BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When actress Carrie Preston was 9 years old, she decided she wanted to run hurdles in the all-city track competition. She couldn’t have been less qualified.
“I was in the fourth grade and I wanted to go out for all-city track. I don’t know why. I don’t know how I got it into my head,” she says.
“I was a tiny, scrawny little girl and I thought it would be really good to try out for the hurdles, so I’m running head-on. This little 9-year-old girl to these giant hurdles that I’m never going to jump over. I kept going and kept going and was hitting them and hitting them. And I would go back and try again until my mom finally came down and said, ‘Honey, honey, honey, I’m going to ask you to stop doing that. You’re going to hurt yourself.’
“That’s sort of how I look at life,” says Preston, after a pause. “That’s the life of the artist right there.”
Preston, who’s best known for “True Blood” and “The Good Wife,” realized she wanted to be an actress when she was 8, living in her native Macon, Ga. “I was never Snow White,” she nods, her green eyes punctuating her red hair. “I was always the maid, the crazy maid, or the fairy godmother — nutty. I was always already playing the character roles — the roles where I got to really be a chameleon. That’s what really feeds me.”
She recalls when she was very young asking her mother if performing could turn into a real job. “My mom said, ‘Well, honey somebody’s got to do it. I don’t know why it can’t be you.’ Both my parents were encouraging and didn’t encourage me to get a ‘real’ job. They saw this as something I could make work in my life.”
Her dad was a geotechnical engineer and her mom a visual artist. “She definitely understands the life of an artist, and what really fuels people in life is passion,” says Preston. “She saw I had that attraction for it, so it was just a matter of getting the skills to meet the passion,” she says.
Preston fed that passion by attending a small college in southern Indiana and devoted four years studying at Juilliard, which she attended through scholarships, grants and fellowships.
She supplemented her income waitressing at the Olive Garden, temping, and serving as a Girl Scout leader. But Preston mostly made her living by acting, once she finished Juilliard.
While she insists she’s always been a character actor, her latest role as the tragic mother of a murdered child on “Dating Game Killer,” airing On Demand and on ID Go, proved another hurdle.
“Just to put those circumstances in your belly — of your child being brutally murdered by a monster — is a really dark and sobering place to go,” she says of the show, which premiered on Investigation Discovery.
“It definitely was tough. I mean, the lines were blurred for me a little bit. I got this horrible respiration, like I got the flu or something. My body was not really wanting to go there. It was very upsetting. So I was sick while I was shooting which, in some ways, went hand-in-hand with the emotional pain playing such a thing.”
She did her best to stay afloat. “In between shots, I was drinking hot tea with honey and taking cough drops and things like that to get myself through it. But this woman is bombarded and run down, too. It certainly wasn’t a terrible thing. It kind of helped.”
In an unusual turn, Preston didn’t have to audition for the role. The part was offered to her. “It’s wonderful,” she smiles. “It sort of makes you look at the material in a different way because you don’t have to hustle for it. You’re being asked to be trusted with it, so I was grateful for that. Certainly it’s not the kind of role that normally comes to me so I was excited about that, also scared of it. And it’s always good to do things that you’re scared of.”
