Melissa Leo Video Interview On ‘Flight,’ Denzel Washington

Melissa Leo revealed in her exclusive video interview with Uinterview that her work on Flight, in which she plays the calculated Ellen Brock responsible for interrogating Denzel Washington’s Whip Whitaker, was in many ways like preparing for a stage play. “What I knew would be the most important thing would be that I knew my lines the way an actor would know their lines on a play,” Leo told Uinterview. She later added, “So really the biggest job, and it’s an oddly difficult job to do all by one’s self alone in a hotel room, was to learn that script inside out.”

Leo, 52, was born in Manhattan, and grew up on the Lower East Side. She broke into acting in 1984 as Linda Warner on All My Children and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award. After a number of smaller television and film roles Leo landed the part of Det. Sgt. Kay Howard on the NBC police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street, and she remained on the show for five seasons. Many more smaller roles followed until the late 2000s when, in 2008, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Frozen River, and two years later received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Alice Ward in The Fighter. Recently, Leo appeared in a memorable episode of the hit FX series Louie as a woman who aggressively hits on the show’s lead character, played by Louis CK.

Leo’s versatility served her well on the set of Flight, which was under a very tight production schedule and limited her to only one day of shooting. “An actor always goes home at the end of a day’s shooting and goes, ‘Oh, I could have done…’” Leo said. “So rather than me getting a second chance at it and not knowing would he [director Robert Zemeckis] do the first part of the scene one day and the second part of the scene another day, we just need to get all in that one day.”