Kathy Bates Didn’t Expect the Lovefest: “Y’all, Where Were You When I Was Sitting on the Couch by Myself?”

“There’s Bruce!” Huddled inside on a rainy February afternoon, Kathy Bates points with delight at the shark from Jaws, which dangles from the ceiling, mouth agape and menacingly frozen in time. It’s the only existing full-scale model from the 1975 classic—and the largest object in Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Next to it, there’s a gallery with the word Zoetrope on the door, which reminds Bates of the production lot Francis Ford Coppola used to own. “That’s where we shot Misery,” she says offhandedly. She keeps walking.

We’ve just begun an hour-long guided tour through 130 years of filmmaking, and whether or not Bates is the kind of person to shout about it, she’s been a meaningful part of that history. She won the best-actress Oscar for Misery in 1991, when she was 42 years old, and has since starred in multiple other films that won Oscars and been nominated for another three herself across three different decades. Mementos from her projects are scattered in the museum’s collection, which gives us an excuse to wander around like any other movie lovers. Bates marvels at a snippet of An American in Paris: “I want to watch that again when I get home.” She urges strangers passing by to listen in to our guide: “Hang out and hear what she has to say!” And she’s rendered speechless by footage from a range of 1920s films that have been painstakingly restored to their original colors for the first time ever. She sits through the whole reel as if having a spiritual experience.

This is the world that Bates grew up in awe of and eventually made her home. The Memphis native is the youngest of three girls and was raised by parents much older than those of her peers. (Her father, an engineer, was born in 1900.) Bates moved to New York at 21 during a bitterly cold winter to try to make a living as an actor and established herself as a Broadway powerhouse before moving to Hollywood. Fifty-some years later, she’s a living legend in LA, warmly smiling at those who recognize her in passing.

We enter the museum’s spacious David Geffen Theater. Bates spent nine years on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Board of Governors, starting in the late ’90s, and still tries to watch all the Oscar nominees. She peppers our guide with questions about the theater’s projection quality and what kinds of movies get shown here during the week. She listens keenly for answers. She’s not interested in a one-sided conversation. As we exit the room, she pulls me aside and whispers, “I want to make sure we have time to talk.”

Downstairs at Fanny’s, the museum’s restaurant, Bates settles on her lunch order. “I want a burger,” she tells me. “Oh God, that just looks so good. I haven’t had a burger in so long.” The server approaches and she asks for hers medium rare with everything on it, plus grilled onions, and french fries on the side—extra crispy. “And what is your name, sir?” Bates asks the server. “Joe,” he replies, fully aware of who’s asking. “I’m Kathy, and this is David.” Joe lights up at the friendliness. He tells Bates that, just a few days prior, he was so excited when she won a Critics Choice Award that he posted a picture of her accepting the trophy on his Instagram. He sent it to his partner and everything. “We love Matlock,” he says. It’s Bates’s turn to light up: “Isn’t it fun?”

Courtesy of Matlock, Bates is in the midst of a career renaissance. Just before signing on to the CBS series at the top of 2023, she felt “invisible,” maybe even done acting. Opportunities were dwindling. She wondered if she should sell her house and leave LA.

Just before COVID hit, she’d been cast in what would have been her first Broadway show in nearly 40 years: Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem. Scott Rudin was producing the project, but it fell apart because of his reported feud with Ruhl’s agent. “I took a fucking meeting with Scott for this when Joni Mitchell wanted me to come to her 75th-birthday party,” Bates says later. “I wish I’d gone to Joni’s because here I was with this guy.” The play may have been her last chance to return to where she made her name as an actor, and it vanished: “The reaction that I had was a physical devastation. And to this day, Scott Rudin has never gotten in touch.” (Rudin announced that he would “step back from active participation” in Broadway productions a few years later after widespread allegations of workplace bullying and mistreatment.)

Like many, Bates felt isolated by the pandemic. A difficult experience on a movie she won’t name, from a few years ago, didn’t help matters either. Then came the Matlock pilot, written by Jane the Virgin creator Jennie Snyder Urman and (very) loosely based on the original legal procedural starring Andy Griffith. Bates didn’t think much of it at first. The episode introduced veteran lawyer Madeline “Matty” Matlock as she charmed her way into an associate position at a cutthroat firm. She got put on a case, learned the new ropes, and eventually helped her team eke out a victory. Bates had done plenty of network TV before. She knew this formula.

