Mary Elizabeth Winstead could easily be considered another Jamie Lee Curtis, as she's made a name for herself in horror-genre cinema and television. But just as Jamie Lee Curtis branched out to other genres, Mary Elizabeth Winstead has proven herself ready to do "something else."
Although she started out as a scream queen, Ms. Winstead began to broaden her horizons as early as 2012, when she played an alcoholic wife struggling to stay sober in Smashed, which was featured at that year's Sundance Film Festival in Utah and gained her rave reviews.
More recently, she's spoofed her own horror-flick reputation by appearing in the CBS summer series "BrainDead," a sci-fi satire about Washington, D.C. in which insects are eating away a the people who make our laws - which explains a lot about the U.S. Congress. This came after her role as Mary Todd Lincoln in - I am not making this movie up - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Perhaps it was both of those projects associating her with Washington the place and Lincoln the man that prepared her for her role as Civil War nurse Mary Phinney in "Mercy Street," the PBS historical drama set in Alexandria, Virginia. Despite Ms. Winstead's solid performance and the equally solid performances of her fellow cast members, the show was canceled, a victim of unstable funding for public television and of high production costs. The fact that PBS is not the American equivalent of the BBC explains why we can't have quality shows like "Mercy Street." (Talk about brain-dead folks in Washington.)
Mary Elizabeth Winstead has since bounced back. She appears in "Fargo," the black-comedy TV series based on the 1996 Coen Brothers movie of the same name.
No comments:
Post a Comment