Anything but typical

Forget “Inside the Actors Studio.” A conversation with Laura Linney, however brief, easily morphs into a master class on the technique, craft and strange magic of acting. Focused and thoughtful, serious but with an unpretentious air about her, she is a capital-A actress in the best possible sense of the word.

“A lot of actresses are crazy,” she says with a hearty laugh, perhaps somewhat wary of a comment that was, really, meant as a compliment.

A graduate of Brown and Juilliard, as well as the daughter of noted playwright Romulus Linney, she is nothing if not an actress of fearsome technical proficiency. In films such as “You Can Count on Me,” “Kinsey,” “The Squid and the Whale” and now “The Savages” (which opened Wednesday), Linney creates characters that are smart and scarred, somehow at once armor-plated and utterly vulnerable.

“I started in theater,” she says during a recent interview. “And moving into film and television was a big surprise for me. It’s the big, great surprise and joy of my life to be working in film and television. It’s nothing I ever anticipated would happen. I really thought I would be a theater actress my entire life.”

In “The Savages,” written and directed by Tamara Jenkins (“Slums of Beverly Hills”), Linney assays her prickliest protagonist yet. In the role of Wendy Savage, Linney brings to life a 39-year-old aspiring playwright and temp office worker who maintains a certain estranged detente with her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Brechtian scholar. The two must reunite to take care of their even more estranged father (Philip Bosco) as he grapples with the onset of dementia. Since the film’s premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival, it has received uniformly strong reviews and a considerable amount of awards-season buzz.

Within minutes of the opening of “The Savages,” Wendy has told a completely self-serving whopper of a lie without so much as a second thought. Linney fleshes out the character with all the inexplicable foibles and deep-rooted idiosyncrasies of an actual person. Wendy is, to put it bluntly, a real piece of work.

“She’s not a typical protagonist,” Linney says. “She lies, she cheats, she steals, she’s in a relationship with a married man. She’s emotionally really immature, and yet she is also capable of great empathy, she’s very smart and she’s a total narcissist. She’s this contradiction of things, like one of those wave machines, she goes to one side and then the other. She’s all over the place.”

Linney’s ability to navigate the hairpin twists of the script, from wry comedy to darkest drama, attracted Jenkins to the idea of casting the actress. The two had met years ago regarding a project that never came to fruition, and so Jenkins assumed that Linney still lived, as she did then, in New York City. For their initial “Savages” meeting, Jenkins took two separate planes and a two-hour bus ride to Telluride, Colo., where Linney lives with her fiance.

“It sounds so self-conscious,” Jenkins says of what made Linney worth the extra effort, “but I felt like she would really be able to handle the tone of the film, that she was capable of the flawed, messy humor of it and would also be able to connect to the pathos of it. And I think that’s a very unique skill. In the case of all the actors, that was something I was looking for, it’s something I’m very attracted to in actors. There are a lot of great actors that won’t ever make anyone laugh.”

Linney and Hoffman had also crossed paths over the years but had never worked together. In “Savages” they convey the unforced, largely unspoken shorthand of sibling communication. Even if these are two people who rarely speak, they know each other better than they perhaps know themselves.

Linney isn’t one to delve deeply into her emotional history for a role, preferring instead to let the material be her guide.

“It’s always been for me script first,” she says. “I don’t tend to take my deep personal experiences and layer it onto a script. It’s my experience, not the character’s experience, and it might not be appropriate. But also, having said that, I know that whatever residue of experience I have is going to bleed through anyway. I don’t even need to tap into it, it’s going to come through anyway.”

Born in New York City, Linney was well on her way to Broadway respectability when she started her film career with small roles in such films as “Lorenzo’s Oil” and “Dave,” and as her parts began to grow in size she began earning some acclaim in films such as “Primal Fear” and “The Truman Show.” An Academy Award nomination for best actress came for her role in “You Can Count on Me,” while “Kinsey” earned her a nomination for best supporting actress. There have also been three Golden Globe nominations and two Emmy wins.

“There was a shift,” she says of her career’s trajectory over the last few years. “The thing that’s been wonderful for me is there’s never been a huge leap. I feel like I’ve earned every little baby step. Which is a really good feeling, and also not jarring to my life. It’s not like my life changed overnight. It’s been very gradual, very steady. I think I’ve grown into it.

“And for me to say my life is totally normal and I’m a completely normal person is absurd. I wish I could say that, but the reality is, and I’m not a superstar by any means, but there’s a little bit of recognition and it alters my life a little bit. And so there’s the aspect of how do you handle that appropriately, not belittle yourself but not self-aggrandize yourself. All that territory is much more treacherous than anything you’re going to deal with on a set.”

At 43, Linney has been able to avoid the mom-of-younger-starlet roles that so often seem to befall actresses of a certain age. Instead, she finds characters who are fiercely intelligent, sometimes a little difficult, but always full-blooded and fully rounded. She is somehow managing to buck the conventional wisdom regarding women, aging and Hollywood.

“A lot of people have asked me about this,” she says, “and I never really know what to say other than I’ve just sort of minded my own business and done what I need to do. It’s an unusual situation to be in, and I’m very grateful and aware of that.”

Linney talks passionately and articulately about the process of acting, which she says for her varies from role to role. In particular, she feels energized by the interface between her background in theater and her more recent work in film and television.

“I realized there is a continuum, and the film work does make the theater work better, and the theater work does make the film work better. A lot of theater people come to Los Angeles, and I was guilty of this myself, and experience film and television and are really put off, because it’s not how things are done in the theater. It’s completely unfair. Rehearsal in theater versus rehearsal in film, it’s the same word, but it’s a completely different language. I had to learn to accept each on its own terms.”

For “The Savages” she mostly combed through the script time and again, sifting and searching for hints and clues to her character’s feelings and intentions. Even now, she still considers herself a student of acting, pushing herself to connect more deeply with the mysteries of human behavior.

“It’s a combination of all that technical stuff,” she said, “and then instinct. That’s the other part of it, the more mystical part of it even I don’t understand. When I say I listen to what the script tells me to do, I don’t quite know how to explain that.”