Holly Hunter’s Georgia twang pierced the rumble of traffic. “When I started here, thirty-seven years ago, the Upper West Side was grittier and more knockaround,” she said. She was striding down West Seventy-second Street, wearing a sack sweater and jeans. Hunter is petite, but her unblinking wariness—her brown-eyed, hawklike vigilance—gives her an outsized presence. “People don’t come to New York out of resignation,” she went on. “They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.”
In front of the Chatsworth, an ornate building overlooking the Hudson River, she said, “I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days. Then she came back from est, where they hadn’t let her go to the bathroom, and she said, ‘I need my space.’ So I spent the night on the ground in Riverside Park, with my backpack as a pillow.” She looked over her shoulder. “And, wow, it was not as lush as it is now.”
After couch-surfing for three weeks, Hunter’s luck changed: “I got a horror film, ‘The Burning,’ and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in ‘The Burning,’ Jason Alexander”—later of “Seinfeld” fame. Though she’d found a support group—“all these kids in the movie who got slaughtered by some maniac with scissors”—the scrounging continued. She and Alexander lived by Needle Park, and she was fired from a waitress job “for making out with my boyfriend—for behavior.” Six years later, after starring in “Broadcast News,” she bought an apartment in the building next to the Chatsworth. So it can go, in New York.
Hunter now lives in Brooklyn and has eleven-year-old twins. At a West Side restaurant candidly named Westside Restaurant, she ordered fried eggs and discussed her two summer films, “The Big Sick” and “Strange Weather.” In each, she plays a fiercely protective mother, a role in her by now familiar wheelhouse, which she characterized as “forthright, strong, blah blah blah.” In “The Big Sick,” her character’s daughter spends most of the film in a coma. Hunter said that, on the set, Kumail Nanjiani—who wrote the autobiographical movie with his once comatose wife, and who stars in it—“was the actor whisperer. Just before ‘Action!,’ I kept draining Kumail of all the information he had about what it was really like.”
In “Strange Weather,” a low-budget indie film on which, she said, “if you shot next to a McDonald’s, that’s where you ate,” she plays a woman who road-trips to New Orleans to discover why her only child, a young man named Walker, committed suicide. On that set, she said, “I was very alone. Just . . . alone. I would love to reëdit the film, have at it with a Bush Hog”—a Southern brand of lawnmower. She pushed her barely nibbled eggs aside.
Now that Hunter is fifty-nine, mothers are necessarily a stock-in-trade. “It’s the sexism of movies,” she said. Shielding her mouth to impersonate a misogynistic producer, she whispered, “Cast her as the mom.” But she first played a mother in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona,” in 1987, some two decades before she became one. “If you’ve had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen,” she said. “I mean, come on—I didn’t know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.” The intimacy she drew on came from her elder sister.
After Hunter bombed in a piano recital in Atlanta, at the age of nine, her parents didn’t grasp how traumatic it was. “I was playing ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again and I still couldn’t remember it.” Her face was very still. “So I played a single note and stood up. And I never really played in public again.” Could she play in public now? “No.” Even having played onscreen in “The Piano”? “No.” Should we keep talking about—“No!” she cried. Then she laughed.
Hunter observed that some actors “aren’t intimate with anyone else onscreen, only with the audience. Bette Davis and Buster Keaton were withholding, but they had incredible intimacy with us.” One of her early heroes evokes that kind of charismatic solitude (as Hunter does). In the eighties, she recalled, there was a bar called Café Central, not far off, on Columbus Avenue, “where, rumor had it, Robert Duvall hung out. So I’d look through the window. I never saw him, never met him, never worked with him later. But it was encouraging to think, in this whole huge city, that I somehow had a proximity to him.” ♦
