"My main aim has always been to do good quality films with roles that have some substance. With Power and Beauty there were loads of things that I liked about the movie, which made me opt for it"
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There is a familiar tightrope in Henstridge's wording: ambition packaged as practicality. "Good quality films" and "roles that have some substance" is the standard actor’s pledge, but it’s also a quiet rebuttal to the way her early fame risked flattening her into a single image. Coming out of Species-era notoriety, she’s had to answer for a career people often misread as a series of glossy assignments rather than a set of choices. The sentence is doing reputational work.
The key move is the pivot from principle to particulars. She starts with a mission statement, then immediately grounds it in the lived reality of decision-making: "loads of things that I liked" is deliberately unspecific, the kind of phrase actors use when the real reasons (timing, financing, relationships, a need to work, a desire to pivot genres) are too messy or too strategic to name. It signals taste without triggering an argument about whether the project is actually "quality". She claims agency while keeping the door open.
"Some substance" is also tellingly modest. She’s not promising prestige cinema; she’s asking for characters with enough interiority to justify her presence. In the TV-movie and mid-budget ecosystem where much of her work has lived, that’s a realistic bar and a pointed one: the subtext is that the industry often offers women roles that are decorative, not dimensional.
Even the title-drop, Power and Beauty, reads like a wink at the stereotype she’s negotiating. She’s acknowledging the packaging while insisting there’s more under the surface - for the role, and for her.
The key move is the pivot from principle to particulars. She starts with a mission statement, then immediately grounds it in the lived reality of decision-making: "loads of things that I liked" is deliberately unspecific, the kind of phrase actors use when the real reasons (timing, financing, relationships, a need to work, a desire to pivot genres) are too messy or too strategic to name. It signals taste without triggering an argument about whether the project is actually "quality". She claims agency while keeping the door open.
"Some substance" is also tellingly modest. She’s not promising prestige cinema; she’s asking for characters with enough interiority to justify her presence. In the TV-movie and mid-budget ecosystem where much of her work has lived, that’s a realistic bar and a pointed one: the subtext is that the industry often offers women roles that are decorative, not dimensional.
Even the title-drop, Power and Beauty, reads like a wink at the stereotype she’s negotiating. She’s acknowledging the packaging while insisting there’s more under the surface - for the role, and for her.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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