The court has appointed me to be your legal guardian. What? You have to come
with me. First of all, congratulations on your Golden Globe nomination for this role.
Where were you and what was going through your head when you heard about the nomination?
I was in the middle of a very, very detailed bit of voice work. I was in a recording studio,
we were doing a very long session. I'd had one five-minute break. I hadn't turned on my phone
and then we had a lunch break and I found out six hours later after the event that I'd been
nominated so, you know, it was it was a kind of total shock. You've spoken about how this role
was really refreshing for you to play so can you touch on that a little bit and what was
it about this script that felt different for you? As an actor you're always trying to find
roles that challenge you and allowed to show you in a different light, and I feel
like sometimes as a diverse woman, it's really hard to find roles that don't necessarily have
any obligation tied to your ethnicity or an excuse or it's a, you know, perpetuating
stereotype of who you are as a Latin woman, so for me, this was an incredible experience because
Fran just felt like any other woman that is just doing a job and trying to achieve something at
life. Now your character in this is pretty ruthless, what is it about playing this anti-hero type that
really strikes you? Traditionally female roles have either been sort of all out
bad and therefore sort of unappealing, and they're the real villain or they've been
the ones that we want to watch and spend time with, are the sort of nurturing, maternal, good,
loving, kind characters. I think when there are women who take those qualities and use them
for ill ends, it gets very interesting for me. I think, you know, both Marla Grayson in
this film and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, they both, you know, are fully able to play the tropes of
femininity that that society has deemed the most acceptable and Marla is able to convincingly be
caring, nurturing, commendable, trustworthy - all the things that we value, and then you realize
she's none of those things. It forces you to denormalize a lot of things, you know, which is
not only the subject matter but also, you know, multiple subjects, like women being unapologetic,
women just working really hard for what they want to do and going for it and not backing down.
She forces them into the home, auctions off their house, and uses the proceeds to pay herself. Because
caring is my job. Now, this film also exposes this very real problem which is exploiting the elderly
community. Why do we ultimately believe that we're sending people to elderly homes and
they're not just still a business? Like, what makes you feel like they're going to take
care of their your family the way that you take for your family? So, it brings a lot of awareness
and it isn't a comfortable watch, I think, that this is not like a breezy movie. This is a movie that is
heart. As soon as I read it, I went straight to the Internet to see what I could find out, and I found
horrendous stories about the truth of this matter, and I found testimonies by relatives who'd,
you know, had their loved one, you know, admittedly maybe they'd taken their their eye off the ball
but they thought that the loved one was in safe hands, and then they were completely exploited and
terrible treatment, and very hard to extract the elderly person from the clutches of one of these
people because they have the law on their side, but obviously we didn't know when we made the
film how much, you know, the health system, the kind of big business of health care, would come
to the fore in people's minds, you know, during the year of the pandemic, so that's given it a
a new sort of unsettling relevance that we weren't expecting. Hello Marla Grayson. I don't like you.
You only just met me. And such an all-star cast. Peter Dinklage, Dianne Wiest. Everyone that is part
of it is on the ride. Dianne Wiest, who's two-time Oscar winner, like, incredible in
this film but not to be surprised. She's incredible and then Peter who,
you know, I think is coming off of being in a TV show that can be very demanding as an actor and I
think he wanted a break out of that image and this was really good for him because it just shows how
incredibly dynamic he is as an actor, and I am just so grateful that J had a vision of
grabbing people that not necessarily would be the obvious choice for roles that really allow actors
to show what they're capable of. Without getting too spoilery, why do you think the final scene was
necessary to happen? There was some talk as to whether we shoot an alternative scene for
that final scene and in the end we didn't, so the scene as J wrote it is intact I think because,
you know, life in our world has taught us to expect that people get away with these things. I mean I
think the truth of it, in reality, if Marla was with us, she'd have gotten away with it all.