Kathy Bates used to “fly home” from jobs if she was criticised.
Kathy Bates was told to toughen up
The 76-year-old actress admitted she got her feelings hurt easily in the early days of her career, and was advised to get “tougher” – but admitted she has been known to take the feedback “too far” and has gone to the other extreme.
Appearing on a ‘Matlock’ panel at the summer TCA press tour, she admitted: “When I was younger, I guess I would get my feelings really hurt. Sometimes I’d get on a plane and fly home.
“I had a wonderful producer, God rest, him, Saul Zaentz. And I remember we were in London, and it was just a nightmare. British press…
“But I remember I got very upset, and I said, ‘I’m going home, that’s it. I’m not going to put myself through this anymore.’ And I remember Saul coming up to me and saying, ‘You gotta get tougher.’
“Someone else had said to me around that same time, ‘You gotta have a head like a bullet and a heart like a baby.’
“So that’s what I’ve tried to do. But sometimes I take it too far and I can be like a bull in a China shop.”
But the ‘American Horror Story’ star insisted she isn’t like the formidable characters she’s played over the years, though she thinks she could learn a lot from them.
She said: “I’m not like my characters. I wish I was.”
In her new show ‘Matlock’, Kathy plays a veteran lawyer who returns to the workforce on the strength of her reputation and she feels “really lucky” to have landed the title role.
She said: “I just feel really lucky. I get to play all of those levels with everything I’ve learned in the last 50 years… I love playing all those facets of this character, and I just feel so lucky to be able to do all of that in one person and in the same episode. I love being able to play all those different notes.
“Playing each scene is like creating a little bead on a necklace, you know? You just have to have faith.
“Because of course, when you’re making television or film, you’re breaking everything up, so we really have to be careful about where we are in the show and what’s happened and where we are in this character development and that one.
“And it all shifts and changes and that’s part of what makes it exciting because you never – you know, Matty is never sure what’s happening in front of her own eyes, and she has to shift with all of it. So, each scene is its one little pearl, so to speak, and so I just have to focus on moment to moment.”
