"The worst is when I talk myself into something. Sometimes you take things because you want to work with a certain actor, or you want to work with a director, even if the script or the part's not that great"
About this Quote
Self-sabotage doesn not always look like chaos; sometimes it looks like a sensible career move. Jessica Lange admits to the most insidious trap in a creative life: the internal PR team that can sell you on a bad idea. "I talk myself into something" is a quiet confession of complicity. No villain, no industry boogeyman, just the mind doing what it does best under pressure: rationalizing desire.
Her logic is familiar in Hollywood, where projects are often pitched less as stories than as proximity to power. You take the role to get near the actor you admire, to be in a director's orbit, to attach yourself to a brand of seriousness. Lange names that gravitational pull and, importantly, its cost: the script and part become negotiable, the actual work reduced to an entry fee. The subtext is a critique of prestige culture, the way status can masquerade as craft, and how easily an actor can start collecting collaborators instead of building characters.
Coming from Lange, this lands with extra bite. She is not an ingenue learning the ropes; she's a performer with enough canon to admit missteps without sounding defensive. The quote reads like late-career clarity: not cynicism about the business so much as impatience with her own bargains. It also hints at a deeper fear - that the hunger to keep evolving, to stay in the room with the best people, can trick you into abandoning the one thing you actually control: taste.
Her logic is familiar in Hollywood, where projects are often pitched less as stories than as proximity to power. You take the role to get near the actor you admire, to be in a director's orbit, to attach yourself to a brand of seriousness. Lange names that gravitational pull and, importantly, its cost: the script and part become negotiable, the actual work reduced to an entry fee. The subtext is a critique of prestige culture, the way status can masquerade as craft, and how easily an actor can start collecting collaborators instead of building characters.
Coming from Lange, this lands with extra bite. She is not an ingenue learning the ropes; she's a performer with enough canon to admit missteps without sounding defensive. The quote reads like late-career clarity: not cynicism about the business so much as impatience with her own bargains. It also hints at a deeper fear - that the hunger to keep evolving, to stay in the room with the best people, can trick you into abandoning the one thing you actually control: taste.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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