Holly Hunter Living It Up At 50

by Gerri Miller

“I think their sexual hook-up is kind of effortless,” she continues. “It completely feeds into the professional partnership, and I don’t think that it impedes it. It enhances it. The professional partnership is fed, fully, by the sexual hookup. They use it in their work, and that’s an original thing. There are destructive elements to it, in that Ham is a married man, but there are many things about it that are kind of magical. Both characters are really volatile,” Hunter notes “and that’s constructive and destructive at the same time. Because they’re both volatile people, that’s attractive.”

Another reason Hunter loves her job is that unlike in movies, where—Sex and the City aside—ingénues generally rule, cable television offers more opportunities for older actresses. At 50, “I feel as alive now if not more than any other point in my life,” she declares. “Creatively, I didn’t feel like I reached my zenith at 30. I keep living and wanting to express stuff.”

Co-star Johnson calls Hunter ageless, and she feels the same about her TV alter ego. “Sometimes I play Grace like a 50 year-old woman. Sometimes I feel like she’s 30. Sometimes she and Ham are like a couple of 13 year olds together. That adolescent behavior is even more explored in the second season,” she notes. “It’s very dramatically rich that way.”

With its police procedural elements and emotionally heavy drama, “Saving Grace” can be both physically and psychologically taxing for Hunter, who says it requires “a mental agility that I have to rise to every day. I feel the pleasure of that, and the pressure of that. My mind has to be quick. At times I feel like my energy is boundless. But sometimes it’s a little bit like running a triathlon.”

How does she keep her stamina up? “There’s maintenance that I do, but it’s fairly minimal because the schedule is kind of wild. I spend way more time on the mental than I do the physical,” she admits. But she doesn’t give any details on how exactly she manages to balance her busy career with her private life. Hunter is steadfastly determined to keep all details of her personal life off the record, and won’t discuss real-life relationships or her kids, twins born in 2006.