THE GOOD DINOSAUR
ANNA PAQUIN
NOW that she and telepathic waitress Sookie Sackhouse have finally parted ways, Anna Paquin is ready to act her age.
The True Blood star (pictured), who was 11 when she won an Oscar for her supporting performance in The Piano, has been playing characters that are significantly younger than herself for most of her career.
“I am probably the only woman in this entire industry that is excited to play characters that are actually my age and that are not like 22-year-olds who are busy being young and hot and that’s kind of it,’’ she says on the phone from LA.
“I feel like I looked like I was 18 for about 10 years.
“True Blood kind of grew with me but Sookie was a disaster as far as continually not learning from her mistakes in order for there to be a show.
“As far as emotional development there is sort of a limit to how much that can n really happen in that kind of concept.
“So now I am looking at things that are actually more adult, which I actually have been for a really long time.”
Paquin’s most recent credit – a small role in Pixar’s new animated family fantasy The Good Dinosaur – would appear to contradict her comments, but there’s a perfectly good explanation.
“After True Blood I was actually quite specifically not looking to work because I just wanted to spend time with my kids,’’ she says.
“I was in the middle of shooting when they were born then I went on to do another two seasons (of True Blood) after that.
“I just really wanted to spend some proper time with them before they started school.”
So Paquin resolved only to sign up for “tiny” projects that really interested her.
One of them was her role in The Good Dinosaur, which she agreed to do on the basis of one brief email.
“Frankly, I would have said yes regardless of what it was. Pixar films are great. I
liked them before I had children. Theyh ki kind d of don’t make bad movies and just being part of that legacy is exciting.
“It just kind of got better and better the more I learnt about the story and that I was actually getting to be a really bad-ass awesome T-Rex cowgirl dinosaur.”
Paquin followed The Good Dinosaur with another small role in the upcoming remake of the 70s TV mini-series Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel of the same name.
Now that her three-year-old twins Poppy and Charlie, with husband and True Blood co-star Stephen Moyer, have started preschool, Paquin is looking at the possibility of taking on some larger projects.
The family has only recently returned to Los Angeles after spending most of the year in Wales and London, where Moyer was shooting FX drama The Bastard Executioner.
“It’s really only been a few weeks that I have been tipping my toe back into the water, having a life in general during the day time, and starting to think about what I want to do next,” she said.
“It’s interesting being at a different stage of life, and seeing the kind of roles I get offered now versus nine years ago. That’s really exciting for me.”