Patricia on becoming Adora Crellin
The acclaimed actress plays matriarch with many secrets in the sinister HBO series ‘Sharp Objects’
Nobody loves you like your mother. By the end of Sharp Objects, the sinister HBO limited series, that old sentiment has been filtered through a very twisted algorithm.
Over eight episodes, Adora Crellin, the matriarch played by Patricia Clarkson, is revealed to be more than just the estranged parent of Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a reporter who returns to her Missouri hometown to investigate the murders of teenage girls there. Clarkson chillingly navigates Adora’s conflicting sides: the grief-stricken mother of one dead child and another with a history of self-mutilation and alcoholism; the de facto ruler of a small town with a disturbing history; and, as it turns out, the woman suffering from a mental illness known as Munchausen by proxy, in which she makes a child sick to get attention from others and make the child dependent upon her.
Clarkson explained the challenges of playing a character with as many layers as Adora.
Was your impression of Adora different by the end of filming than it was when you saw her on paper?
I began with as much grace, and light, and fortitude, and righteousness as I could muster for her, because I think that was important for the character, for the writing, to do Gillian [Flynn, who wrote the novel the series was based on and is an executive producer] proud. I took this part because I knew I would end up in a very different place than I began. And I did.
I was in Los Angeles [on set] for five months, and maybe this says it all: I had chunks of time off, but I could never come back to New York as Adora. For some reason, I couldn’t be home in my New York apartment as Adora. Something took over me. I don’t want to sound like a ‘pretentious actor’, but this character infiltrated me in a way that was very hard. By episode five, I could not extricate myself from the sheer brutality, and yet sadness and excruciating pain, that I felt sometimes physically. I had to get those nails off, I had to realign myself. I had to shift my organs. [Laughs.]
Had you had that experience with a character before?
I have at times, but they are few and far between. I’d say the last time it got like this — of course playing Blanche [DuBois, from A Streetcar Named Desire in 2004], because you never recover from playing Blanche.
As we get to know her, it becomes apparent that she’s really just an open wound — there’s so much trauma in her life. Which I can imagine is a difficult thing to embody for a long period of time.
It is. I’m fortunate to come from a very good family, very good parents, very middle-class, very All-American. I had unconditional love, which is something that I cannot imagine living without. So that’s where I began with Adora, a woman who I don’t think ever had true, real love, and who had this generational violence, and trauma, and abuse that has been with her for so long. It was literally breathtaking to play her. The air goes out of the room at times with Adora, and it has to.
The scene where she tells Camille she never loved her is one of the most devastating, because it’s also the nicest that Adora has been to Camille up until that point.
That is Adora. I think she is at times tone-deaf, and not feeling, lacking a true understanding of what genuine love is. She lacks genuine maternal instincts, because she was never given that. It’s a form of blunt-force trauma, when you’re abused as a child.
Those scenes in the last episode where she is poisoning Amma and Camille are nauseating to watch, because it’s a different Adora — a loving and tender version who is actually destroying these people.
That’s the only form of love she knows. Which is often with Munchausen by proxy, it’s their idea of true love. [Adora] is not one strand. When she shifts, when the illness takes over, she sees herself in a very specific light. It’s a desperate need, an almost obsessive need to take over this person’s life. And it was some of the toughest scenes I’ve ever played.
“[Adora] lacks genuine maternal instincts, because she was never given that. It’s a form of blunt-force trauma.” PATRICIA CLARKSON | Actress