Toni Collette has said one of her acting roles made her realise she “needed to take better care” of herself.
Throughout her career, the Australian actor has played a variety of intense roles – but one in particular stayed with her long after cameras had stopped rolling.
Collette said that she is regularly asked: “How do you shake it off? Are you a Method actor? What do you do to let go of a character? Do you take it home with you?’”
The star told Huffington Post: “I’m always like, ‘No, no, no, absolutely not’. But then I realised, accumulatively, I was carrying stuff. The body doesn’t know what is fiction and what is real, so if I’m feeling it, the body is like, ‘S***, this is really happening’.
She continued to say that she was “fine” after appearing in particularly intense projects, including 2018 horror film Hereditary and 2021 TV series The Staircase, but said: “The job that made me realise I needed to take better care of myself was Miss You Already, where I played a character who ultimately died from cancer.”
Miss You Already follows two lifelong friends, played by Collette and Drew Barrymore, whose lives are rocked when one is diagnosed with the disease. It was released in 2015.
Collette recalled: “A year and a half later, I still found myself thinking about it, and I was like, ‘This is not right; I shouldn’t be carrying it around in any way’. So, I just had to figure out a way to take care of myself – which I did, and I do.”
She says coping mechanisms she taught herself as a consequence helped when filming Hereditary.
“I was taking care of myself progressively throughout the shoot,” she said, adding: “I didn’t wait till the end and realise, ‘Oh my God, I’m depleted, I’m going to collapse here’. I figure out ways daily how to come back to myself and shed what’s not mine. And it works.”
Hereditary director Ari Aster revealed on Saturday (1 April) that a scene in his new film is so “intense” that lead star Joaquin Phoenix “fainted” while filming it.
The actor’s latest project, TV series The Power, is available to stream on Prime Video now.
