‘If you want the girl next door, go next door’: Lori Petty

March 13, 2022 7:55 AM

The Guardian profiles actress Lori Petty, who has appeared in Station Eleven, Orange is the New Black, Point Break, A League of Their Own, Tank Girl
posted by ShooBoo (15 comments total)

"I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door" is a quote from Joan Crawford.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:40 AM on March 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

IIRC, Petty was one of those actors always pegged as difficult to work with, but I often wonder if that had more to do with the fact she would not tolerate being treated the way a majority of young actors were/are.
posted by Kitteh at 10:54 AM on March 13, 2022 [42 favorites]

my friends, who ran into petty at some random LA dive bar, say she's super friendly, hilarious, and gracious. now I'll rtfa.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:01 PM on March 13, 2022 [8 favorites]

I have always liked her, for the same reasons she says she wasn't loved in Hollywood: her androgyny, that edge of toughness. I'm glad to catch up with her. I haven't seen Station Eleven, but want to even more now that I know she's into it.
posted by Well I never at 12:43 PM on March 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I found her performance in Station Eleven... weird. Her choices, her mannerisms, her accent, etc., were just too strange for me to make sense of.

But this is a great interview, and she seems like a cool human being.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:02 PM on March 13, 2022

I remember seeing Penny Marshall talk about filming A League of Their Own, and how she said that, while in the movie Geena Davis was playing an older sister who was a better athlete than her younger sister Lori Petty, in real life Petty was the better athlete of the two, who could outrun and outplay Davis, and she was also extremely competitive. Marshall had to keep telling her, "Slow down! You have to let Geena win!"
posted by orange swan at 1:11 PM on March 13, 2022 [11 favorites]

'Difficult to work with' is a great way for Hollywood to dismiss non-malleable women.

Fun fact: Petty cast Jennifer Lawrence in her first-ever role, a movie she directed in 2008 called 'The Poker House.' It's the film tht brought Lawrence to Granik's attention and led directly to her breakout in 'Winter's Bone.'
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:20 PM on March 13, 2022 [14 favorites]

Fun fact: Petty cast Jennifer Lawrence in her first-ever role, a movie she directed in 2008 called 'The Poker House.' It's the film tht brought Lawrence to Granik's attention and led directly to her breakout in 'Winter's Bone.'

This is discussed in the article, including Petty's efforts to advise Lawrence re: being vigilant and avoiding predatory men, which I thought was pretty cool.
posted by Well I never at 1:27 PM on March 13, 2022 [16 favorites]

I found her performance in Station Eleven... weird. Her choices, her mannerisms, her accent, etc., were just too strange for me to make sense of.

I hadn’t seen much of what she’s been in since, well, the nineties, but I’ve been watching Station Eleven (it is fantastic, everyone should watch it, seriously, what are you doing reading this it’s amazing), and when she first showed up on screen, it took me a minute to realize it was her, and it was HER. Mannerisms, accent, choices, everything, and I absolutely love her and her performance in the show. She’s kind of the perfect person to play a damaged survivor of a catastrophic plague. It’s alluded to that she was a musician, maybe a pop star in the world before, and here she is, carrying untold trauma (like everyone else in the story), clinging to art and music as the only way to keep moving forward, and the scene mentioned in the article, playing piano outdoors in the rain is hard to explain in a way that does it justice.

Watching the show, I’m excited to see her again. She is and was always very much herself, putting forth a valid and artful version of her characters as she saw it. It’s a pretty damning indictment of the film industry that she hasn’t been more of a regular presence, that she wasn’t showing us in stages her evolution from the 90s tll now, that she’s had to be the one contacting casting agents to ask for roles.

And Tank Girl was amazing. If you’ve never seen it, or if you or someone you know wasn’t alive in the 90s, and want to understand what the whole decade was about, you should watch it. It’s not that it can explain those years in any way, but that it’s so far from anything you would expect a movie to ever be, and it could honestly only ever have gotten made in the weird subset of a small chunk of the fever dream of that time. Also, it has Ice T as talking humanoid kangaroo.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:47 PM on March 13, 2022 [17 favorites]

Tank Girl was Deadpool before Deadpool was Deadpool. And the studios weren't ready to try to sell that sort of thing.
Tank Girl : "Look, it's been swell, but the swelling's gone down."
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 4:22 PM on March 13, 2022 [20 favorites]

I was just talking about how amazing Tank Girl is, and what an impact the trailers had on me at 11 years old. It's maybe not a great movie but it was a ton of fun and Lori Petti's Tank Girl character became a kind of diva archetype in my adolescent mind of a take-no-shit woman
posted by dis_integration at 6:06 PM on March 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed this article very much, thank you. I remember Petty most from A League Of Their Own, and Point Break, but to another extent I remember that she was in the sitcom Lush Life. Lush Life starred Petty and Fresh Prince alum Karyn Parsons and was cancelled after the first episode. I remember reading at the time about how the cast went and bought themselves Range Rovers, and then almost as quickly, had to take them back.

That's been one of our recurring references for years. I don't even remember the show itself, but I remember that they had to return their celebratory new cars. It was a cautionary tale, I guess (although not for me, since I have never had a Hollywood-style acting gig windfall!)
posted by 41swans at 9:03 AM on March 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have loved this woman since that stupid-ass show "Booker" - she has always been the best part of anything she is in.
posted by ersatzkat at 11:57 AM on March 14, 2022

I've been rewatching Head of the Class (for the first time since the 80s) and she appears in a few episodes. She plays Rizzo in their production of Grease.
posted by juniper at 3:38 PM on March 14, 2022

"Look, it's been swell, but the swelling's gone down."

I thought that was funny so I posted it on Facebook and my wife was worried people might think we're having trouble when we're not. I mean, I did put it in quotes and credit Tank Girl but...
posted by kirkaracha at 6:00 PM on March 14, 2022