"High Desert" star Patricia Arquette on fighting for equality: "We need to claw back some territory"

It's hard to imagine Patricia Arquette's career as anything short of inevitable. The veteran actor grew up in an acting dynasty that stretches back to the vaudeville era, with her siblings David, Alexis and Rosanna Arquette paving their own Hollywood trajectories alongside her. But Arquette wasn't sure performing was the right path for her. "I felt like maybe I'd be too shy for it or I wouldn't be good at it," she told me on "Salon Talks." "Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you're going to be good at it necessarily."

Now, however, after decades of creating indelible roles in movies like "True Romance" and "Boyhood" and series like "Medium" and "Severance," the Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning Arquette is satisfied with how it all worked out. "I decided I would give myself a year to try acting," she said, "and then, lo and behold, I got work." And that latest work is as one of her most colorful characters yet, the wisecracking recovering addict and neophyte private detective Peggy Newman on the new Apple TV+ series "High Desert." 

Costarring with scene stealers like Matt Dillon, Brad Garrett, Weruche Opia and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters, Arquette walks — and sometimes swings and flies — along the delicate line required to play a comically disastrous character with a grounded sincerity and vulnerability. To capture Peggy's complexity, Arquette said she drew on her own "love for the drug addicts and junkies I knew who passed away." She recalled, "They were crazy-making. They made life a nightmare. They would steal your guitar when you turned your back. But they also were brilliant and smart and funny and sweet and did love you the best that they could."

During our conversation, the always outspoken Arquette opened up about her enduring collaboration with Ben Stiller, about abortion care and LGBTQ rights, her upcoming directorial debut "Gonzo Girl," and why she says that although the climate is "crazy and it's heartbreaking," she still finds beauty and strength in solidarity. "A large portion of the American population are more open, are more understanding, are more embracing. Honestly," she says, "there's millions more of us." Watch Patricia Arquette on "Salon Talks" here or read our conversation below.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tell me about your "High Desert" character Peggy. 

Our director, Jay Roach, described her as a rock and roll hummingbird. The way that she was written, she's constantly pivoting and moving. She's kind of a hustler in her mind, a little bit of a manipulator. She also is very loving and maternal and collects all these kind of broken people with their broken stories and tries to fix their lives.

At the same time, she's on a hustle and trying to get her needs met. She's an addict but she's also co-dependent. She's got this interesting mixture, but she's basically a whirling dervish of a human being. Part of her rapid pace is, I think, her avoidance of the pain that she's really in.

It's a classic TV show in many ways. It harkens back to shows from the '70s, where there's this messy, flawed, private investigator, except it's so beautifully written, so unusual, so of a particular time, and it has a woman.

We wanted it to be messy. We wanted it to be jagged. We didn't want it to be all tied up and perfect all the time. It is a farce and it is absurd. It is all these crazy characters. We grew up in a time where there was a TV show about a man and his monkey best friend. We had "The Dukes of Hazzard" and craziness. 

These writers were so open. I'd call them and say, "I just saw this movie, "The Velvet Vampire," and she's driving around in a dune buggy. Remember dune buggies? Hey, let's have Peggy drive a dune buggy." "Great." It was exciting that everyone would bring all these great ideas. There is a love letter to the '80s and '90s, and that kind of energy and those kind of people that live on the fringe of society, that find themselves gravitating to the desert, because they don't quite fit in.

This was a very physical show. You are literally swinging from the rafters. You are crashing a car. You are doing really intense work. How do you prepare for that?

The first scene we ever shot was swinging from the rafters. Somehow, a week before we start shooting, I threw my back out. I don't really do that, but it was so bad. I'm like, "I don't know how I'm going to do this." The dune buggy doesn't have a door. You have to climb over it. Everything is crazy. I'm going to hang from a rafter. I was like, "Well, it's like our first day of shooting. They're going to put me in this harness. I'm either going to really be messed up or it's going to fix my back." And it fixed my back. I was hanging in it for hours, and I got out, and I was like, "My back is fixed."

So a little DIY alignment. Is that the secret?

I knew the fates had aligned and God was on our side, and there was a little sun shining on us.

The writing is incredible. This show is created by these amazing female writers (Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe-House) who, now, as you said in an interview for Sky, don't get to celebrate this now.

It's awful.

What is the impact of this strike for you as an actor, as a producer, and as someone who very famously has called out about wage equality in your industry, especially for women? (Salon's unionized employees are represented by the WGA East).

