When she was 20 years old, Patricia Arquette got her first big break in a serious movie. And then she walked away from it. She’d won the lead role in Last Exit to Brooklyn, adapted from the cult-classic novel by Hubert Selby Jr., but before shooting began she discovered she was pregnant. Although the producers felt they could get the film in the can before she began showing, Arquette balked. The character she had been meant to play, a Brooklyn sex worker, is brutally raped and assaulted in the film. “I don’t want to be worried how this is for my baby, if I’m falling down or if I’m getting roughed up in a scene or something,” Arquette recalls thinking. So she quit what she knew was the chance of a lifetime, figuring she’d never get another shot.

Arquette tells me this while slouched on a heap of plum-colored pillows in the lounge of a Hollywood hotel on the day before her 51st birthday. I know of the impending milestone because she exclaims it a few minutes into our conversation. Arquette is dashing between Emmy-season events, and she seems as shocked as anyone that her name is being whispered as a contender for not one but two riveting performances in very different limited series based on true crimes. First there was Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora, in which she played Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a middle-aged prison worker in upstate New York who had affairs with two inmates (played by Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano) and aided them in a dangerous escape plot that transfixed the national media in 2015. Before she’d even had time to shed the 40 pounds she gained for Dannemora, Arquette went to work on The Act, stepping into the mottled skin of Dee Dee Blanchard, a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who convinces herself and the world that her healthy teenage daughter is cripplingly ill. The series has become a breakout hit for Hulu, luring in more new subscribers than any of the streaming platform’s other original series. “I feel like I wanted these kind of parts all my life, but there just wasn’t the option,” she says, distractedly playing with the handle of her well-worn brown leather handbag. She’s dressed in a chic white-and-black jumpsuit and black platform heels, her straw-blond hair cut sleek and razor-blunt. She seems radiant but reserved, peering at me through turquoise horn-rimmed glasses.

Although Arquette is one of the great actresses of our time, she has never quite ascended to the American movie-star pantheon. Maybe that’s because she gravitated toward eccentric indie films, often playing oddball, sexily inscrutable girlfriends, wives, and muses. There was the prostitute-outlaw in the Quentin Tarantino–scripted True Romance, the sympathetic girlfriend to a misfit cross-dressing filmmaker in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, a dual role as femme fatale doppelgängers in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and a hairy woman besotted with an ape-man in Michel Gondry’s Human Nature. Or maybe it’s because Hollywood studios were not eager to create films with complicated, unsettling female characters at their center.

Whatever the reason, Arquette wasn’t nominated for an Oscar until 2015, when she won the best-supporting-actress prize for her performance as a single mom in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Shot over 12 years, Boyhood offered a time-lapse view of the character (and Arquette herself) metamorphosing from ages 33 to 45—from professional prime to potentially over-the-hill for a woman in Hollywood. That ultra-real, Oscar-winning performance should have unleashed a cascade of cinematic starring roles, but there were few scripts that allowed an actress like Arquette to swagger. During and after those Boyhood years, she took shelter in television, where she had already starred in the network drama Medium, as a psychic who communed with dead people to solve crimes, and then in CSI: Cyber. Along the way she spent a few seasons on Boardwalk Empire as a hard-ass speakeasy owner, the kind of broad who punches a man in the face before she deigns to have sex with him.

Left to make her own luck, Arquette led the first wave of female film stars who moved to TV, seeing opportunity in what had once been dismissed as a trashy medium. And in 2018, she took lead roles in two TV projects worthy of her talents, Escape at Dannemora and The Act. Over the last few years, prestige TV has become a place for A-list Hollywood actresses like Amy Adams, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, and Emma Stone to flex their flair. But none of the roles they’ve embraced have been as radically unglamorous as Tilly and Dee Dee. It’s a shock for viewers who remember the sensual vamp of Lost Highway to see her as the coarse, cantankerous older women of Dannemora and The Act.

