![]() “She’s so smart and she’s so sharp, but she leads with kindness,” Pelphrey says. It’s exciting and keeps me engaged and keeps me a student, which is really where I’m most comfortable.” Really, the best decision I made was to cast my net wide and do as many different things as I could, under as many different circumstances as I could. “I had a great, great agent who very slowly pushed me into doing tiny little things in movies. Linney initially had reservations about working in front of the camera, but she gradually realized that film and television offered their own unique artistic challenges. I can remember taking the bus home, feeling like, Oh my God, I’m a professional actress! “Listening to the play every night backstage (the wonderful Deborah Hedwall and Dennis Boutsikaris were in it, and Jon De Vries), I would have a sense of where my story fit in the narrative. (Years later, she would return to the play in a performance that earned her her second Tony nomination.) “Something happened to me in the run of that show,” Linney says. She’d been cast in Donald Margulies’s Sight Unseen as German journalist Grete, a small supporting role with only two real scenes. It was onstage where the New York native and Juilliard graduate developed her unparalleled work ethic - and realized that acting truly was her calling. Then you work with her, and she’s more than you would’ve even guessed before you met her.” You have this idea that she seems so smart, and she’s a class act, and she’s professional. I just thought her work was so good for so long. She’s so generous and always elevating what she does to help elevate the work that everybody else is doing as well. It’s really incredible, and she doesn’t advertise that she does it. “Laura gets up and reads the script front to back every day,” says Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy. She also has four Tony Award nominations, for starring turns in The Crucible, Sight Unseen, Time Stands Still, and most recently, The Little Foxes. Linney’s past work speaks for itself: She’s a three-time Oscar nominee - for 2000’s You Can Count on Me, 2004’s Kinsey, and 2007’s The Savages - and she’s won four Emmys for her work on Frasier, The Big C, Wild Iris, and the miniseries John Adams. “It’s just a fantastic season because of her ability to take that character further and further, with seemingly no effort.” This truly is an ensemble show, and this season you saw that benefit the show with Laura carrying even more water,” says Bateman. It’s something she shares with the series’ other richly drawn female characters, including Julia Garner’s Ruth Langmore, Janet McTeer’s Helen Pierce, and Lisa Emery’s Darlene Snell. ![]() Season 3 places Wendy more firmly at the center of the series than ever, as her political acumen and sheer ruthlessness prove that she has what it takes to survive. She has to be this real person, she can’t be somebody doing a lot of melodrama.” I knew that authenticity was going to be important for what this family is going through. She is just so restrained and so classy with the way in which she goes about doing what she does. You can tell she is going to play the character and not hold your hand and throw it to the back row. “She is unapologetically real and serious. “The thing I was focused on by trying to land Laura was what she would represent internally and externally about the show,” he remembers. ![]() Linney’s journey to Ozark began over coffee with executive producer and co-star Jason Bateman, who won an Emmy last year for his work directing the series. ![]() That’s the benefit of doing something that goes on year after year, particularly if you’re working with people whom you trust and who trust you.” I made decisions that I didn’t know would pay off. “You have to trust that you’re going to have time for something to roll out,” says Linney, who in July received her second consecutive Emmy nomination for her work on the series. From the start, she made artistic decisions predicated on the hope that she would ultimately have the opportunity to explore the depths of Wendy’s psyche. Linney wisely chose to play the long game as she charted Wendy’s path from suburban Chicago housewife to riverboat casino owner in the employ of a Mexican drug kingpin. When Laura Linney signed on to star in Netflix’s searing crime drama Ozark, the stage and screen veteran had only the vaguest sense of where the character of Wendy Byrde might go.
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