The star of 90s classics Point Break and Tank Girl on her maverick career, delving into her troubled upbringing, and her latest role in the era-defining TV drama
Lori Petty lives with her cat in a gloriously cluttered apartment in Venice Beach, a neighbourhood in southern California that she moved to three decades ago while filming the surfer movie Point Break. A row of high arched windows let in plenty of light, and just about every other spare inch of the 58-year-old’s wall space is given over to portraits, photographs, hung up hats and books. Somehow, Petty has found a patch of bare whiteness that’s big enough for her to sit in front of for our Zoom call. This took a bit of stagecraft, she admits. “Ya ready?” Petty whips away the white background to reveal the reflective glare of an LCD screen. “It’s my TV! I put a quilt over it!”
She has a gleeful, infectious cackle; she has close cropped grey hair, occasionally dyed platinum or purple, and conspicuous sleeve tats. But it’s Petty’s unique way of talking that catches your attention at the outset. Both squeaky and hoarse, part Smoky Mountain preacher, part chill Cali baller, her voice puts you in mind of all the eclectic screen work past and present, whether that’s the family film A League of Their Own (1992) or the gen X classic Tank Girl (1995), the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019) or her superb new TV show that debuted this winter on HBO and (in the UK) Starzplay: the apocalypse drama Station Eleven. About 18 months ago, while enduring “the severe, crippling loneliness” of someone who lived alone through the pandemic, Petty auditioned for Station Eleven just like this: squatting in front of her telly, quilt as backdrop, lighting courtesy of the Pacific sun.
