Native New Yorker Laura Linney may have been acting in Hollywood films since the early 1990s, but she refuses to spend too much time away from the city of her birth. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Linney talks about what she gets out of acting on the New York stage and why she prefers New York to Los Angeles.
Though acting on stage obviously isn’t easy, Linney points out some of the positives. She says, “It’s very much an actor’s medium, and there’s something about the routine of it that’s very comforting. But more than anything else, what you get on stage is time. You don’t get time doing television or film. And part of the challenge is the lack of time. With theater, time is an element that influences everything you do. And you can’t fake that, and you can’t generate it, and just time will work on things.”
One of the reasons why Linney prefers acting in New York to acting in Los Angeles is the way people treat each other. She explains, “I find New York to be sort of brutally honest: If someone’s pissed off, you know it; if someone’s annoyed, you know it. If they like you, you know it. And in Los Angeles, that’s sort of all up in the air. You have no idea what’s going on. Everyone’s scared. Everyone’s very scared out there. Everyone’s afraid. It’s just business-oriented. It’s just a business town. And art and business are very strange bedfellows, and always have been. They’re co-dependent, but they’re very different, and you need different types of people to do each one, and they need to respect each other.”
