Patricia Arquette Takes on Motherhood in 'Otherhood'

Patricia Arquette played a mom in the acclaimed 2014 Richard Linklater film Boyhood — a stunningly good, complex performance that won her an Academy Award. Now the 51-year-old is portraying a mother again, this time a bit older, in the Netflix comedy Otherhood. Costarring Angela Bassett and Felicity Huffman, it's about three women who head to New York City together to surprise their sort-of-slacker adult sons on Mother's Day. Empty nesters, the women are feeling a bit adrift and are ready for change.

The role is a familiar one for Arquette, who has a 30-year-old son, Enzo, and a 16-year-old daughter, Harlow. She's also, at midlife, one of the most-respected and award-winning actresses in Hollywood. Arquette has been nominated for two Emmys, one for her role as a prison worker in Showtime's 2018 series Escape at Dannemora, the other for her performance as an abusive mom in The Act, a limited series that premiered on Hulu in March (Emmy winners will be announced next month).

We talked with the actress about her career, growing older and motherhood — on-screen and off.

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Your role in Otherhood seems like a natural progression from Boyhood. Now it's like you're playing the next stage of life as a mother. Do you see parallels with your own life?

Definitely. I think as an actor, you use your life experiences to connect to characters. My son had just gone off to college when I did that scene in Boyhood [where her character cries as her son packs for college], so it was very resonating for me. I had just kind of gone through that, and in that moment I felt very similar to that — that life was just flying by, and my son was taking off and beginning to live an independent life, and there are a lot of emotions surrounding that. Then you get the call a couple weeks later, “Mom, where do I get socks?"

I'm like, Oh, I'm still a mom. It didn't really stop, OK. So it's OK. But I do feel that life is really going fast now. I'm 51, and inside I still feel like I'm 20. And even though I've accomplished a lot of things in my life, there's still moments of, Is this all there is? What is this life, exactly?

Your daughter is 16. Do you think about how you'll feel when the nest empties again?

I do, but now that I've experienced some of that with my son, I know that my kids are always connected to me and me to them. And I'm excited for my kids to live their lives.