“You can see her brain working things out; you see how conflicted she is in this extraordinary situation,” says TV critic Gillian Flynn, who has written about Big Love for Entertainment Weekly. “For me, the show would not work without her in that role, because she’s the person you need to empathize with. She’s extremely genuine, and she makes it all entirely grounded and believable.”
A Big Problem With Big Love
Having agreed to play Barb, Tripplehorn considered opting out just before production on the pilot began in May 2004 because she didn’t understand why a woman would share her cherished husband with two “sister-wives.” “I mean, honestly! Who does that?” she sputters. “I got cold feet.” She called an orange alert meeting with Big Love’s creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, announcing to them with rising panic: “I hate Barb.”“We had to talk her off the ledge,” recalls Scheffer, adding that eventually Tripplehorn came to see the character as they did: a sort of have-it-all protofeminist whose sister-wives double as live-in help in raising her family, which allows her enough independence to return to her job as a teacher. After that, Barb came alive.
“I looked at Barb as the greatest control freak,” Tripplehorn says, “and I think one of the lessons she is learning over the series is to let go and focus on herself.” The character’s backstory, she notes, is that “Barb thought she was going to die, so she was handpicking her husband’s next wives. Then she lived. From there, it had to be about the love of family.” (This season a similar dynamic played out, as Barb feared her cancer had returned.)
“There are so many facets to this particular prism,” Tripplehorn continues. “You would think going into it that it’s the ultimate male fantasy, but it’s really the ultimate male nightmare. [It tells men,] ‘You’d better watch what you ask for, because you’re going to get it . . . and get it, and get it.’ ”