Dannemora is the grittier production and the stronger performance, with a raw sexuality still pulsing beneath Tilly’s frumpy exterior as the prison employee in charge of the tailor shop where convicts work. She desperately wants out from the jail of her own life in the boondocks of upstate New York and her drab marriage. In The Act, Dee Dee initially comes across as more crudely sketched: her saccharine maternal surface conceals a monster of manipulation. But as the sadistic subtleties of the mother-daughter relationship unfold over eight episodes, Arquette’s performance proves to be a quiet triumph. Thirty years after Arquette turned down her “big break,” Hollywood is meeting her on her own terms, allowing her to carve out a second act to her brilliant career.

A rquette says she always felt awkward playing the ingénue, on-screen or off. “That was weird for me, because I never felt like a beauty. I certainly didn’t really feel sexy,” she says, flashing a snaggle-toothed smile. Arquette was raised in a commune in Virginia in the early 1970s; her hippie parents were both actors. Although neither of these things made her any less shy about nudity, this free-range upbringing—which included protest marches as well as “making art and doing puppet shows and singing” with her siblings—equipped her to sidestep cultural expectations.

A boy at school once told her that if she fixed her crooked teeth, she could pose for Playboy. “I was like, ‘Why would I want to be in Playboy? … I am not going to be some Barbie. I’m going to be the wolf girl, the vampire girl,’ ” Arquette says. “I already thought, I don’t look like I am inside. My outside doesn’t fit my inside.”

Those wolfish teeth turned out to be one of Arquette’s most distinctive features, a visual imperfection that set her apart. After running away from home as a teenager to live with her actress sister Rosanna, in Los Angeles, Arquette soon began auditioning for parts. She doesn’t recall anyone pressuring her to fix the teeth. Her body, on the other hand, was a different story.

“One director, I remember him say-ing to my manager, ‘Could she lose 10 pounds? … But not if her boobs will get smaller!’ ” Arquette’s lips curl in disgust. “There are those moments where you do feel like a weird piece of meat.” Although she was only 18 at the time, she says, “somehow I had the wherewithal to be like, What a dick!”

In the last few years, the #MeToo movement has inspired a lot of women to unearth incidents and trauma from their past. Arquette has spoken up in support of women who made accusations against Harvey Weinstein (Rosanna was one of the first) and contributed to the Twitter “Why I didn’t report” hashtag last fall. “I gave up ‘reporting’ after I called the police at 12 after a man masturbated at me from his car,” she tweeted. “I gave the cops his license-plate number and description. They didn’t come to take a report and never contacted me again. They did nothing.”

When I asked her about this last year, Arquette said she’d been insulated from a certain amount of overt industry harassment by the men in her life. (She has been married to actors Nicolas Cage and Thomas Jane.) “I had powerful boyfriends who people wanted to work with, and I don’t think people wanted to cross them. So I think I got a lot less of that than other women did.” Even so, she said, “there were obvious things that happened in my life that I knew were sexual trauma—that were sexual assaults, and very flagrant. But as time went on, I found [#MeToo] really traumatic, because every time a new wave would come up, I would re-remember other things that I had kind of buried, and it was like ‘Oh my God, that was horrible.’ ”

Arquette has often been charmingly unguarded in interviews over the years. While doing publicity for Flirting with Disaster in 1996, Arquette—who played a new mom and the wife of the central character, played by Ben Stiller—sometimes talked about being proud to play a new mom with authentically imperfect tits, since her own breasts had actually nursed a baby. She couldn’t have foreseen that, more than 20 years later, Stiller would reach out to her to inject realism into Escape at Dannemora, the bleak ripped-from-the-headlines series that he was directing and executive-producing.

“There is something about Patricia that is very genuine and unconflicted,” Stiller told me by phone. Working with her in the 90s, he had noticed that although “she is extremely beautiful ... as an actor she’s always been very much not about that, just really about the work.” She didn’t care if her characters came off as traditionally “likable,” he said. That was helpful when it came to playing abrasive prison worker Tilly. “This is very much a story of a woman in a male environment who is really trading on her sexuality,” Stiller says, as “a way for her to have some sense of power.”

The five-foot-two-inch actress wore false teeth, gained weight, and adopted a harsh working-class accent for the series. It was her personal Raging Bull experience. She says she wore no body makeup for nude scenes, exposing herself in a way that felt deeply contrary to her self-effacing impulses. (She likes to say that she’s so modest, she takes baths in the dark.) But her research into the real Tilly suggested a middle-aged woman secure in her sexuality, something rarely glimpsed on-screen.

