Daily Inspiration Quote by Laura Dern

A tidy hero is bad casting for real life, and Laura Dern knows it. “I’m interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them” lands with the offhand confidence of someone who’s spent a career watching audiences lean forward when a character gets messy, not when they get righteous. The first sentence frames “interest” as an artistic appetite: she’s not talking about morality, she’s talking about momentum. Flaws are plot engines; they generate choices that cost something. They also make room for contradiction, the one trait Hollywood constantly claims to love and routinely edits out.

Then comes the kicker: “I was raised on them.” It’s a family line disguised as a taste preference. Dern is the child of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, two actors whose best work often carries a raw, nervy edge. So the subtext isn’t just cinephile nostalgia; it’s inheritance. She learned, up close, that greatness can look like volatility, vulnerability, even ugliness - and that the camera doesn’t have to flinch.

Context matters because Dern’s own filmography is basically an argument for the premise: Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, Enlightened, Big Little Lies, Marriage Story. She keeps choosing women who are earnest and irritating, competent and unraveling, chasing control while exposing need. The line also reads as a quiet rebuttal to the “strong female character” industrial complex. Strength, in Dern’s framing, isn’t flawlessness; it’s the permission to be complicated without being punished by the script for it.