Judith Light: "Lights, camera, activism!" | Big Think Edge
I think we're live. Oh good! Welcome everyone to Big Think Live. I'm Winston Brown. I'm an actor, writer, and director. It is my great pleasure to be in conversation today with the beloved, as well as multiple Tony and Emmy award-winning actor and activist, Judith Light.
We will be talking about creating transformation in our lives in order to bring purpose and meaning and joy to our work. Judith, I just finished binging The Politician on Netflix. What is it like? What a total delight! Your state senator, Dede Standish, is strong, sexy, and richly complex and transparent. You're hilarious and heartbreaking, and that musical finale with a show-stopping number, "Your Boundary is My Trigger." You played a real-life character, Bobby Jewel, Richard Jewel's mother in Manhunt: Deadly Games on Spectrum.
Your roles are juicy, and as an actress, you are exploring an incredible range of lives and experiences. That's rare. I'm sure many people, not just actors, would love to have this kind of breadth in their professional lives. Can you talk about what you have done to get to this point?
“Well, first of all, hello, and I'm so happy to be speaking with you today and to all of your viewers. You know, it's a question that I'm always curious about myself. I don't know how these things happen. I know that—and we've talked about this before, you and I—about creating a context. A context is something that holds your vision, that holds the way you choose to be in the world. For me, I always knew that I was fascinated by all different kinds of people, all different kinds of psychology, all different kinds of ways of being in the world. So my curiosity has led me to that kind of creativity, so that's the way I choose the roles that I do. My people, that I work with on my team, know that that's the way I like to choose and the way I try to stretch and grow. So there's a—so all of a sudden, that begins to be the way I'm viewed or how I manifest those things in the world because of the context from which I convert."
"That's fascinating. I’m going to jump for a minute and treat the other end. The lows—this is a business of highs and lows, and with a career with as many high points as yours, I'm sure that you've faced equal low moments. Right now, people watching our conversation and people around the world are facing financial insecurity, loss of their work, concerns about their health and the health of loved ones. Some people are at the point of despair. How have you dealt with those moments of deep insecurity and crushing disappointment?”
“Your question makes me very emotional. It isn’t just the work that has the highs and the lows; that is life, that is the human condition, and how to navigate that with grace has been a lifelong journey for me. I hold it more as an adventure with curiosity, as I said before, and creativity rather than with despair or ‘What will I do next?’ or ‘How will I handle this?’ I know my mind, you know my programmed mind, takes me into those places where I get very escalated and very upset. I do my very, very best to breathe. I do my best to meditate and stop myself, and if I find my mind—if I'm being dragged behind the roller coaster of life rather than being on the roller coaster, I find that I know those are sort of esoteric things to say, but there are actually some practical things to do. When you begin to breathe, when you're in touch with the breath, you're in touch with your life force again, and you can begin to see your way through things. That’s always been a truth for me. Also, I have people in my life that I call on, that I go to, that I look to, to give me coaching and guidance. I know that there are people that are out there and that we're dealing with a circumstance right now in our lives of real worry about no income coming in. Maslow's hierarchy spoke to—the bottom line is we must have health care, we must have food, we must have shelter, and when you don't have those things, it's much more complex. So how to find a refuge, places that can help—that kind of support is the firs..."