While it may seem as if she was playing to the Calgary Expo crowd, Helen Hunt didn’t hesitate when asked if the genre she would like to take on that she hadn’t yet as an actress. Read More
While it may seem as if she was playing to the Calgary Expo crowd, Helen Hunt didn’t hesitate when asked if the genre she would like to take on that she hadn’t yet as an actress. Not long after complimenting a family sitting in the front row of the main theatre at the new BMO
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While it may seem as if she was playing to the Calgary Expo crowd, Helen Hunt didn’t hesitate when asked if the genre she would like to take on that she hadn’t yet as an actress.
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Not long after complimenting a family sitting in the front row of the main theatre at the new BMO Centre for their matching “Rebel Alliance” t-shirts, she revealed she wants to enter the world of Jedis and droids and the Force.
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“Star Wars,” she said to thunderous applause Friday afternoon on Day 2 of Calgary Expo. “Maybe some fierce president of a planet.”
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“I could be stormtrooper,” she added. “I could be the one older-lady stormtrooper.”
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In a 45-minute talk with Victor Dandridge Friday afternoon, the Oscar and Emmy-winning actress covered a lot of ground, from her “origins story” as a young child actor taken to musicals in New York by her director/acting coach father Gordon, to her approach to acting, to tidbits about projects such as As Good as It Gets, Twister and both the original Mad About You seroes and its recent reboot.
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She said she caught the acting bug after her father took her to see a production of Godspell in New York when she was a child. She later joined her aunt in an acting class.
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While she won an Oscar for her role as a single mom dealing with an erratic Jack Nicholson in 1997’s As Good As It Gets, was nominated for a second Academy Award for her role in 2012’s The Sessions and won four Emmys for playing Jamie Buchman in Mad About You, Hunt revealed that she still feels overcome by doubt whenever she takes on a new role.
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“Every time I get a job, my first thought is I absolutely am not going to be able to do this, I don’t know how to do it, ” she says. “Then I have to say ‘Helen, you’ve been doing it for a long time and it will come.’ You chip away at it, chip away at it.”
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She revealed a key component to her process when discussing her recent run in Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre: detailed preparation.
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“I had to do a U.K. accent,” she said. “Boy, when you hear it and it’s bad and it’s coming out of your own mouth. I have a good enough ear to know when it’s bad but I didn’t know enough to make it good. I worked on it for a year. It might take other actors less amount of time. For me it was a year until I could walk out there and not worry about it.”
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Hunt rose to fame during her seven-season run as Jamie Buchman in Mad About You in the 1990s. There was a reboot in 2019. Hunt starred opposite Paul Reiser, who played her film-director husband. When asked who some of her favourite people were to work with, she again didn’t hesitate.
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“Paul Reiser for sure,” she said, again to tremendous applause. “I would probably pick him. Not only is he one of the best but we had eight years to be together. I hear stories about people who worked together in TV shows and they don’t get along, I don’t know what I would have done. I really don’t. Because I just lucked out. He and I are still friends, we see each other all the time. Oh my God, we would see each other more than we would see our partners in real life for eight years. So if I didn’t adore him and didn’t love playing with him, it would have been a long day.”
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Hunt was still working on Mad About You when she was cast it one of her pivotal roles. In James L. Brooks As Good as It Gets she played the single mother of a chronically ill child who befriends a misanthropic author with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder played by Jack Nicolson. The film won both Hunt and Nicholson Academy Awards.
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“It’s always the writing,” she said.”Ninety per cent of it all is the writing. I was working on that and doing Mad About You at the same time. I was a blonde Tuesday through Thursday and a brunette Friday to Monday.I was saying to someone in front of the writer and director Jim Brooks — who has made some of my favourite movies and your too, I bet — a friend of his asked me which of these parts was more like me and I said ‘Well, Mad About You, probably.’
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Jim Brooks disagreed.
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“I thought about that and then after not seeing it for decades, I saw the last 25 minutes recently because I went to a screening of it and I thought ‘He’s right. I’m very sensitive to what people say, I care about my kid in a fierce way, although I didn’t have a kid when i did that part. There is a lot of me in there even though she lives in a part of the world, has a different job and speaks a differently, there was a lot of me in her.”
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As for Twister, a 1996 blockbuster in which Hunt played storm-chaser Jo Harding, Hunt says she is nothing like that character.
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“I would be driving the other way,” she said.
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She looks back on it fondly, but admits it was a tough shoot.
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“We were in the mud, we were in the firehoses, we were in the wind,” she says. “The most fun part …was hanging out with all these guys. It was like Wizard of Oz in that way — ‘you were there and you were there’ — and they were all around this Dorothy character that I got to play. We worked until six in the morning in 100 degrees.So it’s not like the most fun you’ve ever had. But we laughed so hard played cards all night. That’s kind of what movie-making is sometimes. You’re bored and you get so close.”
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Calgary Expo runs until Sunday, April 27 at the BMO Centre.
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