MIND GAMES – Jim Schembri’s interview with legendary ‘Split’ star Betty Buckley

MIND GAMES – Interview with Split star & Broadway legend Betty Buckley

It’s hard to find a common thread through the remarkable stage and screen career of Betty Buckley – and that’s just the way she likes it.

Buckley is one of the icons of Broadway who, as Grizabella, helped make Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats a worldwide hit with her rendition of the power ballad Memory.

As a film and TV actress she played the mother Abby in the TV series Eight is Enough, appeared opposite Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies, played the dumped wife in Woody Allen’s Another Woman and, perhaps most impressively, appeared as Harrison Ford’s kidnapped wife in Roman Polanski’s 1988 thriller Frantic.

In M Night Shyamalan’s Split, Buckley (who also appeared in ther director’s 2008 film The Happening) plays a psychologist opposite James McAvoy, who play a man with 23 different personalities.

In this colourful, though regrettably brief phone interview, Buckley discusses the research she put into her character for Split, reflects on the eclectic nature of her career and muses over the election of Donald Trump as US president. She is not a fan, she says, but she refuses to be pessimistic about him or the future of her country.

Enjoy.

 

Click play below for the Betty Buckley interview

 

Click play below for a trailer for Split