Arquette Talks Medium Well
Patricia Arquette, star of NBC's upcoming supernatural series Medium, told SCI FI Wire she was a little worried about taking on the job of portraying a real person, Allison Dubois, who says she has psychic abilities. The series, based on Dubois' life, explores what happens when an average wife and mother begins to work with the police to help solve missing-persons and murder cases.
"Before we even shot the pilot," Arquette said in an interview, "I went out to meet her and said, 'Are you really ready for this? This is going to be very weird. Pretty quickly things are going to have to separate off from you. And I don't want you to have your feelings be hurt or have you upset if you call and say, "Me and [my husband] Joe didn't have that fight."' I'm not having that problem, because at a certain point they're going to have to go with dramatic license."
Arquette added, "Right away I said, 'Here's some aspects of your personality that I know right off the bat I'm going to change, just because for TV it will be clearer in some kind of way' or 'These are things that I want to experiment with.' Yeah, there's a fierce responsibility, but we had that conversation early on, and we knew what we were getting into here, I hope."
For Dubois, who says she has seen ghosts and asserts that she has been able to tap into the thoughts of the living since she was a child, talking to the dead isn't nearly as strange as watching her life being played out on television. "Seeing my life on TV," Dubois said in a separate interview, "it was very profound for me when I watched the pilot for the first time, because I felt that I had this whole world inside of me that other people didn't understand, and to see it laid out in front of my eyes, I've never had to look at who I am before. In that respect, it was very moving to finally ... feel understood on many levels." Medium premieres Jan. 3 at 10 p.m. ET/PT and will air Mondays in that timeslot. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.