June Squibb has loved working with auteur Alexander Payne, but that doesn’t mean it was an easy road to start.
The actress detailed during SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show” with Julia Cunningham just how much she had to convince Payne to cast her in 2002 film “About Schmidt.”
“Well, to be honest, it was very difficult to get them to look at me for ‘About Schmidt,’” Squibb said. “My agents tried and tried. They were in L.A. and going to shoot in Nebraska and I was in New York and they really didn’t want to use New York actors. They ended up, I think using one or two, but not very many. And they kept saying, ‘No, we’re not interested. We’re not interested.’”
The “Inside Out 2” star continued, “Finally, I think my agents wore them down and they said, ‘Yeah, just send us a tape. Send us a tape.’ So I sent them a tape and Alexander told me later, the minute he saw that tape, he knew I was ‘About Schmidt.’ He knew I was the role.”
While Squibb was glad to be cast, she wanted to know what took so long.
“What do you say to someone like that? ‘Well, you should have seen me weeks before,’” the “Thelma” star said. “So anyway, that they actually had someone that they were interested in and going to go with because they didn’t feel they had it. And I came along, so he hired me for it.”
And yet more than a decade later, Squibb had an almost identical debate with Payne once again for being cast in 2014’s “Nebraska.”
“Then for ‘Nebraska,’ Alexander thought I was the little lady from ‘About Schmidt,’ so they were not interested again. And the casting director kept saying, ‘Well, of course Alexander loves her and knows her, and I know her and love her, but she’s not right. She’s not right,’” Squibb recalled. “And so finally again, my agents wore them down and they said, ‘Oh God, tell June to send us a tape.’ So I had the script and I taped I think two or three scenes and they called right away and said, ‘Well, you’ve got it.’”
She later went on to earn an Oscar nomination for her role as Will Forte’s vulgar dying mother.
Squibb added that both Payne films are “very important in my life.”
“We didn’t really even talk that much about it, Alexander and I, but I knew in ‘About Schmidt’ that this was a director that I understood,” she concluded, “and I felt he understood me.”
Squibb recently reflected on her 40-plus year career with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. The actress admitted that she hasn’t had to audition for a role since before her Academy Award-nominated turn in Payne’s “Nebraska.” Turns out, awards really do matter.
“Before ‘Nebraska,’ I was auditioning for everything, and then after you’re nominated for an Academy Award, everybody says, ‘He doesn’t have to audition, or she doesn’t have to audition anymore,’ and they give you scripts,” Squibb said.
She also credited her career to just having “been around so long” in Hollywood.
“People think of me for certain things, and I do get offers all the time. It’s kind of neat,” Squibb said. “I don’t quite know why. I guess this thing about ‘everybody’s died off,’ there’s some truth to that. There are a lot of women I used to be up for certain roles with, and some of them are gone.”
Read the full IndieWire interview here.
