It took me a long time to actually fess up and say “I want to be an actress” when I was young. I was a little shy about it. By the time I was in high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Well, I knew I wanted to be a part of the theater in some way. I didn’t necessarily know that I was going to be acting.

My father [acclaimed playwright Romulus Linney, author of The Sorrows of Frederick and Childe Byron] and I talk about the theater a lot. He’s been doing it his whole life; he’s dedicated every cell of his being to it. And I think probably the most valuable thing he ever said to me was, “Get onstage, say what you’ve got to say, and get off.” It’s about not indulging. I think it’s also about trust. The actor is trusting the play. The director is trusting the actor. The fellow actors are trusting each other. The audience is trusting the people onstage. The people onstage are trusting the audience. Trust that who you are and what you’re doing is more than enough. Don’t be desperate; don’t be aggrandizing; don’t try and gild the lily. Do what you’ve got to do fully and completely, and then it’s done. And you will be in service to something else.

When I first got out of Juilliard, I was “cold” and “unattractive.” I think that when people don’t quite know how to define you, they go to some stock answers. What does “cold” mean? Waspy? Not ethnic? Uptight? I mean, come on. I’m an actress; how uptight can I be? It’s absurd.

Then I went to being “just not sexy.” And I’ve been really good at “intelligent but wounded” for a long time. Now, I guess, people are realizing that, yes, I actually do have sexuality. As a human being, you have to just take all that with a grain of salt and not give it too much power. But it can be really discouraging.

From the outside, looking at me, there was a huge shift after You Can Count on Me. Without a doubt, perception changed. My lifestyle didn’t really change; more than anything else, the contents of my closet changed.

You Can Count on Me was very satisfying. Everyone did that movie purely because we liked the material. We had no idea what was going to happen. We were relieved that it got made! And then it won Sundance, and it just kept going. All of a sudden, there we were at the Oscars.

That movie was a true independent. As is The Squid and the Whale [due out this month, starring Linney and Jeff Daniels in the story of a 1980s Brooklyn couple going through a divorce]. I was attached to The Squid and the Whale for years; I kept saying to [writer-director] Noah [Baumbach], “It really is going to happen. And when it happens, it will be all that it’s supposed to be, so just hang in there.”

People used to ask me, which do you prefer, theater or film? And that used to be a very easy question. It used to be theater, theater, theater, theater. I will never forget the opening night of The Crucible—when Arthur Miller walked onstage to take a bow, I had never heard a noise like that in all my life. It was an indescribable roar. But film and television have become a much greater part of my life than I ever thought they would, and that’s fantastic. I love film. I find it fascinating. The fact that any good film is ever made is a miracle. An absolute miracle. The more I do it, the more I realize that.

The only way I’ve come close to describing it is, it’s like tennis and swimming. They’re both sports; they both require similar things; but they’re radically different. The stresses are different, the lifestyle is different, your responsibilities are different.

One thing I realized, and thank God I realized this early on, is that it is completely unfair to apply the laws of one to the other. Film and theater use very different parts of yourself. Sight Unseen [an award-winning play in which Linney gave a breakthrough performance in 1992, then revisited in 2004 in a different role] felt like everything I had learned in the past twelve years had come to land there. You have to respect the history that both theater and film have and learn from each. There are things that I’ve learned working in film, about relaxation and my own mental pacing, that have helped me tremendously in the theater. And all the basic laws of theater acting and the discipline [have helped my film acting].