I’m not watching Big Little Lies yet. I know it’s getting rave reviews, I’m just still watching a couple of other shows and am taking my time picking up a new one. My mom read the book and said she had a hard time with the show because it follows the book so closely she knows exactly what’s going to happen. Apart from that I’ve only heard good things about it and am looking forward to watching it in a couple of weeks when my other shows wrap. (I’m watching The Path on Hulu and Bates Motel. Let me know if you watch either of those and are interested in news about them.)

Vulture has a new interview with Laura Dern, and like Woody Harrelson they caught up with her at the Wilson press junket and got some excellent quotes. She talked about how women are becoming aware of how pervasive sexism is and how we’re finding our voices now that we’re being so openly shut down. I found myself wondering how they got her to open up so much and it’s probably just the way she speaks in general.

On her recent roles
it interests me a lot to consider … not women who are trying to figure out how to use their voice, but women who didn’t even know they were entitled to one in the first place.

I’m sad to say that, in the last months, I think part of the wake-up call for a lot of women and girls in this country is they were in that boat. They didn’t know they were entitled to a voice. They didn’t know people would listen, and they didn’t know they were being objectified. They didn’t really understand how insidious it was, and so I think there’s no greater timing that Wilson and a character like Pippi would exist in the Zeitgeist of telling stories about seeming misanthropes. The seemingly difficult people, the people you’re trying to keep away from you because they’re honest, because they want you to look in your face, connect with you, get off your phone, and be a human. That’s so awkward and so off-putting, yet con men aren’t awkward and off-putting. That really fascinates me.

There’s [a] scene [in Wilson] where you, Woody Harrelson, and Isabella Amara sit on a little train in an amusement park. How long did you shoot on that tiny train?
Hours. Hours. By the way, anywhere I was — even on that train — that I’m with Woody Harrelson is the best time of my life. I mean, there is a bit of Wilson and Pippi to us in that I’ve found my soulmate. I say that with total respect for his wife. But he and I are the same person. As actors, I feel like we’re the same person, and I’ve only felt that with a couple of other people, where you work with them and you’re just like, I hope other people let us do this again and again. Because there is something symbiotic. You feel like part of the same skin. You’re one organism. So one person does one thing and the other person follows and there was something just so beautiful and delicious about that.

Who’s another person you’ve felt that with?
Nic Cage and I, I think, felt that a lot. And I felt that with Mark Ruffalo on a film, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, that we did together. We had all these very complicated, emotional fight scenes, and you have this feeling where you move left and they’re with you. I mean it literally is that Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire feeling, where you’re just matched in the cells.

[From Vulture]

I really loved how she explained her friendship with Woody Harrelson and how she gets that kind of deep connection while acting with someone. I remember the film with Mark Ruffalo she mentioned, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, also starring Peter Krause and Naomi Watts. It was so hard to take because the arguments felt real.

As for women finding their voices, the other day a guy tried to refute my argument by interrupting me almost immediately with a sneered “honey.” I told him not to patronize me and he apologized, but it’s true that the crazy takeover of the government by unhinged Nazi misogynists has led more of us to speak up when we encounter casual sexism. It’s also led to worse abuses against women, people of color and just about every marginalized group. I don’t think this is a good thing, although I’ve heard people say that hopefully it will lead to a new era of peace and understanding. The darkness before the dawn and all that. I know that when it happens to me, if I feel safe, I call it for what it is. The thing is that the people who don’t feel safe and who have to take it or face the consequences are the ones who are suffering.

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