Virginia Madsen on Scoundrels, Her Most Disappointing '60s Experience and Her Lust For 'Real Men'

Was it hard to adjust to a television shooting schedule?

Well, it doesn't really feel any different for me because I spent most of my career doing small independent films where we had very little time and we had to shoot a lot of pages every day and you have to go for it and be extremely prepared. So I felt very much at home on this set. I haven't made very many films where we had three months and huge budget and big trailers. I haven't worked in that world very much so this seems very natural to me.

You have a pretty kick-ass voiceover resume. You've worked on Wonder Woman, Justice League, Spider-Man. How did those projects come about?

I started doing that about 15 years ago when I was enormously pregnant. I thought this would be a good way to continue working and to continue being creative but I was really, enormously pregnant and there wasn't any other way that I could work really. It was something that I trained for back in my acting school days and I have so much fun doing it, especially the cartoons -- I have only done a couple of the big animated features like Stuart Little, and I did Scooby-Doo. The cartoons are great because you just go in for an afternoon and you don't have to get dressed up, you don't have to wear make-up, and you can do things that you could never do normally. Like one time, I played a giant brain and I exploded. It was incredibly fun! I became overloaded with data and then I exploded. It's really fun -- it's just like being a little kid again.

Speaking of things you would never get to do in real life, you also went back in time during your arc on American Dreams. Was it surreal being in the sixties?

Honestly, I didn't feel like it was representative of the sixties. That job was a real disappointment for me because of my character, and it wasn't [the creators'] fault. I was there to be the feminist. My character was supposed to be a catalyst for change. I was going to take the show's mom [played by Gail O'Grady] out of the house to see Lenny Bruce and to teach her how to smoke pot. And that was something the network wasn't ready for, so they turned my character into a drunk. I couldn't believe it. I went from being a feminist to a drunk. I was thinking, "This is not right."

That isn't right.

The show's creators weren't happy with that either. Thankfully, they wrote me out of that story because I was more than disappointed in the direction that they decided to take my character. The network wanted a really straitlaced, quiet mom and that's the story that the creators had to tell. I don't know what I thought, but it was not the 1960s to me -- it was present day with a suburban quote-unquote mom and I know they had nice costumes and they had American Bandstand...I just don't think that the network was ready to tell that story truthfully because so much happened to women in that time. I watched the whole series because I liked the show a lot, too, and they tried to go to Vietnam and they did deal with issues of racism but they did not deal with the social upheaval that was going on in this country. I grew up around that.

For some reason when we look back at that period of time, more often than not, we make fun of hippies and flower children and they make it seem like teenagers were the only ones protesting but they don't show how many adults were protesting, how many people were deeply involved on a grassroots level and completely changing our country. It was monumental and historic and [laughs] I will get off the soap box now.

Pages: 1 2 3