But then, those last few pages—and that twist! The pilot ends by revealing that Matty is actually Madeline Kingston, a wealthy retiree who’s infiltrated the firm to bring it down: She believes that one of its lawyers protected a pharmaceutical company instead of getting dangerous opioids off the market—opioids that caused her daughter’s death.

The series has evolved into a hell of a showcase for Bates as she weaves between the two identities: righteous, grieving crusader and sweet, maternal colleague. The actor, long known for her tremendous range, gets to run the gamut. “All of her characters have that soft heart, that place you can enter—and then she can flip them,” Snyder Urman says. Executive producer Eric Christian Olsen tells me via email, “You can feel her rip the oxygen out of the room and everything goes dead still—like right before a storm, rippling with electricity.”

Matlock was a major hit right out of the gate and now averages 16 million viewers an episode. Naturally, it earned a swift renewal. Around the premiere, Bates told The New York Times that Matlock would be her “last dance”—which resulted in an outpouring of public affection: “I was like, ‘Y’all, where were you when I was sitting on the couch by myself?’ ” Bates says with a booming cackle. While she has walked back the notion of retirement, she tells me: “I have a feeling this is going to be the last thing I do. I hope we run a good while—I really do.”

If it does turn out to be her swan song, the show has given Bates one last glorious awards run. The Critics Choice Awards are known as a pivotal stopover for movies during Oscar season, so it’s odd for a “best actress in a drama series” win to be the highlight. But as Bates took the stage, the starry crowd—filled with her collaborators across the years, from Colin Farrell (2001’s American Outlaws) to Nicole Kidman (last year’s A Family Affair)—rose for a rousing standing ovation. “She’s one of the greats,” Kidman tells me later. “I love her resilience and what she represents. Her story is extraordinary.” The warm industry embrace took days for Bates to process. “It’s the affirmation of a career that hasn’t always been up here with the A-team going to Ibiza or whatever, you know?” she says as our food arrives. “It hasn’t been a straight trajectory.”

She pauses and looks down. “I don’t know how I’m going to get my mouth around it.” I tilt my head in confusion, before realizing she’s talking about her burger, not her award. “Okay,” she says. “Here I go.”

I feel our conversation is like my career,” Bates says between bites after a brief silence. “My niece, Linda, calls it ‘getting lost in the right direction.’ ”

By the time she made Misery, Bates had already earned a Tony nomination for her work on Broadway, but it was as the maniacally cheerful, then maniacally violent nurse Annie Wilkes that she became a thrillingly unconventional Hollywood lead. “I was in my prime,” she says. “I was in my 40s by then, and I felt totally in command—and powerful.” She also navigated a prickly dynamic with her costar, James Caan (who died in 2022). He clashed with Bates over her stringent stage-trained methods, like preferring extensive rehearsals. “Jimmy—God rest him—was going through his own shit, and he’d apologized for it and we were cool [before he died],” Bates says. “I was at his memorial service and his assistant said something really lovely: ‘Jimmy told me before he died that he wished that you guys had gotten to know each other better.’ ”

Bates ruled the awards circuit for Misery and then waited for another great role. And waited. “It was like a desert,” she says. “There was quite a while where I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”

One reason why was dismayingly obvious: She didn’t look like other movie stars. During one of her first interviews for Misery—which is to say, one of her first interviews for any film—a journalist said to Bates, “You’re not Michelle Pfeiffer.” Around this same time, the late Garry Marshall declined to cast her in his film adaptation of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, despite the fact that she’d originated the stage role to great acclaim. “He couldn’t make the leap that people would see me onscreen kissing someone,” Bates says. “Me actually kissing a man onscreen—that would not be romantic.”

How did she react to hearing that? “Well, I’ve always had that,” she says with a shrug. Years after leaving her native Tennessee, Bates learned that her father had told her hometown acting teacher, “You know, she’s not conventionally attractive.” In one of her favorite post-Misery roles—she’d rather not name the movie—she filmed a meaningful, rare romantic kissing scene that was cut from the final edit. That one still stings.

