Mike Judge’s Idiocracy keeps getting moved around. Even its stars don’t know when it’s coming out. Recently appearing on and off the schedule for September, Darlene Hunt just wanted to know when she could see it. She will soon be starring in the new TV series Help Me Help You as a member of group therapy led by Ted Danson. Whether Idiocracy comes out first or after the show airs, it should put Hunt in the spotlight.
What’s your role in Idiocracy?
“The whole setup is that because the educated smarter people are waiting longer to have babies, sometimes they wait too long to have babies. So his take on it is that in years into the future, we always imagine the future being really advanced and really evolved but his point is that for lack of a better phrase, the dumber people are the ones having all the kids. In the future, we’re actually taking steps backwards as we move forward. In the beginning, I play a yuppie wife who’s waiting to have kids. Then they age me up to 50 years old as I keep waiting and then it’s finally too late for me to have kids.”
This is in the year 3000?
“My part is current as he explains the plight of people waiting to have kids. I’m in modern times, I’m in the first five or six minutes of the film.”
What’s it like seeing yourself age?
“It was really fun. I’m the kind of person, sometimes you read things about actors saying, ‘Oh, they didn’t want to wear fake boobs on a show,’ or ‘they didn’t want to be inauthentic.’ I’m like, ‘The more you can add to me…’ On the show, I wear a ton of fake hair and I love it, and fake boobs and the whole thing. So I’m like, ‘The more we can play with…’ On that movie also, they age me three times, they gave me old age makeup and crazy hair and I love it. It’s my favorite thing to do.”
Do you act differently at each age?
“A little bit. I kept putting on sort of an old lady voice that he kept telling me to stop doing. He’s like, ‘Really, Darlene, you don’t need it. Quit talking like an old lady.’ But I really thought it added to the character.”
Your biography says you’ve done writing, standup – all sorts of things. Does it all inform your performance?
“My writing career sort of led to me getting this role, because Jenny Konner and Ally [Reid] I met because I had written a pilot that got produced at ABC a few years ago called Platonically Incorrect. So they came on board to write that show with me, and then it went away and never aired. We shot a few episodes, wrote a few scripts but it never aired. So she and I have stayed friends, so this year pilot season, I was actually writing two pilots for ABC. Both of mine got passed on and she had written this character with me in mind. Once mine were passed on, I came in to audition. The writing definitely helped my acting in a weird way because I sort of thought I was doing so much writing that my acting career was going to fade away, and then it actually helped it.”
Did you just keep trying different things, or was there a natural progression?
“My progression has always been to just perform and to get out there as much as possible. When I wasn’t getting cast as much as I wanted, I just kept writing for myself and doing standup because I knew I could get on stage two or three nights a week. It was just my desperation for attention that has led me to where I am today.”
And you’ve done beauty pageants. Were they during your childhood?
“The ones when I was a kid were very much childhood pageants and baton twirling. They were the pageants where everybody gets a trophy. I look back and I think, ‘I won every pageant that I was in.’ Then I remember that at that age… Then we moved to a farm when I was seven so everything kind of ended. I didn’t do that stuff anymore, didn’t do dance classes anymore. I think that sort of fostered my imagination and creativity, living on the farm. When I finally got out and got to go to college, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do theater and perform and all that crazy stuff.’”
Your bio also says you take trapeze. Is that just for kicks?
“I’m obsessed. I live for the trapeze. You have no idea. I started taking it a year ago because it was down the street from me I found out. It was a childhood dream and I couldn’t believe that you could just go in and do this. Now I do it two or three times a week and I have a whole trapeze family. I’ve got friends involved, my boyfriend does it, we all go together and I am obsessed and I love it. I’m not bad. I can do some pretty cool things.”