“I really want to have the conversation of who’s allowed to be sexual, who’s allowed to be sexy,” she says, slapping the scuffed white leather hotel sofa for emphasis. “Who defines what that is? What are you supposed to look like? What age are you supposed to be and who gets to say that’s the only story of the human race, you know?”

Stiller points to a simple scene in the first episode for a key to Arquette’s genius: Tilly is rocking out to a Nick Jonas song in the car, and you see in her eyes someone “who has a whole inner life that is not being tapped into by anybody. In that one moment, [Patricia] just filled her with so much humanity that for the rest of the series, anything that she does, you kind of remember that this is a human being.” It was not written into the script that way, Stiller says, “but she filled it with that secret twinkle in her eye.”

Dannemora had an extended production schedule, giving Arquette time to burrow deep into her character. “Because I have some success, I’m able to say to people, ‘Can we slow down a little bit? We should explore this or that before we set up for the cameras because the director might find something they really want to capture,’ ” she says. The way she describes the process of creating a character like Tilly, it sounds a bit like an excavation—not so different from the way the convicts in Dannemora probe the network of tunnels beneath the prison, searching for a way out. “Humans are really fucked up!” she marvels. “When you start looking at them with all these layers, it’s like, Whoa, I’ve gone down this wormhole with you.”

W hen Arquette was a kid, her mother began studying to become a therapist. “She’d be talking about narcissists, and she’d be talking about passive-aggressive and borderline and bipolar people,” Arquette remembers. It made psychology seem like a recipe book: “Put in 3 percent of this, and then 5 percent of that, and, oh, this person abandoned you—what’s the reaction? It’s like cooking with human behavior.”

So upon accepting the role of Dee Dee in The Act, shortly after wrapping Dannemora, Arquette began digging into research about Munchausen by proxy. The psychological syndrome led the real Dee Dee to fabricate illnesses in her otherwise healthy daughter, Gypsy (played by Joey King), for sympathy and money. One particular video stunned Arquette. It was hospital footage of a mother who repeatedly rolled over her baby until it began smothering. “Alarms would go off; the nurses would come in and stabilize the baby. They’d leave and then she did it again,” Arquette says. She watched another video in which a mom covertly injected her child with something. “I thought as an actor that I would see something interesting on her face before or after, but there was no change. It was really, really chilling.”

The Act is an appropriately eerie mix of true crime and existential mother-daughter drama. Arquette says that she threw in homages to melodramatic characters like Blanche DuBois and Baby Jane to hint at the turmoil within. Her performance zigzags between a caricature of maternal saintliness and terrifying cruelty. One malevolent look from Dee Dee is enough to put Gypsy in her place—and if it’s not, Dee Dee isn’t afraid to tie her daughter’s hands to the bed. She treats Gypsy like an ailing infant rather than the fully grown woman she is, giving her sponge baths and injecting nutritional supplements into her feeding tube. That required Arquette and King to spend months shooting intimate, claustrophobic scenes.

“There’s no personal space” in the Blanchard house, as Arquette points out. “Everything is such an enmeshment.” At their first dinner together, Arquette and King were friendly but “pretty shy,” director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre says. Within a week, she was amazed to see the two women “laughing crazily together, holding hands, sharing secrets.”

King recalls a pivotal scene in which her character is standing up to her mother for the first time. “I was nervous about it, and Patricia could see that,” she says. Arquette came over and squeezed King’s body, constricting her arms. They stood that way for several minutes. “I started to feel really suffocated and kind of panicked,” King continues. “It really, really helped me get into that headspace of someone who feels trapped.”

Arquette immersed herself in every detail of Dee Dee, from dialogue to accent. Early on, the actress sent de Clermont-Tonnere a photo of the very shapeless, flowery clothing she wanted Dee Dee to wear, a kind of frumpy armor. Arquette was always trying to “find the right movements for the character … to find all the pieces of the puzzle,” says de Clermont-Tonnere. “That was her process of trying to see and to feel organically connected to Dee Dee.”