The year after Misery, Bates promoted the adventure epic At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in which she and Aidan Quinn played spouses. She recalls a British journalist asking Quinn, right in front of her: “You’re a leading man. Is it believable that you and Kathy would be married?” Bates felt crushed; she could guess the premise of the article to come. “I went upstairs, I locked the door, and I cried like a kindergartner,” she says. A producer encouraged her to toughen up, but she needed some time to herself. “I wanted to get on a plane. They said, ‘Actually, Ms. Bates, there’s one leaving right now.’ I said, ‘Great. Get me on it.’ I got on Virgin Air. Sat down. Picked up a magazine. It’s about Frankie and Johnny.” Bates erupts in laughter. There was glamorous Michelle Pfeiffer, cast in the part that Bates had been denied.

Onscreen, Bates built up an unusual filmography as an adored star who rarely played the lead. Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard met her in the ’80s New York theater scene, and they bonded over how to navigate their industry’s narrow-mindedness. “Both of us were looked at as the friend, the neighbor next door, the crazy one—the action away from the center of the frame, which always had a wilting, de-nourished white girl in the middle of it, honestly,” she says. Woodard observed Bates cultivating a dedicated fan base despite regular rejection from Hollywood. Her success “is not because of a production company, a studio, a director—it is those people that see her and just go, Ah. They identify something in her,” Woodard says. “They’re touched by something in her. She is beloved by regular people everywhere.”

“I don’t feel comfy,” Bates says now of working in Hollywood, even having lost 100 pounds within the last seven or so years. “I never felt that I belonged, but that’s okay. I see them sail away in their gowns….” Later, she leans in with a mischievous grin. “So now? It’s sweet revenge. Oh, Miss Beauty Queen, you had a career up until your 40s and you can’t work? Too bad!” Bates grimaces at the comment. It came out harsher than intended. But the Bates emerging in this moment, an hour into lunch, is liberated—boisterous and warm, proud and profane. “I’ll think, Oh, you shouldn’t say this; oh, you shouldn’t say that,” she says. “But then I say, ‘Fuck it—I’m 76. Can’t I just say it?’ ”

And when Bates says fuck, trust: She’s letting you in. The more she sprinkles the word into our back-and-forth, the more liberated she appears. It’s a regular presence on her sets too. “Often when she saw me approaching with direction between takes, she’d say, ‘What? What, you fucker, what?’ ” Alexander Payne, who directed Bates to an Oscar nod for 2002’s About Schmidt, tells me in an email. “I’d keep my comments as concise as possible and watch her processing them like a finely tuned machine. Then I’d watch in wonder as my small directions rippled through the next take.”

About Schmidt remains the project where Bates was most literally naked onscreen. She played the eccentric and free-spirited Roberta, who at one point makes a pass at Jack Nicholson’s eponymous grump in her hot tub. Bates and Payne had several long conversations about how to shoot it. “He was talking about getting a merkin; I was overweight, so I didn’t want to do that,” Bates says. “My tits were really big, and it was a problem because my tits kept floating to the surface. That was a difficult moment: Sitting in the tub with Jack, he’s talking about how he had done some Japanese painting of a gorilla that he was giving to somebody. He was talking about Churchill. All these things. And I had a cosmopolitan, or maybe two—I had to relax.”

But Bates committed—and always collaborated with an intense, invigorating focus. “I remember her calling me one evening to ask whether she could alter the preposition to to on,” Payne says. “I glanced at the script and saw, to my horror, that she’d found a typo.” This echoes Snyder Urman’s experience with Bates on Matlock: “She comes into the edit after I do my cut and watches and gives me ideas. If there’s a false note in a script, she’s going to find it.”

Bates found her first great post-Misery role in another Stephen King adaptation, Taylor Hackford’s decades-spanning Dolores Claiborne (1995), giving one of her deepest, most haunting performances as a woman accused of murder. She credits her success in the movie in part to the movement coach, dialect coach, and star hair-and-makeup team that were hired as she requested. “It’s like veterinary medicine—each part is a different animal,” Bates says. “You’ve got to figure out where the tail is, where the heart is, all that stuff.”

In the late ’90s, colleagues increasingly took note of Bates’s sharp filmmaking instincts. Bates received her second Oscar nomination for 1998’s Primary Colors, the Clinton campaign–inspired political drama, and she helped director Mike Nichols in choreographing a complex scene involving the results of a bombshell paternity test. In Titanic, meanwhile, Bates portrayed the “unsinkable” socialite Molly Brown, who at one point encourages Kate Winslet’s Rose to join her elitist mother, Ruth (Frances Fisher), on a lifeboat to safety, leaving behind some less fortunate—effectively doomed—passengers. Rose is reluctant, though, and ultimately stays behind. Working out how to approach the scene, Winslet turned to Bates.

