The Big C keeps Linney’s career healthy
Actress achieves life, work balance
STAMFORD, CONN.
Peering down from the wall above Laura Linney’s dressing room couch on the set of The Big C are a trio of royals: Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II and King Henry VIII.
Linney was missing England, the site of a recent movie shoot, so her assistant posted some familiar British faces.
Those monarchs are keeping good company. Quietly, steadfastly, Linney has achieved a different kind of royalty in her 20-year career. With three nominations notched each for Tonys and Oscars, plus three Emmy and two Golden Globe trophies, Linney has nailed the thespian trifecta of stage and screens big and small.
It’s TV that is stoking her talent these days, with her Globe-winning role as Cathy Jamison, the suburban Minneapolis mom with terminal melanoma on Showtime’s The Big C, one of those relatively small (Season 2 averaged 2.6 million weekly viewers across platforms) pay-cable shows with big impact. (Season 3 premieres Tuesday, while Season 1 makes its Canadian cable premiere Friday on W.)
The Big C is a half-hour black comedy that mines tricky terrain as it hits close to the marrow of what cancer patients and their caretakers contend with — to the extreme, its star concedes, what with extramarital affairs and bipolar brothers in the medical mix.
“You scratch the surface, and there ain’t nothing conventional about this show — what we’re trying to do, what we hope it does,” says the 48-year-old Linney, who is also an executive producer on the show.
That said, she resists the temptation to label the show “groundbreaking.”
“It would be complete hubris to be so sort of selfinvolved to make this (lowers voice) important sort of thing. This is a television show that is attempting to take two different perspectives and put them together, and hopefully be entertaining and at the same time resonate a bit with people about some deeper issues,” such as the fragility of life in general, whether cancer is the catalyst or not.
There are other unconventional aspects to the show. The Jamisons’ lemon clapboard house comes to life in a former cigar factory in this suburb northeast of New York, far from Hollywood. This season, it’s winter in the Midwest, but despite the “cold and long” climate, Linney assures that “there is a renewed sense of energy” throughout the 10-episode arc.
Linney, too, lives well outside her industry, in a house in northwest Connecticut (she rents a nearby apartment for the 10-week, 14- to 18-hour-a-day shoot) with her husband, Marc Schauer, a real-estate agent.
“I’m lucky because he gets the appropriate amount of joy out of being a part of this world,” she says. “He’s far from a sycophant, but he’s not jaded. He helps me. He has fresh, sort of delightful eyes that look at all this, and there will be times I’ll come home and I’ll complain about something, and he will just laugh at me. He will laugh, laugh, laugh.”
She also says she’s lucky to be able to work at the level she does but outside the swirl of celebrity.
“I have sort of the perfect balance of it: well-known enough to be taken seriously by some and too busy to really notice, quite frankly, where I am” amid the firmament of fame. If she were one of those actresses who couldn’t smoothly ride the subway in her native New York, “I don’t think I’d handle that very well,” she says.
Linney has an elegant reserve as she talks, but she grows increasingly animated as she leads a visitor on a tour of the Jamisons’ sunny tiled kitchen, past the “Frankenstein trees” that stand in for the real thing and through the shabby house occupied by Cathy’s brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey).
“I love working on this set,” she says, standing on the threadbare carpet amid the faded, cabbage-rose wallpaper, in a room that could rightly be described as Victorian.