Toni Collette Reveals The Movie Role She Couldn’t Let Go Of

Throughout her decades-long career, the Oscar-nominated actor Toni Collette has become known for her celebrated performances in the likes of About a Boy, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Sixth Sense. In a recent interview, Collette opened up about some of her more difficult projects to date, revealing the one character she struggled to shake off long after filming had wrapped.

“A lot of people would ask me, ‘how do you shake it off? Are you a method actor? What do you do to let go of a character? Do you take it home with you?’” the actor told the Huffington Post. “I’m always like, ‘No, no, no, absolutely not.’ But then I realized, accumulatively, I was carrying stuff.” Collette went on to share that the role of Milly in Miss You Already had a lasting impact on her, and was “the job that made me realize I needed to take better care of myself.”

Released in 2015, the film follows the story of two best friends (played by Collette and Drew Barrymore) whose lives are turned upside down when one of them is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.

Recalling the “year and a half” after filming the Catherine Hardwicke-directed drama, the BAFTA-nominee revealed that she still found herself “thinking about” the character of Milly. “I was like, ‘This is not right; I shouldn’t be carrying it around in any way.’ So, I just had to figure out a way to take care of myself — which I did, and I do.”

In her Huffington Post interview, Collette also disclosed that her time working on Miss You Already inspired some self-taught coping mechanisms that she put into practice when filming the 2018 psychological horror Hereditary.

“I was taking care of myself progressively throughout the shoot,” she said, adding: “I didn’t wait till the end and realize, ‘Oh my God, I’m depleted, I’m going to collapse here.’ I figure out ways daily how to come back to myself and shed what’s not mine. And it works.”