These three women have been toiling over this project for at least seven years. We met probably six years ago about this project, and they've been tweaking it, changing it ever since. They write really fast. They're incredible together. They each bring a different strength. They have such an original voice together. It really made me laugh out loud when I was reading the scripts. It's a different kind of humor. It's not cleaned up around the edges. There's something about Peggy and the way she sees the world and the voice that she has that they've written, that is refreshing to me, is provocative. I really wish they could totally embrace this moment. I know what they're fighting for and I support their fight for that, but I celebrate that. This work couldn't exist without them at all.

This is also another collaboration, going back 27 years, with Ben Stiller for you. You started with "Flirting with Disaster." In the last couple of years, you worked on "Escape at Dannemora" and "Severance." Now this. What is it about this really special, unique bond that the two of you seem to have? 

It is really special. I feel very grateful for it. I loved working opposite Ben as an actor and then in "Escape at Dannemora" and "Severance" as a director-actor relationship, and then, on this, as a producer. I think we both have discriminating taste, and we both usually agree with each other's taste or turn each other on to new things, so there's that shorthand and honesty. We both know, or we trust, that each other will work very hard and be pretty relentless in giving everything to the projects we work on.

You've been acting most of your life now. You come from an acting dynasty. It's in your blood, your grandfather, your father, your siblings . . .

My great-grandparents.

Yet you weren't entirely sure you wanted to go into this profession.

I felt like maybe I'd be too shy for it or I wouldn't be good at it. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you're going to be good at it necessarily. Having watched my dad really struggle to support us five kids and two adults on a working actor's salary, I knew that it was really a long shot. My sister, Rosanna, had been working a lot and doing incredible movies, like "Baby It's You" with John Sayles. She was having a lot of success as a wonderful actor. I felt also like, "Will I be in her shadow?" 

I had a sense of myself, but I was also very nebulous still of who I really was and my own self-esteem. I decided I would give myself a year to try acting, and then, lo and behold, I got work. Then, I got another little job and another one. And each one, I would learn a different skill.

The next thing you know you've got a 30-year career behind you and so much more in front of you, right?

My B plan was, I was going to go and be a midwife if it didn't work out. I gave myself a year to see. I didn't want to be doing it for 20 years. People say, "Never give up on your dream," and that's a beautiful thing to say, but I also felt like I probably would've given up on that dream if it didn't happen in a year. I would have gone on to another dream.

You are so vocal and outspoken about reproductive rights. You've been talking about it especially since the 2016 election. Looking at where we are now, post-Dobbs, what concerns you, as a woman, as a parent, as an activist, as a person in America? 

When I was 15, one of my first jobs was working at Planned Parenthood. I'd go around to schools and talk about different birth control methods to other kids, including abstinence. You'd ask them, "What are different birth control methods?" They'd never say abstinence. I'd always say, "You forgot a very important one: abstinence." I learned that from my training at Planned Parenthood. I would sometimes be in the room with doctors and assist the nurse practitioner. So much healthcare happens at Planned Parenthood, and they started rolling back funding for them. 

I knew in the 2016 election that we were looking at women's rights, that it was on the line, that we were going to lose the Supreme Court, that it was no joke. It's happening in America. It's illegal for women in certain places to have abortions, before they even know they're pregnant normally. Many women don't know at six weeks they're even pregnant, so they don't even know that there's that option. Obviously, there's a big difference between women who have money and the healthcare that they can have and leave the state, to those who have no money, have no options, maybe with an abusive partner, and the state's against them. 

Now we have women who are walking around with non-viable fetuses, threatening their bodies with sepsis, and they're wandering around and the state is forcing them to do this. I'm horrified at what's happening. People are disgusted. Everywhere I travel in the world, people are like, "What's happening in America?" There's no goodwill. There's no faith. There's no understanding. There's no holding other people's pain and their life experience and the painful choice they're making and trusting them in that choice. This whole narrative about these late term abortions, they don't exist. It's not true. People don't carry a fetus for that long and then, just decide they're going to have an abortion. Doctors won't do that. The whole thing's a non-argument. It's just a giant lie. 

The fact that we don't have the Equal Rights Amendment, we aren't explicitly in our own constitution, the founding document of our own country, has really impacted us. It terrifies me, honestly. I was scared when my son was coming to be 18 that we were going to go to war and my son was going to be sent to war. I'm terrified having a 20-year-old daughter in America with her right to her own body.

