Parenting & Family Quote by Meg Tilly

A child’s viewpoint is a narrative cheat code: it lets Meg Tilly talk about violence without letting the usual adult alibis - romance, “complexity,” backstory-as-excuse - sneak in. Kids don’t have the language for abuse, but they have the clarity of sensation and consequence. That’s the point. She’s reaching for a perspective that can’t rationalize what’s happening, only register it. In a culture that often asks survivors to package trauma into neat, digestible arcs, the child lens refuses polish.

The second sentence quietly explains why this isn’t just an artistic whim. Tilly is tracing a pattern across her own filmography: roles orbiting abuse, either as wound or as contagion. “Abused or became abusers” is an unsentimental line; it frames harm as something that replicates, not something that stays safely inside a single villain. She’s naming the industry’s recurring fascination with trauma, then pivoting from depiction to responsibility. Not “I’ve played these parts,” but “there was a need.”

That phrase is doing heavy lifting. It’s modest on the surface, almost apologetic, but it carries an indictment: if we keep returning to these stories onscreen, someone should tell them in a way that doesn’t glamorize cruelty or turn pain into awards bait. The intent isn’t shock or catharsis; it’s intervention - using fiction to restore the simplest moral truth adults too often negotiate away: this happened, it mattered, and it wasn’t the child’s fault.