Diane Wiest may have won accolades for her work with Woody Allen, even receiving awards for her roles in Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets over Broadway. However, Wiest revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she is struggling to pay her rent because of a lack of high-paying roles. The 66-year-old actress is currently working on the Off-Broadway play, Rasheeda Speaking. As she was being interviewed for her role in the play, Wiest said, “I have to move out of my apartment soon.”
According to Diane Wiest, this is due to the fact that most of the roles being offered to her in films are not exactly desirable. She said that she’s been type-casted as “a nice mom, and that’s it. That’s all that ever came, except in theater.” However, some projects would come along that would pique her interest, including David Wain’s offbeat comedy The Ten back in 2007.
Despite the lack of roles being given to her, Wiest revealed that she isn’t planning on reinventing herself or writing her own roles. “I think that if it’s meant to happen, it will happen,” she said. “Which is, I guess, a real sign of stupidity.”
Recently, she starred alongside Al Pacino in The Humbling and 2012’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green. She has also appeared on an episode of NBC’s The Blacklist just last year.
Rasheeda Speaking is a play written by Joel Drake Johnson and stars Diane Wiest as Ileen, a receptionist at a surgeon’s office. Ileen was tasked by the doctor (who happens to be white) to keep tabs on her African-American co-worker, played by Tonya Pinkins, in hopes of finding reasons to fire her. It is a play about racial prejudice, and Wiest claims that she took the role “to explore my own latent racism.”
