The show came to me in a period of time … when I was having real existential moments of thinking about time and the time that we have and that it is limited. It just is. It’s human nature to — thank god — not have [death] be the first thing you think about every single second, but there is a reality to it and as I’ve been aging and parents are dying and I’ve unfortunately lost friends who were way too young to go, you realize, what a privilege it is to age and that’s not a message we hear a lot in the United States.
— Laura Linney talks to Dave Davies about aging and where she was emotionally when she began work on the Showtime dark comedy series The Big C, in which she plays a terminally ill cancer patient.
![Laura Linney tells Dave Davies about why it was crucial to have her character’s appearance change in this last — and final — season of The Big C:
It was important to me that you actually see what’s happening to her, that you see the cancer and you can see how it changes people. … [S]o I cut my hair … and then I lost a lot of weight and there is something about what happens to the soul of a person as they are battling with an illness: the days when they’re feeling weak, the days where they’re strong, how that shifts and changes, what happens to the voice, how the body moves, breathing and … more than seeing the disease, you see the life that’s there and how the life is coping with the challenges that are happening with the body.
Image of Laura Linney in The Big C courtesy of Showtime](http://25.media.tumblr.com/6e2a28843a5545329f53ec6890c0bf62/tumblr_mmdw1k1RvG1qd9dz2o1_500.jpg "Laura Linney tells Dave Davies about why it was crucial to have her character’s appearance change in this last — and final — season of The Big C:
It was important to me that you actually see what’s happening to her, that you see the cancer and you can see how it changes people. … [S]o I cut my hair … and then I lost a lot of weight and there is something about what happens to the soul of a person as they are battling with an illness: the days when they’re feeling weak, the days where they’re strong, how that shifts and changes, what happens to the voice, how the body moves, breathing and … more than seeing the disease, you see the life that’s there and how the life is coping with the challenges that are happening with the body.
Image of Laura Linney in The Big C courtesy of Showtime")
![Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, on recent advances in cancer therapy: “If there’s a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it’s that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but [it turns out] that cancer genes are sitting inside of each and every one of our chromosomes waiting to be corrupted or activated.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lc1gvqMFp11qd9dz2o1_500.jpg "Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, on recent advances in cancer therapy: “If there’s a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it’s that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but [it turns out] that cancer genes are sitting inside of each and every one of our chromosomes waiting to be corrupted or activated.”")
