The Talented Mary-Louise Parker on Broadway

Mary-Louise Parker

I was curious, yet not surprised, to read Mary-Louise Parker: 'I'm Almost Done Acting'.  I've always found her to be a beautiful lady, with such underrated acting versatility, that she can sidle from comedic, to seductive, to dramatic quite plausibly.

"I'm not really that into it anymore," she said. "I don't know how many more movies I wanna do. I wouldn't mind doing a TV show again, I'd like to do a couple more plays, but I'm almost done acting, I think."

The reason?

She's fed up with the mean-spirited nature that comes along with being in the entertainment industry.

"The world has gotten too mean for me, it's just too bitchy. All the websites and all the blogging and all the people giving their opinion and their hatred … it's all so mean-spirited, it's all so critical," she said. "It's sport for people, it's fun to get on at night and unleash their own self-loathing by attacking someone else who they think has a happier life -- or something, I dunno."

Admittedly, the negative feedback gets to her.

"I don't know if you can imagine a friend sending you something they thought was funny, that was something mean someone wrote about you and there's like 50 comments from complete strangers across the world about you -- and you can say 'Oh I let it roll off my back' and 'I wouldn't take it personally', but you have no idea until it happens to you. It doesn't feel nice."

I wrote about this very thing in another article - The Artificial Line Between Online and Real Life - specifically regarding "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets":

The best comedy, I think, does two seemingly contradictory things all at once: It makes us laugh, and it makes us sad. This is a stroke of genius on Kimmel's part to humanize the people some of us tweet about and tweet with. Those people who delivered these mean tweets can hide behind Twitter handles, as Couts points out, but in a way Kimmel has 'de-anonymized' them. He moves new media (Twitter) into the tried-and-true old media of TV, which ironically many of us watch on new media (YouTube), and shows us how celebrities took these mean tweets. Many of them were truly good sports about it, and took it in stride with calm confidence or fitting humor.

But some looked hurt, though.

So Kimmel dissolves that artificial boundary between online and real life, not fully of course but sufficiently enough, for us to think twice, I hope, about how we carry ourselves on social media.

Here's the most recent edition of "Mean Tweets":

(image credit)

The talented Parker is currently on Broadway, and The New York Times does a photo retrospective of her stage performances, dating back to 1990, in Stage Scenes: Mary-Louise Parker.