Kathy Bates has made (and been great in) a lot of movies and TV in her day, appearing in everything from Misery to Dick Tracy to Titanic to The Brightside to last year's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. She's put in the work! And now, it sounds like she's done.
Bates is set to star in the upcoming gender-swapped reboot of 1986–1995's Matlock, which originally starred Andy Griffith. It's set to premiere on September 22, but before it's even arrived, Bates is saying it'll be her final role.
"This is my last dance," the Oscar and Emmy-winner, age 76, told the New York Times in a recent interview. "Everything I've prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it," Bates said of working on Matlock. "And it's exhausting."
She continued, saying, "I never really thought about being a movie star. I just wanted to be the best I could be. … It becomes my life. Sometimes I get jealous of having this talent. Because I can't hold it back, and I just want my life."
In another interview, Bates told Entertainment Weekly that Matlock is "like nothing I've ever experienced" in her long and storied career.
"I really did a lot of digging deep in my own personal life, my own background, my own growing up, and all of the experiences that I've had personally, but also all of the things I've learned about the craft for the last 50 years," Bates said. "That's another joy that's been part of this, is that I'm able to use everything that I was taught and I've taught myself. And I'm able to do the whole spectrum of things that I love to do as an actor in one character. So in preparing, I dug a lot. I went down into the basement of my own insecurities and failures and regrets to understand what [my character] Madeline [Matlock] feels. The thing I keep going back to is the regrets."
Who knows if she's really and truly done, but she's certainly done enough great screenwork to last a lifetime.