Patricia Arquette never felt comfortable being cast for her luminous looks in movies like “True Romance.”
In an exclusive new interview with Page Six, the Oscar winner reflected on her younger days as an actress and fighting off the pressure to be Hollywood’s next “It” girl.
“I really was conscious about trying to get out of that ingenue situation as quickly as possible,” Arquette, who portrayed the role of Alabama Whitman in the 1993 film, explained. “Beauty felt really dangerous to me and a bit scary. It also felt one-note, and felt like [it had] a short shelf life.”
Arquette told us that’s why she was thrilled to later be cast in the 2001 movie “Human Nature,” in which she played a writer with hypertrichosis. She loved the project because her beauty wasn’t on display as she was “covered in hair” for it.
“I didn’t want to be limited by my own beauty,” the actress, now 57, shared. “I didn’t even feel beautiful myself, but the world was treating me like that, so I always had a really intense conflict with that.”
Flash forward to today, Arquette’s ambivalence about beauty almost made her not cast model Camila Morrone as the lead in her directorial debut, “Gonzo Girl.”
The film — which follows the story of a “struggling young writer who takes a job working as an assistant to a novelist with a wild reputation,” per IMDb — was recently screened at the Tribeca Festival.
“I was like, ‘Oh, no, maybe that’s distracting.’ Then I was like, ‘Hold on, what is this reverse bias I have?’” she recalled of her thought process.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty. That’s all you get in this life. You don’t get to be the great actor, too.’”
However, Arquette ultimately did end up casting Morrone, who plays an assistant to a famous unhinged writer.
The movie is based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Cheryl Della Pietra, who was famed gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s assistant. Actor Willem Dafoe plays the writer based on Thompson.
Arquette, who both stars in and directs the film, told Page Six that she is an “incredible fan” of the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” author, who died in 2005.
“I think he’s a genius,” she gushed of Thompson. “He was really pivotal to my growth, I think.”
She also noted that many of the themes of the movie, like co-dependence and addiction, are “all really important” to her.
“I don’t think we see enough of it in movies,” she explained, “but we really experience it in life.”
Aside from her directorial debut, Arquette’s acting career has absolutely exploded in the last few years on the small screen.
She won numerous accolades for her roles in “The Act,” “Escape at Dannemora” and “Severance,” telling us she was especially surprised by the latter’s success.
“I really thought, especially when we were shooting the first season coming out of COVID, it’s claustrophobic, the first season,” she explained. “I thought people are not going to want this after coming out of COVID. And boy was I wrong!”
“I’m so lucky,” she added of her career longevity. “I felt, like, so ‘wow,’ blown away by the fact that I’ve been able to have this career.”