What were they?
My first job was working at a collection agency where I was on the phone. So I had to call people who hadn’t paid their bills. And because I had such a low deep voice, they didn’t know that I was, like, 14 years old. Then I moved out on my own at 16. I didn’t do the typical [job], which was working in a restaurant. Mine were office-oriented jobs. I worked for an accountant. I was a receptionist at 20th Century Fox for a producer who worked for Aaron Spelling. It was being in the [Hollywood] world but not in the world, very humbling. Being able to watch it from an objective point of view and going, “This isn’t where I’m going to stay.” I had much bigger designs.
You believed in yourself. You worked your ass off. It happened. And I imagine the dreams shift, the dreams become bigger, and then those come true and then they become bigger and those come true. Was there ever a point at which you achieved something that you thought you wanted, only to realise that the dream had expired?
Well, it was a realisation after striving, working hard, having the good fortune of certain films, having really enormous success, and that [was] able to keep moving me forward and giving me even greater opportunities. And then certain personal things happen. My mother died, my marriage ended, and I stepped back from work to be with my kids. And there was a moment I realised that my own success—which had been a real driving thrust, a real motivation—wasn’t enough.
I had to reconnect with what moved me—why was I really doing this? We know that outside success is never the answer. And so I think recalibrating took me quite a while to really find the place in me that felt that what I had to offer from my inside was worthy of striving to do meaningful work.
Okay, now I’m going to shift into some questions I’d like to know that are not quite as deep.
Okay.
How’d you get your hair so long? It’s been like this for a while.
Yeah, I think after I shaved my head when I did G.I. Jane, which was a very powerful experience on many levels, but I just started to let it grow. And it also kind of coincided with stepping back from work to be with my kids. I just started to let my hair grow. And I think probably because I’m also lazy and I don’t like to sit in the chair or have to go and get it done a lot.
[We often hear] that as women get older, they shouldn’t have long hair. And for some reason, to me, I didn’t buy it. I didn’t believe it, and it didn’t make sense to me why that had to be the case. And I did notice, particularly women who were going through menopause, that they were…. I was looking around and seeing that they all were kind of cutting their hair in a very almost masculine way, just desexualising themselves. And so I think there was a combination of this attachment to it too. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’ve just willed it.