Interview: Role challenged Tunney (2006)

I found a nice article/ interview in which Robin talks about the film "Open Window" (2006).
She explains her feelings about the film and about being an actress.
To read it click on Read More.
You can also find the article in the Interviews Section.



Source: rogerebert.suntimes.com




Role challenged Tunney

By Roger Ebert
 
PARK CITY, Utah - Robin Tunney sits in the corner of an empty coffee house and smiles about the fact that her TV series "Prison Break" has made her recognizable everywhere she goes. "It's not something I pursued, doing TV. I've been broke in my career, and that's okay. I love doing indie films."

I love seeing her in them, too. You may not have heard of "Niagara, Niagara" (best actress at Venice, 1997), and "Cherish" and "The Secret Lives of Dentists" (both 2002), but they were very good - especially "Cherish," with Tunney under house arrest and wearing an ankle bracelet that will sound an alarm if she leaves her apartment - which she must do for reasons of diabolical precision.
Now here she is at Sundance in Mia Goldman's "Open Window," her most serious drama, and most challenging role. She plays a photographer happily engaged to Joel Edgerton, when a stranger breaks into her studio and rapes her. She is not quick to recover. She refuses to press charges, won't talk about happened, retreats into depression and withdrawal. The movie is about the slow healing of her relationship.


"Revenge is silly except in Elizabethan drama," she said. "To confront the rapist doesn't heal anything. I like the way the movie allows her to be silent, to do nothing, to not really react for a long time."


Tunney said she was surprised by how difficult the rape scene was: "I'm not an emotional person. I don't cry, I'm pretty composed, but I just broke down and started crying and couldn't stop, and finally had to go to a hospital for a sedative. It was embarrassing. But at least we got through it. Mia Goldman, the director, was the velvet knife: She got exactly what she wanted, but she asked for it in the best way."


Tunney grew up in Chicago, graduated from the Chicago Academy of the Arts, is happy to be back home for "Prison Break," which shoots around Chicago through March. She thinks a lot, she said, about how she'll handle the next 20 years of her career: "Acting is so youth- driven, especially for women, who start doing crazy things to their faces. No woman enjoys getting older. In fact, a lot of old actors don't seem very happy. I worked once with G. D. Spradlin, though, who was almost 80, and he told me an old actor is like an old hooker: You don't like to do it anymore, but you're flattered when you're asked."