Parenting & Family Quote by Kathleen Turner

Turner draws a line in the sand with the kind of plainspoken authority that comes from having already played every shade of desire, menace, and vulnerability on screen. The phrasing matters: she does not claim moral purity or announce a crusade. She frames it as labor ethics - “choose my jobs” - placing acting back in the realm of work with consequences, not just “art” that floats above accountability. In an industry that often hides behind craft to avoid responsibility, she’s arguing that selection is part of performance.

The key move is “depending on the actions of the character.” That’s a subtle rebuke to the idea that actors are mere vessels. Turner insists that narrative behavior has real-world meaning, and that participating in certain stories is a form of endorsement, or at least complicity. The refusal isn’t about discomfort; it’s about refusing to normalize specific violences through repetition and entertainment packaging.

Her boundaries - “child abuse or women’s abuse” - land as cultural context, too. Turner’s career spans decades when Hollywood routinely used threatened or actual violence against women as shorthand for stakes, grit, or sexiness, and when stories about children were mined for shock. The subtext is weary: we’ve seen this movie before, and the camera has often been kinder to perpetrators than to victims. Turner’s statement is an attempt to reclaim agency in a system that profits from violating it, and to signal that “edgy” isn’t a free pass when the harm is predictable, gendered, and marketable.