“Kate came over to me and she said, ‘Can you just give me an idea of this?’ and I said, ‘Give me a minute,’ ” Bates says. “When I came back from thinking, I said, ‘This is the first and last time she’s going to see her family for who they really are.’ ”

Around this time, Bates got into directing and received an Emmy nomination for helming the 1999 A&E biopic Dash and Lilly. She also served as one of the primary directors on the early seasons of the sprawling family saga Six Feet Under. Bates may have been on the precipice of a great career behind the camera, but it stalled after her diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2003. “It just changed everything. Something broke. I stopped that whole year,” she says. “Then I needed to make money, and I couldn’t make money directing. You don’t get paid the same.” She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, just after the cancellation of her short-lived legal drama Harry’s Law, and underwent a double mastectomy. The silver lining of that scary period for Bates: “Ten pounds were gone. Five each, you know?” She now seems healthier than ever.

It’s been about 20 years since Bates’s last credit as director, but she aims to helm an upcoming episode of Matlock’s second season and is already intricately involved in the making of the show. “In my private time, I call her the Energizer Bunny—I literally have never seen anything like it,” says Sam Anderson, who plays her husband on the show. He first met Bates in an acting class 40 years ago and remembers her as a “sieve,” taking in every bit of knowledge and using whatever she could to sharpen her craft. Now, as an executive producer and number one on the call sheet, she still does—while also advocating for every other creative on set.

“She tells directors, ‘Don’t let me be good—have the gumption to challenge me to be great, because I want to be great,’ ” says Skye P. Marshall, who plays Bates’s colleague on Matlock. “I can imagine directors coming in for one episode, how scary that could potentially be: giving Kathy Bates an adjustment. But she goes into it wanting to consistently be a student, to learn and be pushed.”

Bates sums up her Matlock gig simply. “I’m doing everything I was trained to do,” she says. We’ve now crossed the two-hour mark of our interview. “It’s not that I hit every note exactly right, but I get to try. And I keep trying, and I keep trying.”

It’s pouring outside now, and Bates’s niece, Linda, has been waiting patiently to take her home. We agree to pick things up on Zoom a week later.

When we reconvene, Bates logs on from her couch with a list. “I started to fret about some things that we had talked about,” she says. She’s worried about how she discussed the way her appearance was treated in Hollywood: “It’s embarrassing.” Linda’s dog climbs on her head as she reconsiders. “But I think that’s fine. I can be embarrassed about it.” She mentions some other details she’d rather keep private, before smirking. “Is this weird, somebody telling you what to write and what not to write?” Strangely, it’s not. This is the person I’ve come to know: thorough, sensitive, magnificently conversational.

One topic Bates is comfortable exploring: She lives with depression and has spent her life better understanding her mental health. “It used to be anathema—I needed help when I was a teenager, and it wasn’t talked about,” she says. She questions what she wants to say on the record. “I want to be really careful because I love my mother. We had difficult times growing up. It was not her fault.”

Bates’s father attempted suicide in his early 80s, just before Bates began playing her breakthrough stage role, as a suicidal divorcée, in Broadway’s ’night, Mother. That overlap was tough on Bates. There are times, too, when her depression comes on strong. “It’s always there underneath…almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—you can feel really good and then there are times when you get swept under,” she says. “I don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody. All of my closest people know when it’s happening—they back away.”

I ask if there’s anything else Bates hopes to clarify before we wrap. “I wanted to talk about how difficult it is to talk about what I do,” she says. “It’s what I’ve spent my life doing, and I don’t know how to talk about it.” She pauses, and after a time, decides to stop worrying about how this piece will be received. “People are going to think what they think, right?” she says.

One thing I can promise is that Bates’s inner life helps her go where she goes onscreen. It’s at least partly why she can terrify us in Misery, break our hearts in Primary Colors, find that jagged human comedy in About Schmidt, and so on. Everything she does is inside her.

HAIR, MARCUS FRANCIS; MAKEUP, STEPHEN SOLLITTO; TAILOR, SUSIE KOURINIAN.PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PREISS CREATIVE. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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