Patricia Arquette on why she hated portraying ‘ingenue’ roles in Hollywood

Ahead of the new season of Severance, Patricia Arquette reflects on why she is playing ‘this shadow side of a lot of women that you don’t get to explore when you’re younger’.

Patricia Arquette reflects on fame, playing the ‘ingenue’ – and finding her voice in Hollywood. Picture: Getty Images

Patricia Arquette accepts keeping her professional and personal lives separate is impossible. As someone who isn’t afraid to explore dark material and complex characters – from Medium’s haunted Allison DuBois to the abusive Dee Dee Blanchard in The Act – Arquette has always endeavoured to “emotionally” leave her work on set.

“But when you have a job, you have to go home and memorise all your lines for the next day. It doesn’t really end when your shooting day ends,” she explains.

“So there is a kind of bleed-through that happens.”

Likewise, fame itself has an impact. “How do you leave that at home?” she asks. “People are looking at you with this whole distorted thing: ‘What could you do for me, if I’m with you? Does it elevate my status in the world?’”

Severance star Patricia Arquette is reflecting on her experiences of fame. Picture: Getty Images

‘Are people really even present?’ Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette. Picture: Getty Images

That often leaves Arquette asking herself if people see her differently. “Are people really even present? Do they really care about you? Or is it through all these filters of who the hell they think you are and what that would mean to them, and what does that mean about who they are? The whole thing’s just super weird.”

The 56-year-old actor isn’t convinced that compartmentalising the elements of your life brings happiness anyway. That’s evident in her series Severance, in which staff of the biotech company Lumon undergo a medical procedure to “sever” their consciousness, so that when they are at work they have no memory of life outside the office, and vice versa.

Arquette plays icy Harmony Cobel, who oversees the “severed floor”, where Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Irving Bailiff (John Turturro), Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) and Dylan George (Zach Cherry) work.

Patricia Arquette. Picture: Getty Images

Patricia Arquette, Dan Erickson, Christopher Walken, John Turturro, Britt Lower, Adam Scott, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry and Ben Stiller of Severence. Picture: Getty Images

Being severed has enabled the four workers to escape their personal lives during office hours. For Mark, that means pressing pause on his overwhelming grief over his wife’s death, while for Helly it means reinventing herself away from the looming shadow of her family.

While Harmony is one of the only “unsevered” people viewers have so far met at Lumon, Arquette doesn’t believe that makes her any less splintered.

“I don’t think anybody these days is unsevered in real life anywhere,” she says with a shrug. “We’re all grappling with these parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at, or haven’t integrated, or don’t know how to give voice to.

“So I think there are a lot of aspects of Harmony that she is not ready to deal with, and I think part of her indoctrination in this organisation was to not look at those things.

“This is just the next level [of avoiding reality], having a literal medical procedure.”

Arquette believes her most interesting roles have come as she’s aged, noting that “there was a lot of boring stuff in being an ingenue” – which involved being an object of desire or someone who needed rescuing.

Listen to the full interview with Tammin Sursok on Something To Talk About:

“I am interested in exploring this kind of shadow side of a lot of women that you don’t get to explore when you’re younger,” she says.

“There’s a Greek tragedy to these kinds of women, and I am really enjoying that because it is so different from me … The older I get, the less likely I am to keep myself severed in realising there’s a lot of manipulative people in the world.”

For the actor, the themes of Severance feel particularly relevant coming on the back of a global pandemic and “these giant political changes in the world”, coupled with growing concern about technology and AI infiltrating everyday life.

“Beyond even these tech companies, we’ve become so disconnected from each other,” Arquette points out. “And that’s also at the core of this story.”

Severance streams Fridays on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping weekly. The new episode of the Stellar podcast, Something To Talk About, featuring Tammin Sursok is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Originally published as Patricia Arquette on why she hated portraying ‘ingenue’ roles in Hollywood