Almost everyone knows how it feels when the mean voice in your head gets a little too loud, but what if you could turn it around and use it as a positive force? Allison Janney did just that when she used hers to win an Oscar for best supporting actress.
The day before the Oscars, at the Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles, Janney had admitted she used her own self-hating voice to inspire her performance of Tonya Harding's cruel mom, LaVona Golden, in I, Tonya. Her character berates and belittles Tonya Harding, played by Margot Robbie, to the point that she seems to have no heart whatsoever. Turns out, when she was looking for a way to make that nastiness feel realistic and authentic, she looked to a voice she knows only too well.
'We all have those voices inside of us that are mean to us, like my inner critic,' she said. 'And unfortunately I realised, 'Oh, I just have to talk to her the way I talk to myself sometimes.' It's true, we can be awful to ourselves. So I imagined Margot being me.'
But now Janney's mean voice has finally quit. Speaking to press backstage after her Oscar win, she said the voice was now saying, 'Bravo, good going, girl—I'm proud of you.'
'I kind of didn't dare to dream of things like this,' she said, 'because I didn't want to be disappointed, and at a certain point I had kind of given up thinking this would happen for me because I just wasn't getting the kind of roles in film that would give me attention like this.'
Let that be a lesson to any inner voices that insist we're not good enough—there's no arguing with an Oscar.
