In 2015, Patricia Arquette’s performance in Boyhood won her the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. In her acceptance speech, she thanked the Academy. She acknowledged her fellow nominees. She sent love to her family. And then she said something that had stars like Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez applauding and whooping in agreement.
“To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation — we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” Arquette said, her voice rising as she clutched her trophy. “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
Ten years later, I asked the actress to reflect on the monumental moment. According to Arquette, she “really didn’t see that coming.”
“That wasn’t my trajectory,” the 56-year-old actress tells me during our conversation for Yahoo. “I never imagined that moment would turn into something so much bigger. But with my speech, I really wanted a lot of people to win. If I’m gonna win something, I want women to have equal pay.”
As we talk about her new role in Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, it’s clear that Arquette is still thinking about the ripple effects of that Oscar night — and what’s changed, or hasn’t, since. “There were a lot of laws that ended up getting passed,” she says. While Arquette says she lost roles after the rousing speech, it’s clear she wouldn’t change a thing. “Women came to me and said, ‘Hey, I got a raise.’ But we’re seeing women’s rights get rolled back so quickly in America. That’s sad to me.”
For Arquette, it’s never just been about the trophy. It’s about truth — the kind that can’t be neatly packaged into a soundbite or headline. It’s what’s drawn her to decades of complex, quietly radical roles.
The invisible woman
Like many of us, Arquette can’t resist the true crime genre. “I’m interested in cults,” she says. “I’m watching every documentary about a cult. I’m interested in the way people work.”
That same curiosity — about what drives people to lie, to believe, to stay — runs through her latest project. Murdaugh: Death in the Family, streaming now, is a scripted retelling of the stranger-than-fiction South Carolina murder case of a wealthy family that captivated the nation. She plays Maggie Murdaugh, whose life and death became national headlines as her husband, Alex Murdaugh, was convicted of murdering her and their son in 2023.
“I was following along with everybody else,” Arquette says of the trial. “I was fascinated by watching him lie in court and this new evidence coming up, one thing after another. But what really struck me was the family. Family is supposed to be where you’re safe.”
But the very thing Maggie worked to protect ended up putting her in danger. “It’s not the showiest part, but I wanted to honor this woman who was raised to make her husband and her kids her priority,” Arquette says of playing the Murdaugh matriarch. “Her success was raising and supporting them — in a way, becoming invisible.”
Jason Clarke and Patricia Arquette star in Murdaugh: Death in the Family. (Daniel Delgado/Disney)
Arquette spent weeks researching Maggie through interviews and details gathered by journalist and podcast host Mandy Matney. “I got a lot of information — that Maggie kept her cash in a plastic bag in her purse, what she liked to cook for her family, what she liked to drink, what kind of makeup she used,” she says. “She was always the one taking the family pictures. In the little bits of video I found, she’s the videographer. That really struck me, because that’s how she lived her life: I’m the support team.”
Even as Maggie began to see the cracks in her husband’s world — “how manipulative and deceptive Alex was,” as Arquette puts it — she played her as a woman who could never have imagined the violence to come. “I think she started to recognize how out of control their life was and how many things had been normalized that weren’t,” she says. “But she never imagined he was capable of that.”
The role also carried a personal weight. “I don’t know if you can really separate it from being a mother,” she says. “My mom gave up a lot to raise us, and I think that’s part of the experience of being a mom — historically, that’s what it’s been. I really wanted to honor women who find themselves with pathological personalities and have to reverse-engineer it — what is it when you wake up one day and realize you have no clue who you’re with?”
Truth, power and the human touch
If roles dried up for Arquette after her Oscar win, it’s hard to tell a decade later. She’s also starring in Apple TV’s award-winning series Severance. Both shows explore power, morality and the human cost of ambition — themes that have long run through her work.
“I think people are interested in complicated people,” Arquette says simply. “And I’m interested in complicated stories. Why not?”
It’s a through line in her career — and in how she views the future of storytelling. Asked about artificial intelligence and the rise of AI-generated performances, Arquette doesn’t hesitate.
“It’s so weird to be in this time where there are flying cars and robot people and people falling in love with AIs,” she says. “And this idea of replacing creative people who make movies — the truth is, if you go through an algorithm, you would never make some of the best movies we’ve ever had. They don’t conform to these algorithms. The choices each actor makes — AI will not be making that because it’s not the common denominator.”
She takes a beat. “I’m not saying it will never happen, but I don’t think it will happen well for quite a while.”
It’s a pragmatic view — neither alarmist nor naïve — from someone who’s watched Hollywood reinvent itself many times. Arquette, mother to two adult children, Enzo Rossi and Harlow Jane, says she worries more for their generation than her own.
“I have a daughter who’s doing her first series,” she says, acknowledging the impact AI will likely have on up-and-coming actors. “I worry about our kids in unimaginable ways.”
Arquette at the 2015 Oscars. (David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
Learning to love herself
As our conversation winds down, we turn from the future of Hollywood to something more personal — the future Arquette is shaping for herself. After four decades in the business, she’s entering what she calls the second half of her life — one guided less by obligation and more by curiosity.
“I think I’ve really gotten comfortable the last couple of years with saying, ‘No, this is my limit,’” she says. “That’s not gonna help me do the best job here or replenish myself. Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t really love myself. I know that sounds corny and everyone’s talking about that, but doing that kind of work is really powerful. It impacts everything in your life.”
For her, that work is emotional as much as professional. “It’s learning to identify your feelings, make space for them and then let them go,” she explains. “Then really seeing that part of yourself — imagining what age that part was that got hurt — and kind of mothering it, telling it you love it and that you’re there and it’s OK.”
It’s the kind of grounded wisdom that comes with age and reflection — and a far cry from the self-effacing women she’s often played. “I was a mom at 20,” she says. “It was always about taking care of my kid, being home when I could, working and providing. Now I’m at a place where I can start thinking, What do I want to do? That’s a new question for me.”
She describes it as a new kind of freedom. “I don’t have to take into account what a partner wants to do or where they want to live. It’s a really exciting moment where I get to just think for [myself] — Where do I want to go? How do I want to spend this time? I’m just hanging out, discovering these things about myself.”
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