Love at Second Sight
Back in 2000, just before getting together with her husband, Leland Orser, Tripplehorn had almost given up on finding Mr. Right. “I was at the point that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be, and that I was going to be a single mom,” she says. “I was 37, unmarried, and I was OK with it. Then this came out of nowhere.”She calls it “love at second sight,” because she and Orser were both with other people when they had their first, electricity-free encounter, on the set of Very Bad Things. A year later, unattached, they met again in Toronto, and the planets had apparently shifted. “He walked into the room, and that was it,” she says. “I saw him; he saw me; we’ve never been apart.”
On her iPhone, Tripplehorn keeps a home movie that she shot, edited and scored herself. In it, Orser jogs alongside their angelic son, August, teaching him how to ride a bike. When Orser lifts his stabilizing hands and her son pedals unassisted, August gazes into the camera and cries out to her in amazement, “I can do it!” And in the background, you can hear Tripplehorn’s laugh, a pealing bell of total happiness. “I look at Leland like, ‘I earned him,’” Tripplehorn says. “I don’t know if I would have dated him when I was younger. He’s such a good person. You’re not interested in that in your twenties. You’re interested in bad boys.”
One thing about the passing years that has surprised her is the quality of the roles that have come her way. “I’m in a really great place,” says Tripplehorn, who plays Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the HBO movie Grey Gardens, airing in April, as well as a mother tending to her traumatized daughter (Dakota Fanning) in the upcoming indie film Winged Creatures. Then, of course, there is “the best job in town, ” Big Love. “I’m in my forties and I’m being written for,” Tripplehorn says. “It’s the greatest role I’ve ever played—beyond three-dimensional. If more gifts like these are coming my way, then I’m looking forward to getting older.”
