It’s all about moving forward for Michelle Pfeiffer.
The “French Exit” star is on the new cover of Town & Country, and in the issue, she discusses her complicated relationship with her past work.
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“Some of the performances I have felt the best about are ones for which I’ve gotten panned. The ones that make me cringe are typically when I got the best reviews,” she says. “I saw ‘Scarface’ and I went, ‘Eh, I’m okay.’ I rarely like my work. I only look at films once. It’s just too painful.”
Pfeiffer also talks about her five-year break from Hollywood and her decision to return to acting.
“I realized my daughter was looking at colleges, and I saw the writing on the wall. I thought, This is going to hit me really hard. It’s time for me to get back into moviemaking,” she explains. “Your seat is never saved in this industry. It’s very competitive. There’s that transition time when you’re not the ingenue and you’re not really old enough to be the grandmother—you’re not old enough to play Frances. I’m at an age when the parts are getting more interesting again for me. I guess the timing of it really worked out, because I don’t feel I missed out on much.”
That said, raising children has genuinely meant a shift in priorities for the 62-year-old.
“Before the kids were born, my work was my life—and it was in a good way,” she says. “When they were small, I could just pack them up and bring them with me. But then it became, ‘Okay, how long will this separate the family unit?’ When they got into school it became even more complicated, because I didn’t want to just take them out of their routine, so I would shoot in the summer and tried to not be away for more than two or three weeks at a time. It became challenging for people to hire me because it was too complicated. It was easier to get somebody else to do the part.”
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Talking about her new film “French Exit”, Pfeiffer says. “There’s something incredibly liberating about somebody who speaks her mind so freely. She can be rude and very curt at times, but I loved her take-no-prisoners attitude. We spend our entire lives trying to be polite, trying to not upset the apple cart, and she doesn’t really have any of that.”
As for what the future holds, she says, “I want to do more theatre. I’ve got too much on my plate at the moment, but that’s the thing I wish that I had been able to do more of.”
