Anna Paquin Tells Decider Why She’s Never Needed The Publicist She Plays On ‘Flack’

When you win an Academy Award when you’re 11, there’s every expectation that your career has peaked and it’s all downhill from there. But Anna Paquin, who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for The Piano in 1994, has defied that stereotype. She’s worked almost constantly in the quarter-century since, choosing many dark and interesting roles in movies and TV series, most notably playing Sookie Stackhouse in HBO’s True Blood for seven seasons.

In her new series, Flack, which debuts on Pop on February 21, she plays Robyn, a “crisis” public relations rep who is preternaturally good at bailing her clients out of trouble. For example, in the show’s very first scene, she gives CPR to the young male lover of her soccer-star client, who is not publicly out. The machinations she goes through to keep it that way show that Robyn, whose personal life isn’t nearly as under control as her work life, has the emotional detachment necessary to be great at her job.

Paquin hopped on a call with Decider to talk about the show, its five-year path to Pop (and UKTV’s W, where it airs in the UK), if she’s ever needed a flack like Robyn, and what (if anything) she’d tell the 11-year old who was holding that Oscar 25 years ago.

DECIDER: How did this role came to you, and what your interest was in the role of Robyn?

ANNA PAQUIN: I have a production company with my husband [True Blood co-star Stephen Moyer] and we’re always on the lookout for interesting material. This show landed on our laps about five years ago. There was at that point a script written, and outlines for the rest of them. And from pretty much page one, moment one of the first episode, I was just hooked. It was so dark, and funny, and strange, and smart, in ways that just really appealed to me. I just really wanted to be part of it. We all … our company all found it to be very much our vibe. And that was sort of it. It was one of those things that was a very quick yes.

Was the first scene in the written script what we saw in the premiere?

Oh yeah, it was. It’s as it was scripted. That was the first thing. I mean, it was a pretty quick way to get people’s attention. I’m not giving away anything, for people who have not seen the show yet. It’s a pretty dramatic way to meet your protagonist.

Was it always the intention that you wanted to play Robyn?

No, it came to us with the idea that we would co-produce it, and that I would be Robyn. That was always the intention.

What intervened between then and now in the development process?

Well, we had a production deal with HBO for a while, and we were developing with them, and they commissioned a few additional scripts, and then there was some talk about setting it in the States instead of in the UK. But then ultimately, as I’m sure you know, HBO only has a very, very small number of shows they do in a year, and this just wasn’t going to be one of them.

So, it got kind of put on the shelf for a while. Then, about a year and a half ago, I’m was going through mental checklists of ones that got away, so to speak, to see if there was something we could revive. And this has always been sort of our secret shame, like the sad one that hadn’t quite happened, but was amazing material. And took another stab at seeing if we could get it set up elsewhere, and Pop TV in America, and UKTV over in the UK, came on board, and could finance it and here we are.

So it kind of lay dormant for a few years. It’s been … Things can get busy, and you go and do other work. You sort of forget about it. And once we got green-lit, or once our financing was in place, we were shooting within about four months of having had the conversations like, we should probably figure out whatever happened with that, because we really want to get it back from HBO. And kindly, they actually give it back to us.

Were there any changes that you had to make to the show for the two networks that eventually financed it?

We did shoot a couple of versions of scenes with slightly different language, but pretty much other than that, it is exactly as is, and really all that was just a kind of creative exercise for Ollie [Lansley], our writer, to come up with slightly more exotic ways of saying equally profane things, as opposed to just being able to use a swear word. But it’s just the same thought and sometimes, actually, what would be technically the sanitized version would end up sounding … well, I mean, dirtier, and filthier, and darker, and often funnier than just busting out a curse word. So, it was one of those things where some of the versions of the scene are as they’re originally written, and some of them are things that we found while trying to figure out ways of … doing the same number of F-bombs or whatever it is. I really can’t think of a good one off the top of my head, but there definitely were many that ended up being way funnier. Nobody’s asked me that question before, so I don’t have a stock answer for you on that one.

Do you know people who are like that, who either have used the kind of a “crisis” PR person like Robyn is, or is a PR person that does that kind of thing? Do you know people like that in your life?

