Melanie Lynskey has been receiving rave reviews for her latest film, Hello, I Must Be Going, about a divorced woman who falls for a 19-year-old.
“I like to play the grey areas in life—that’s the most uncomfortable place to be,” the actress told Vulture. “Nobody likes to be in that in-between state where they don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of tension in that, and a lot of stuff to play with—where it’s uncomfortable and awkward and sad and scary.”
Lynskey has chosen some amazing projects, including her debut in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures in 1994, when the actress was just 16. “For me, it’s…if something clicks emotionally,” she said about how she decides which roles to take. “The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you’re working. So I understand that, but I don’t have the impulse like, ‘Oh, I’ve never played this kind of Scottish drug addict…”
Lynskey admits she’s not one of those actresses that can cry on cue. “If I have to cry in an audition I’m like, ‘Okay, let me see what I can do,’” she said. “But when I’m working, I always have an iPod with me, and it usually turns out that one particular song will become my theme song. So every movie I’ve done I have a particular song I keep going back to that puts me in the right emotional place. For Win Win it was the Pixies’ ‘Gouge Away,’ for whatever reason. For this movie I had two songs because half the time I had to be crying and emotional and feeling horrible about myself, and then half the time I had to be in this romantic ecstasy. So I had ‘Let Down,’ that Radiohead song, and then my happy song was ‘Running Up That Hill,’ by Kate Bush, because it’s very sexy.”
