She’s also been in TV shows such as “Medium” and “Severance.”
Now she stars in the Apple TV+ show “High Desert,” playing Peggy, a manic former drug dealer trying to get her life together while struggling to remain sober. She also decides to take on a new career as a private investigator.
Arquette tells KCRW that Peggy is flawed and can be destructive and manipulative. She sees the character as not necessarily bad, but as someone who has a story to tell.
“She's constantly leaving this chaos in her wake. But like many other addicts, she's smart and funny and sweet and has a good heart. … She's been taking care of her mom and her siblings when she was little. So she's also codependent. So she's picking up all these broken birds along the way. … I've known some addicts in my life and love them very much and lost a lot of them.”
To craft Peggy, Arquette says she pulled from her own experiences, including growing up with her alcoholic father and abusive mother, and living on a Southern commune.
“I didn't understand money, and I didn't understand the material force and how much money mattered in the world. Everyone was poor. So we were all the same. I didn't understand that there was a real caste system in America until I moved to the city. And I realized, ‘Oh, rich people are better, or they think they're better.’”
She adds, “I definitely grew up in a chaotic circumstance. And Peggy is chaos and this world that she is in chaos. And maybe there's a part of that that is my playground.”
In stark contrast, Arquette’s character on “Severance” — Harmony Cobel — is an intense and buttoned-up manager.
“I had a therapist say once, ‘A lot of times when kids grew up in chaos, they choose very structured things.’ So these characters are the opposite. And I played them right back-to-back from each other. And to play Cobel, who's so structured, interior, conditioned by everything that she grew up in, to then turn around and play Peggy that's wild and an explosion, it was such a joy.”
Political activism
Arquette’s parents were civil rights and environmental activists who took their kids to union picket lines. Arquette has continued that legacy, including using her 2015 Oscars speech to talk about women’s rights and equal pay and rights. She’s also been vocal about LGBTQ rights. Her sister, Alexis, was trans.
“I'm horrified that women have lost, in many states, their right to their reproductive rights over their own bodies. And that LGBT families are being attacked. That trans kids cannot even discuss being trans. They can't find a support system. They can't have therapists help them, that their families have to live in fear all the time. I mean, this is the United States of America.”
She adds, “This idea that trans people are dangerous in some kind of a way with kids? I really resent. Because we all know that, by and large, it's not trans people who are committing crimes.”
Looking back on the 2016 election, Arquette says apathy caused the American political landscape to shift drastically, and a subconscious bias has prevented people from caring about the rights of marginalized communities.
“We should have cared about what was gonna happen to women. And because we know: If it's women, it's also gonna be LGBTQ people, it's gonna be everybody else. It's going to be minority rights. It's going to be activist rights. It's going to be protesters’ rights. When you start having a society that quickly starts removing people's rights, they're going to remove everyone's rights who they don't agree with.”