When you pack a film with cinematic heavy-hitters, your best hope is that the the two or so hours of screen time will adequately showcase everyone’s charms… or, you know, that it’ll at least give everyone enough gab time. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was a long-awaited reunion between the Goodfellas director, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci—all titans within the densely populated Hollywood landscape. Quietly among them is Anna Paquin, a fellow Oscar winner who plays Peggy Sheeran, the daughter of De Niro’s Frank Sheeran. After the film’s critically lauded premiere, fans noticed that Paquin—of Rogue and Sookie Stackhouse fame, if Academy accolades aren’t your thing—spoke a total of six words scattered among some stares. But these were, like, really intense stares… the best, most important stares, clearly.
But if you were one of the ones concerned by Paquin’s lack of dialogue, the True Blood actress would like to assure you that she’s quite pleased with how things turned out—more specifically, she’s thrilled to have been part of a Scorsese film, even if the role didn’t involve much chatter. She’s so pleased, in fact, that she took to Twitter to shut down any further hand-wringing. “I auditioned for the privilege of joining the incredible cast of The Irishman and I’m incredibly proud to get to be a part of this film,” Paquin responded.
Scorsese has been criticized in the past for potentially, as IndieWire notes, “undervaluing female characters.” But during a conversation with Spike Lee at New York’s DGA Theater last month, Scorsese assured that Peggy’s silence was not a case of shutting a woman out, but a function of the the script. After watching her father commit unspeakable acts… well, they’re called “unspeakable” for a reason: “I decided that she doesn’t have to say anything… You see him crush the guy’s hand like that, other kids maybe, but this kid couldn’t take it. She looks at him. She knows he’s up to something…”
In any case, if Paquin feels that having few lines is a decent trade-off for the chance to be in a Scorsese film (which a lot of people might agree with), then there’s really not much else to say, right?