Laura Linney Interview: ‘Ozark’

“The thing that I love about the show and saw an enormous amount of potential in is that here’s a family that really does not know each other,” says Laura Linney about her new high-stakes Netflix drama “Ozark,” which premiered this past July. “These are four people who live together, who function together, but they don’t know each other at all. And through this grave situation they’re put in, parts of their character are revealed to each other.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Linney above.

Linney plays Wendy Byrde, whose family is uprooted from Chicago to the Ozarks after her husband Marty (Jason Bateman) gets into trouble with the drug cartel he has been laundering money for. But Wendy does more than just passively react to her husband’s criminal associations. There’s more to her than meets the eye. “There’s a lot going on there,” Linney explains. “She’s learning so much about herself as she moves forward. There’s something about people who are very knowing, who think they know themselves pretty well, and then you put them in a difficult situation and all of a sudden they realize they have resources they didn’t know that they had, they have limitations that they didn’t realize they had.”

Now that Wendy is really getting to know herself and who she’s married to, what does that mean for the family in season two, in production this November? “We’ll see how that shakes down over the next season,’ Linney teases, “what type of terra firma they’re on — is it based in sand, or is it mud, or concrete?”