"I've seen people almost question if I should be walking around free," admitted the actress the first time I interviewed her, while she was working on the 1999 L.A. premiere of Woman as Battlefield, a play about the horrors of war in the Balkans. "It's very easy for me not to place judgment between me and the character, so I can be there in a heartbeat." Indeed, if you're going to be engaged in believable, bloodthirsty torture on-screen, as Zabriskie is in David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990), you'd better understand something about madness and how to get there.
A daring actress, a published writer of poetry and erotica, and a visual artist who designs fine art boxes, as well as kaleidoscopic photo collages, Zabriskie is a New Orleans-born autodidact who says she learned to act by reading, talking about it, and paying attention. "My father's pet name for me when I was 3 was 'little bastard actress,'" said Zabriskie in a recent interview with BSW, "and I suppose I've never had a day in my life that I wasn't just that." Perhaps best recognized for her role as the grief-stricken mother Sarah Palmer in Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990)—a woman prone to odd, drug-induced visions—Zabriskie explained how she is able to approach the fringes of extreme emotion.
"I have done a bunch of interviews in my life for roles that were just extremely bizarre," said Zabriskie. "One of them involved having just killed my parents and now I was munching on the hand of my mother or some damn thing. I asked myself, How in the world would you get there? Can I imagine eating the hand of my mother? No. Killing my mother? No. Hating my mother enough to kill her? No, not really. The fleeting wish? Not really, but I'm a little closer. Can I imagine being very angry with her? Yes. You just have to keep going back until you find the place where you can come in, and work from there."
Standing around as a local, three-day extra on the set of Norma Rae (1979), Zabriskie found her career took off when director Martin Ritt decided to extend her role and she was instantly offered representation. Though she insists it was never her goal to see her name on a movie marquee, Zabriskie was then able to build a solid film reputation, playing such roles as the irritable, concerned mother of Matt Dillon's character in Drugstore Cowboy, or the haunting seductress Alena, who picks up a narcoleptic young hustler (River Phoenix) in My Own Private Idaho (1991), or Granny, that sour rattlesnake of a woman in Bastard Out of Carolina (1996). But it was the television series Twin Peaks that gained Zabriskie more widespread recognition, with a challenging performance for which Lynch pushed her, take after take, toward an extreme intended to teeter on melodrama.
Blessed with enormously emotive eyes, sharp cheekbones, and an unmistakable voice that ranges from sexy to sinister, Zabriskie returned to the stage last spring in the L.A. premiere of Murray Mednick's absurdist, language-based play 16 Routines, portraying a deranged, snappy, bantering vaudevillian.
When asked what keeps her going, despite the challenges of securing good roles as she matures, Zabriskie responded, "The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it. It may be a very small thing in terms of the problems that exist in the world, but it is a thing, and it's something I can do, and like to do—am thrilled to do actually."
