Mary-Louise Parker has announced she’s going to quit acting.
“I’m almost done acting,” she said in an interview with The Herald Sun. “I’m not really that into it anymore. I don’t know how many more movies I wanna do. I wouldn’t mind doing a TV show again, I’d like to do a couple more plays, but I’m almost done acting, I think…It’s only started happening to me recently that I’ve felt weary of it all, so I dunno. There’s another play I wanna do after [The Snow Geese] and I wouldn’t mind doing a couple more years of a TV show, but after that not much more.”
Parker, who is starring in two summer blockbusters (Red 2 and R.I.P.D.), admitted she wouldn’t really miss acting. “I would write, still,” she said. “I write for Esquire and writing makes me happy. I would take care of my kids and my goats. That’s about it. Bake. Throw my internet in the lake.”
In fact, the Internet is one of the elements that is driving Parker away from the entertainment industry. “The world has gotten too mean for me, it’s just too bitchy,” she admitted. “All the websites and the blogging and all the people giving their opinion and their hatred…it’s all so mean-spirited, it’s all so critical.”
“It’s sport for people, it’s fun to get on at night and unleash their own self-loathing by attacking someone else who they think has a happier life or something, I dunno. I don’t know if you can imagine a friend sending you something they thought was funny, that was something mean someone wrote about you and there’s like 50 comments from complete strangers across the world about you—and you can say ‘Oh I let it roll off my back’ and ‘I wouldn’t take it personally,’ but you have no idea until it happens to you. It doesn’t feel nice.”
Despite finding major success starring in the Showtime series, Weeds, Parker is still having a hard time staying away from the negativity. “There’s more of the [mean comments] than there is whatever praise people think you’re getting,” she continued. “There’s way more mean-spiritedness. I stay away from it as best I can because I’m too thin-skinned, but it still finds you.
“It’s a mean culture—it’s reality TV and it’s watching people suffer and watching people humiliate themselves. It’s little girls in pageants and housewives and plastic surgery and people in rehab. It just feels like a very ugly…it’s like someone just lifted up a rock and that’s all we’re looking at.”
Red 2 and R.I.P.D both come out Friday, July 19.
I totally get what Ms. Parker is saying. Everyone has an opinion no matter what level of critical expertise in your respective field. All you need is computer access and you can vomit any nastiness onto others that you deem fit. I starred in a series for ABC and no matter how much my hubby warned not to read Blog comments, I did. And it was all good until I came upon one post that said ” I hate the their version of that character” – other comments were positive but my heart sank, hanging on that one comment from someone located on the other side of the hemisphere. As humans we seek acceptance and approval even though we try to rise above it all. Hateful commentary is destructive and it’s everywhere. The blogger or commenter seems to not take into account the hard work that goes into what others do. Perhaps they are the ones that can’t do so they end up berating everyone that is actually out there working, doing and taking risks to achieve and make things happen.