Once Tom Cruise's plucky onscreen spouse (and Michael Douglas's sexy shrink), Jeanne Tripplehorn now says she's got the best job in town: learning all about sharing on HBO's hit series Big Love.
For the third time in the past hour, Jeanne Tripplehorn opens the oven door in the white-tiled kitchen of her Hollywood Hills home and squints at a tray of browning oats, slivered almonds and sunflower seeds. She’s trying to re-create the taste of the homemade granola that her Earth Shoe–wearing hippie mom, Suzanne, prepared and shipped in vast care-package quantities to Tripplehorn during her four years in the drama division of the Juilliard School. “She used to send me bags, and I just lived on it,” says Tripplehorn, adding that her most recent attempt at making the high-energy cereal culminated in a memorable lesson in the chemistry of sun-dried fruit. “I put in the raisins with everything else at the beginning, and they blew up. They looked like ticks,” she says. Then they exploded and collapsed into shriveled, flattened bits. “Today, I will remember to put them in close to the last.”Dressed in blue jeans and a striped button-down shirt, her hair pulled back in a hasty ponytail, Tripplehorn, 45, looks a lot like Barb Henrickson, the character she plays on HBO’s acclaimed series Big Love, now in its third season. Except for one thing: She’s alone. Her son, six-year-old August, and her husband of eight years, actor Leland Orser, are out of the house. On Big Love, which offers a glimpse into the hectic days and logistically complicated nights of a family of modern polygamists in Utah, a mealtime scene typically positions Barb at the center of a small crowd, barking out orders as she supervises the feeding of her extended clan: husband Bill (Bill Paxton), her three biological kids, her husband’s younger wives (Chloë Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin) and their ever-growing broods.
For all the comic opportunities afforded by her role as a bossy first spouse, however, Tripplehorn gets the most praise from critics for the subtle gestures, expressions and vocal inflections with which she conveys that this team marriage is not a life Barb ever imagined for herself.
