Maura Tierney on The Iron Claw, Joe Rogan and the aftermath of ER: ‘I need to stop playing women in despair’
In the butch weepie The Iron Claw, Maura Tierney plays Dottie Von Erich, matriarch of a family of doomed wrestler sons. The ER star plays out unimaginable levels of grief. She loved it. Found it challenging and creatively satisfying. She’s also not going to do it any more. “I’ve just decided,” she laughs, drily. “I need to start saying no to playing women in despair. It’s time.”
It is true that people keep asking Tierney to cry. Or, if not cry, at least to embody a kind of haunted, battleworn intensity. On , the medical drama phenomenon that made her one of television’s most recognisable faces, her character at least had a little balance: her sunny disposition tempered with just the occasional relapse into alcoholism. Lately, though, she’s played wives to philanderers and stepmothers to, another stop on the Maura Tierney Misery Express, she made a choice: even if the script didn’t call for it, she’d play all her scenes as if she was starring in a comedy.
