‘I Know This Woman.’ Michelle Pfeiffer on Inhabiting the Role She’s Been Longing to Play

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of our most fearless actors, but she doesn’t think of herself that way. Admittedly, fearlessness is hard to define, more a you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality than a goal you can shoot for. But Pfeiffer doesn’t believe she was ever fearless, especially in the early days. “One thing I didn’t like about my work is that I would watch other actors who took all of these risks, and I always felt like I was playing a little safe,” she says over tea in New York City. In fact, in one of her earliest big movies—opposite Al Pacino in the 1983 Scarface—she felt panicky the whole time. “I was really young, and I was working alongside so many seasoned actors. I was terrified every second.”

But anyone who has been watching carefully, through a career spanning more than 45 years, can see that Pfeiffer has always been a quiet risk taker, a performer more intent on rooting out the truth of a character than courting easy likability. This was as true in her early roles—as the disillusioned but self-determined Mafia housewife Angela de Marco in Married to the Mob, or the grimly funny cokehead ice princess Elvira in Scarface—as it is in the roles she chooses today, two of which are now landing almost simultaneously. In Taylor Sheridan’s six-part Paramount+ drama The Madison, Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, a hardcore (and very wealthy) New Yorker drawn to the mountains of Montana as she grieves for her husband, Kurt Russell’s Preston, whose spirit lives on for her in that landscape. And in Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, produced by Pfeiffer’s husband David E. Kelley, she plays Shayanne Millet, a woman who has struggled to raise a child by herself, Elle Fanning’s Margo, and now sees her daughter headed for similar hardship.

Pfeiffer’s early performances could have been given only by someone who doesn’t know how much power she has, a special gift of certain great actors. And now, at 67, she’s finding that there are good roles for women her age that hadn’t presented themselves before. So when Kelley gave her the Rufi Thorpe novel on which Margo’s Got Money Troubles is based, she was intrigued. “David handed me the book and very casually said, ‘There’s a part in here, and everybody thinks you should play it.’”

Shayanne says what she thinks and wears what she wants, essentially a wardrobe of spike-heeled boots and tiny leather jackets in a rainbow of hues. She used to be a Hooters waitress. Now she works at a Bloomingdale’s in Fullerton, Calif., and her daughter Margo is building her own life as a grownup. A student at the local community college, Margo is a good writer and a star pupil, such that she attracts the not exactly wholesome attentions of one of her professors (Michael Angarano). He and Margo have an affair; when she becomes pregnant, he wants nothing to do with the baby. Margo weighs her options and decides to keep the child, only to realize she can’t make enough money to support herself and the baby. Her solution? Becoming an OnlyFans creator, a secret she tries, but ultimately fails, to keep from her mother. Their relationship is the series’ heartbeat: Shayanne doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did, though both need to reframe their ideas of what a mistake really is.

Pfeiffer loved Shayanne from the start. “I know Fullerton,” she says. “I grew up in Orange County. I know this woman. In some ways, I’ve been longing to play this part.” She also saw the story’s authenticity; its characters’ predicaments feel lived in. Margo and Shayanne’s lives become more complicated when Shayanne’s semi-estranged old flame, and Margo’s father, retired wrestler Jinx (Nick Offerman), re-enters the picture—just as Shayanne becomes engaged to a reliable, straitlaced guy (Greg Kinnear). “Even though each of these characters is eccentric in a different way, I feel like they’re all grounded. We’ve all met these people here and there. I just loved it.”

In person, Pfeiffer is both mildly intimidating and a little goofy. She’s wearing a black silk blouse and dark, elegant trousers, plus a pair of enormous yet delicate gold hoop earrings: they have presence, as she does, but they’re also somehow discreet and understated, as she is. Her carriage is both casual and regal. She’s also the kind of person who, once the recorder is off and the notebook is closed, will ask to see pictures of your pets. She has a dog and a cat herself.

Her demeanor is so generally affable that it’s easy to forget how many genuinely fantastic performances she’s given. She’s been great in movies nearly everyone has heard of (Scarface, Batman Returns, Dangerous Liaisons), but also in pictures that don’t show up in the average Letterboxd account (The Russia House, Love Field, Natica Jackson, I Could Never Be Your Woman). You could program a complete film retrospective with “forgotten” Pfeiffer performances alone.

While it’s impossible to identify a single explanation for her longevity, the ease with which she shifts between comedy and drama—and sometimes blurs the lines between them—hasn’t hurt. Pfeiffer is circumspect about her gifts as a comic actor. “I don’t really understand it,” she says. “But I remember [film producer] Marty Bregman saying to me, ‘You know, you have a funny bone.’ Which I guess is different. I sort of understood what he meant.” Yet her knack for comedy—even the kind that isn’t ha-ha funny—is key to her sly, effervescent portrayal of Shayanne, a woman who both yearns for security and wants to have fun. She’s engaged to Kinnear’s upstanding churchgoer, yet she goes to great lengths to pretend she doesn’t love to drink and gamble: when she does let loose, her sailor-on-shore-leave joy is something to behold. And the way Shayanne literally holds her infant grandson at arm’s length—as if she could somehow erase Margo’s “mistake” by refusing to cradle him close—is both piercing and funny.

One of the joys of Margo’s Got Money Troubles is the way it allows its characters to recontextualize their own life choices, an idea that’s not lost on Pfeiffer. “Disappointments often lead you down the path you’re supposed to be on,” she says. One of the things she loves about Margo is that “it’s so much like real life. All of these characters are really grappling with who they thought they would become, vs. who they are and where they find themselves.”

Pfeiffer’s role as grieving widow Stacy Clyburn in The Madison is more somber—though again, it’s easy to see how an actor at home with the breeziness of comedy can also bring intense human emotions to life onscreen without turning them into leaden, lifeless things. Stacy isn’t just mourning her late husband; she’s forging new connections with her spoiled—but not irredeemable—daughters, played by Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, as well as her two young granddaughters (Amiah Miller and Alaina Pollack).

“One of the themes in The Madison is that it’s very hard to find that line of allowing your kids to stumble, allowing them to fall, to build character, build self-esteem,” Pfeiffer says. “When do you need to come in and swoop them up, give them support?” Sometimes, in real life as in The Madison, it’s the grandparents who step in with a little tough love. Pfeiffer recalls how her own grandmother, whom she adored, would sometimes intervene. “I had a certain kind of reverence for her, and I was a little afraid of her. She felt somehow more powerful than my mother. Maybe that just comes with getting older,” Pfeiffer says. “And I think, is it possible that she saw me sassing my mother, and that was her way of defending her daughter from me?” This is one example of how the people we used to be inform the people we grow up to be, something to which the best actors are attuned. Pfeiffer puts it all to use, seemingly without overthinking any of it. Come to think of it, that right there may be the definition of fearlessness.