In my life? No. Have I ever met people like that? Yeah, absolutely. But that sort of, let’s say the “crisis lifestyle,” as a overall bracket of people, isn’t really my scene. I don’t … I’m not a big going out, partying kind of gal. I never really was. Those sorts of people just kind of haven’t really been in my … landscape as much, as people. I spend most of my time working, and I work with people who are, by and large, incredibly serious about what they do, and don’t really have the time or energy for the drama anywhere but on the screen. So that hasn’t been my scene, really. But it’s certainly fun to pretend that it is, and to be playing in that role.

What aspects of Robyn’s personality do you think make her suitable for this job?

Well, I think being emotionally detached from your own life is a big one. I think that, as we sort of come to find out, her and her sister grew up in a household with a mentally unwell mother who had substance abuse issues, who ultimately killed herself. And as far as, if you were to create a less stable environment for children, that’s … As far as girls who … kids who had to be good at walking on the eggshells and being the things that … They needed to be in that moment make sure that the mother didn’t go off on them or have some kind of episode around them.

I think that learning from a young age, to change your behavior to fit what’s coming at you, is scarring for turning people into functioning adults, but does happen to make her quite uniquely suited to her job. Because nothing really shocks her. And I think if you’ve been continually let down, as a small child, by the people … by the person you’re supposed to be able to trust, over and over again, that you would, just sort of out of self-protection, build a wall around your own actual feelings about things, just to keep yourself emotionally safe. Which again, is a disaster for the home life, but makes her really good at her job.

Is it also a matter of being used to lying and being lied to?

I would imagine so. We see versions of that environment that we had kind of decided that she had come from, and we chose her the hundred different variations on kids that grow up in households with mental illness and substance abuse, and there was no leaving the environment. But the way that we had decided that that household was for the purposes of our story, yeah. The truth being a kind of flexible thing, that it’s more important to say the right thing at the right time than it to be the truth. It’s getting the moment done with, surviving the moment, as opposed to a bigger picture.

What was the idea behind doing the show in London?

It was always set there. Originally, Robyn was supposed to be from the UK as well. With the input of Pop and the fact that we were trying to, I think, more accurately replicate the world of PR, which is a very international business, and even because the internet makes it so there’s no such thing as local news anymore. It made sense to have her be from somewhere else, just kind of exaggerate the degree to which she’s kind of her own island. And she’s a fish out of water in that environment. And that she has had to learn to swim, because otherwise God knows what it is she to fall back on. Probably nothing.

She’s not a social butterfly type, like Eve (Lydia Wilson), the woman she shares her office with. It seems like she lets the crises come to her, in a way.

That’s fair, but also her coworker, Eve, is from an incredibly privileged background. And has the luxury of being able to be a bit more of a party girl and behave a bit more fun with her own life. Because ultimately, she doesn’t really need the job. And Robyn really, really does. And I think that there’s a certain … there’s a hungriness to the way that Robyn has to be in her own way, versus Eve, who gets take it less seriously. And it’s a little bit more of a game.

How did doing the show make you appreciate publicists that you work with, or publicists that you know?

The person I’ve worked with since I was, like, thirteen years old, is a very different kind of entity and woman. That’s not the relationship I have, but I certainly feel for people who have ended up in these sorts of jobs where they really are just cleaning up other people’s messes all the time. I mean, it’s got to be incredibly stressful.

What appeals to you about that kind of show, where there’s a new case every week going on while Robyn’s story arc continues through the season?

One of the nice things about Flack is that it has some of the upsides of an episodic drama, where you’re meeting new characters every week. But there is ultimately a very strong, central storyline of Robyn’s and the other characters that are being main figures in her life, that carry you through from episode one to episode six. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. It’s not True Blood, in the best possible way; the structure is just like soap opera. And this is not that, I think, but walks that kind of middle line, where you have new fun people to play with, but they’re not just episodes that exist in a vacuum without each other.

I’m sure you could tune in and enjoy an episode of it without having seen anything else, but it certainly has more weight and more intrigue factor if you know what all the repercussions of all those little choices you see people making during the episode. It’s kind of the best of both worlds.

Knowing how your career has gone, since you won the Oscar for The Piano, what would you tell that 11 year-old girl who was standing there with the Oscar in her hand, giving that speech in 1994, about how it would turn out?

I mean … Not sure if that’s really something I can reflect on at this point. I’m not really done, yet. I mean, I sincerely hope I’ve got a whole bunch of decades left of getting to do what I love doing. I’m not a huge advice-giver to anybody, but that’s because I’m not really sure that I have anything so uniquely figured out that I feel like I should give anybody advice. But I think that little kid did all right.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Flack on Pop TV