Wit & Attitude Quote by Holly Hunter

Holly Hunter threads a needle here: she’s voicing ambition without begging, critiquing the industry without sounding bitter, and protecting her own brand without declaring herself “above it.” The opener - “I would love to work more - I really would” - is a preemptive defense against the lazy narrative that actresses disappear because they’ve “chosen” to. She anticipates the accusation (picky, difficult, aging out) and swats it away with insistence. The repetition is doing reputational labor.

Then she turns the knife with a kind of plainspoken elegance. “Not a lot of stuff around” is scarcity language, but in Hollywood it’s also code: the roles for women, especially past a certain age, narrow fast. She doesn’t say “sexism,” because she doesn’t have to. She describes the market and lets the listener do the math.

The sharpest phrase is “not very complicated.” Hunter built her career on characters with friction - people who are smart, messy, opaque, hard to summarize. By calling available material “flat,” she’s not just critiquing scripts; she’s lamenting a cultural preference for women who read cleanly on screen. “Complicated” is a demand for interiority, moral ambiguity, and specificity. The subtext is a challenge: if the industry keeps offering flattened-out parts, it isn’t only underemploying actresses like Hunter; it’s shrinking the emotional vocabulary we get to watch.