The thing that most surprised Arquette was how much Dee Dee colonized her mind. In the middle of a scene, she says, “I’d see Gypsy, and then all my thoughts were like: Your legs are like toothpicks; they’re gonna snap; your bones are so brittle! You just don’t understand; you’re too little.” She lapses into Dee Dee’s singsong but scratchy southern lilt and then shakes it off with a shudder. “It was so weird being in this lady’s head, because it was a never-ending train of thought that just kept compounding itself.”

If it wasn’t already obvious, Arquette grew up in a family heavily doused in 60s activism. “Our mom was a civil-rights activist and our dad was a lefty... He took us on union strikes, and our mom took us to a Diablo Canyon nuclear-power sit-in,” she says. “It was always a part of our lives being socially conscious and active.”

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Arquette started a charity to improve sanitation there, as well as in Colombia, Uganda, Nicaragua and Kenya. She lights up when she talks toilets—specifically, a conversation she had with a 72-year-old Ugandan woman who told her the new bathroom installed near her house meant that she wouldn’t have to trek outside the village to a faraway toilet and risk getting conked over the head or raped at night. “I just thought, She’s 72, when does she get to stop?” Arquette says. “I’m so glad she doesn’t have to worry about being raped every time she has to go to the bathroom now. It’s such a real danger for women all over the world.”

Increasingly outspoken about her pet issues, Arquette used her 2015 Oscars acceptance speech to demand pay equity for women in Hollywood and beyond; California state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson credited the speech with providing the momentum for her to introduce and pass an equal-pay law in the state later that year. Arquette went on to executive-produce a documentary on the topic, Equal Means Equal. In late April, she testified in front of Congress, pushing for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Asked whether she demanded equal pay on her own movie and TV projects last year, she told me, “I definitely got some pushback on it, and one of the first jobs I got offered after that I had to walk away from because they were just being so awful about the pay, compared to my male co-star. I was like, ‘I know, he’s a bigger star than me, so you know I think that this is fair that I make less than him, but not ridiculously less than him.’ ” Arquette says now that she always wants to have a conversation about equal pay before she accepts a gig but shrugs, “In general, males still are going to make more, and I know that.” At one point in our conversation she mentions how grateful she was that Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano joined the Dannemora project; even with an Oscar in her pocket, “we still needed some big guy to sign on.”

I don’t think Dee Dee or Tilly ended up having the life they imagined when they were young,” Arquette says wistfully at one point during our conversation. What future had she imagined for herself?

Acting was always a draw (she’s been performing since she was four, when she played Chicken Little at a hippie folk festival), but Arquette once considered becoming a midwife. Beyond that, she says, “I really thought I would be a wife—” She stops herself and grins. “I guess I have several times attempted that job! But I finally feel like I’m really in the right relationship,” she continues, referring to her longtime boyfriend, artist Eric White.

One thing she never pictured is that she’d be getting the best roles of her life at 50. “I had observed for so many years that when [women] got to be a certain age, they just stop letting you work,” she says. Arquette even starred in the Inside Amy Schumer sketch skewering this unspoken horror. In “Last Fuckable Day,” she, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Tina Fey play themselves—actresses over 40, out to celebrate Louis-Dreyfus’s waning appeal in Hollywood. Telltale sign? You’re cast as Tom Hanks’s mother instead of his wife.

All of those actresses seem to have busted through that age barricade, not by trying to portray younger women but via roles that play on their age and experience. Arquette says that she’s now getting some choice parts offered to her. But after the emotional double whammy of Tilly and Dee Dee, she is considering taking a short break.

It wasn’t that hard to slough off Dee Dee after shooting wrapped on The Act, Arquette says; she just had to peel off the wig, fake toenails, and prosthetic legs, and wipe off the makeup that simulated rosacea. She found exorcising the ghost of Tilly harder. All that time spent on location in the real town of Dannemora during the gloomy East Coast winter, combined with what she calls Tilly’s “underlying feeling of depression,” stuck with her.

She did, however, like the sense of invisibility granted her by Tilly’s persona. On the rare occasion that a stranger recognized her as a frizzy-haired, 40-pounds-heavier woman, they would say things like “Oh no, what happened to you?,” Arquette scowls, mimicking the patronizing tones. “This whole trip of being an actor—I’m so grateful for success, but it’s really been a fascinating social experiment. Oh, I’ve learned strange things about our species.”