Laura Linney Resists Interpretation

She lives for the stage, loves film crews, and treasures her co-stars. Just don’t ask her about the ending of Ozark.

- E . ALEX JUNG

WHEN LAURA LINNEY starred in a 2002 Broadway revival of The Crucible, her favorite part was Act Three, in which her character, Elizabeth Proctor, doesn’t appear onstage. “I would be underneath the floorboards of the theater, just listening,” she says. “You could hear the orchestration of the voices. Liam Neeson tromping around. Then you realize just what a fucking genius Arthur Miller was. When you’re in the work like that, it just envelops you and moves through your body.”

Linney is an actor’s actor, Juilliard trained and now on the school’s board of trustees. For more than 30 years, she has made a career in television, film, and the theater. She recently wrapped the fourth and final season of Netflix’s Ozark and has begun shooting an Irish drama, The Miracle Club, with Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates. Throughout her body of work, she exudes a quality at once familiar and slightly hard to place— a dimpled smile that can slide easily from delight to menace and a contralto voice that understands the constraints of her medium. She has a good disposition for the industry: a realistic outlook and a sunny steeliness that help her weather the ebbs and flows. Still, when it comes to why she became an actor, she has no answer. “I don’t know if I really want to know,” she says. “Maybe when I’m 80, I’ll look at it.”

What are your first distinct memories of the theater?