You may have read a certain interview we recently conducted with Chloë Sevigny wherein she had some less-than-charitable things to say about the past season of Big Love—and if you didn’t, chances are you’ve heard about it secondhand, as the story has garnered Bronson Pinchot-levels of OMG-ing from places like Entertainment Weekly, Us, Perez Hilton, TMZ, etc., all with headlines like, “Chloë Sevigny calls Big Love ‘awful.’” Even more fascinating, it merited an official response from HBO, who insisted that the quotes must have been taken “out of context”—which, fair enough. You’re a big cable network, so probably no time to read a whole interview. After all you’ve got way more important things to do.
But then Sevigny herself was asked to comment on it in a follow-up with Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello and she had this to say:
What happened? Why’d you say it?
SEVIGNY: [Long pause] I feel like what I said was taken out of context, and the [reporter] I was speaking to was provoking me. I was in Austin [at the SXSW festival] and really exhausted and doing a press junket and I think I just… I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. You know, after a day of junkets sometimes things slip out that you don’t mean, and I obviously didn’t mean what I said in any way, shape, or form.
Hey, again, fair enough. You were caught biting the hand that feeds you Golden Globes; probably best to blame your momentary lapse into candor on everything that’s beyond your control, such as exhaustion and the rigors of doing press junkets. But as the person who conducted said interview, I’m not really sure how a statement like “It was awful this season” can possibly be taken out of context. So while the interview is all there verbatim, and I would think most readers would recognize this as necessary spin, I’m including an audio snippet of our talk below.