When we look at these issues and we look about the oppression and the attack on rights, it all also comes down so much to gender and gender expression. You have lost a sibling [Alexis Arquette], who you celebrate often on your Instagram and your social media. The fight against trans people, against gender expression of all forms, it's all tied in the same thing. When you see bans on just drag performances, on nonconforming attire, what are you thinking? 

They're also trying to take away an adult's right to any kind of healthcare, a trans person, gender reaffirming care, in certain places. Children can't even mention it. If they think that they're trans, they're not even allowed to talk to anyone about it, let alone a doctor, let alone their schoolmates, or a support system or a teacher or anyone. Again, we're going back to this lack of humanity, this lack of goodwill. This is what kills marriages. You're going to get a divorce if you have a lack of goodwill for each other. We, as a country, have a lack of goodwill for each other. 

Trans people are not the enemy. The problems in your life, if you really sit down and look at them, have nothing to do with trans people and what they're doing to their own bodies, nothing to do with trans people existing in film, LGBT people, characters in movies. They've given you another scary "other." They keep pointing the finger of what you're supposed to be afraid of, and that's your new enemy, and people keep falling for it. It's crazy and it's heartbreaking. 

The beautiful thing about it, because I do want to find a beautiful thing about it, is we know a lot more. A large portion of the American population are more open, are more understanding, are more embracing. And honestly, there's millions more of us. What we have to do is make sure that, no matter what, we get elected leaders in positions that are loving, are understanding, that do protect personal freedoms in the United States of America, which was supposed to be this country of freedom. It's interesting that that's reversed itself, this idea of freedom.

Unless we have political leaders, and they may not be the perfect leader, and they may not check all of our boxes, but if they're going to move us towards progress and appoint better judges, enact better laws, we need to move back towards that. We need to claw back some territory now because we really lost a lot in 2016.

And we can't take that for granted, which also means voting and fighting for our voting rights as well.

I have gotten in arguments, heated conversations, with people I love. In 2016, I begged people, "For your granddaughter, for my daughter, go vote. Go vote. Promise me you're going to go vote. Promise me you care about that. If for nothing else, you may not love [Hilary Clinton], but you have to vote for her, because otherwise, you're giving a vote to Trump basically."

You're also going to be a director now. You just directed your first film, "Gonzo Girl." 

It was a very humbling experience, getting on that other side of the camera, just even after all these decades in film, realizing how much I don't know. And the things that I thought would come so easily, like talking with actors, talking about acting, weren't necessarily the easiest things either. 

It's called "Gonzo Girl," and my lead actors are Camila Morrone and Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Lail, Leila George, Ray Nicholson, Zoe Bleu, and they all do such beautiful work. It was so exciting. The material's based on this book called "Gonzo Girl," which is a fictitious account of her experience working as Hunter S. Thompson's assistant for several months. I took it, and then, we changed it again for film.

Just dealing with some themes that I thought were really interesting, what it was like to be a young woman in the '90s. What was this unspoken commodity of beauty through the eyes of these male celebrities? What was it like to be in their orbit? What is it like when you're getting older and you're trapped in part of your success and you're getting love and acknowledgment and money, but you're also trapped by it and you resent it and you want to move on, but no one will artistically really let you move on?

There were a lot of different themes going on in competition between women and things that I thought were really interesting. It was nice to explore those without explicitly saying them. They didn't do this in the '70s and now, the whole movie has to be about this one topic and we have to talk about this topic and meet it head on. We were moving through life. We weren't stopping and really examining these things. I think it's an interesting movie, because post-#MeToo, you look back like, "Oh wow, we have changed a lot in incremental ways."

What you said about being a young woman being seen through that male gaze, you lived that firsthand as a beautiful blonde woman in the '90s.

Being in this business, yeah. And what is it like, with that male celebrity person who is like a sun and the world that gravitates around them and the whole ecosystem survives off them? What does that look like? What's that pressure on him? Willem gives an incredible performance.

I can't wait, but in the meantime, I get to enjoy "High Desert." This show is so fun and unique. Thank you so much for joining me today. What an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me. That is the biggest compliment to acknowledge its originality because I think these writers had such an original voice. Each of these actors brought something, and there was so much love in this project, my love for the drug addicts and junkies I knew who passed away, and their beautiful qualities. They were crazy-making. They made life a nightmare. There was all kinds of dysfunction. They would steal your guitar when you turned your back, but they also were brilliant and smart and funny and sweet and did love you the best that they could. So this project means so much to me, and I'm so grateful that you have had me here.

"High Desert" is streaming on Apple TV+.