Oliver Platt on his career: “There’s a sense of gratitude that I’m able to support my family doing this”

In Showtime’s, The Big C, Oliver Platt plays a husband who has no idea his wife is dying of cancer.

Platt says it wasn’t easy filming those scenes “in the dark. You had to really focus and forget that you knew,” he said. How did he pull it off? “Well, you just do it. It’s your job. You pretend.”

He believes his non movie star attributes have worked to his benefit as an actor. “What I was told early on was that, as an actor, I had a uniqueness: There wasn’t anybody who looked like me, for better or worse, and we don’t need to get into THAT any further, thank you.”

Platt discovered at an early age acting provided a way for him to fit in.”I was always a new kid in school and I figured out this was a way to plug in: I’d try out for a play and then I would have a group of friends, and I also loved doing it.”

Having worked on both stage and screen, Platt has enjoyed a varied career spanning many genres. “I’m drawn to stuff that I haven’t done before,” he says. “But at the same time, when you take a job, especially a high-profile job, you want to have a sense that you’re not going to completely wipe out. So you try and balance things.”
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