"I hope it makes your skin crawl,” says actress Dot-Marie Jones about her new movie, Breeder, which opened in theaters in October. The recent Las Vegas transplant (she and her wife moved to town last year) is best known for her Emmy-nominated work as Coach Beiste on the Fox TV series “Glee,” but she’s been a working actress for more than 30 years. Breeder offers her a rare leading role, as reclusive poodle breeder Patti, who has decided to move on from breeding dogs to breeding people, and lures broke grad student Russell (Daniel Doheny) to her remote ranch to be her latest “stud.” Jones gives a chilling performance that she tells Desert Companion was influenced by Kathy Bates in Misery and John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane, making the most of writer-director Alex Goyette’s showcase for her talents.
What drew you to this role in Breeder?
I read the script, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I love it.’ It was a chance for me to come in from the very beginning. We met and had coffee and went over everything: the character and how crazy she was. I’m always the big woman, the biker chick, the prison guard, the cop. I love every single one of those, because I’m still here and I’m still working, but it was such a different character. As crazy and as twisted as she is, it was still so fun for me to get to do something like this. I haven’t done anything this extreme. I love it, and I hope there’s a prequel.
Since you came onboard early, did you get the chance to shape your character?
As far as shaping the character, Alex was such a good director. Everybody’s got different visions, so he would tell me certain things when we were filming, like to let certain things hit, (while) I was looking at something else in the dialogue between me and Russell. There was a lot of collaboration to make this happen.
What was it like working with poodles?
It’s so funny because, in the trailer, it looks like I’m licking the poodle’s mouth. That did not happen. They put stuff around my face to make the poodle lick me. It was cringey for me, so I can only imagine how it was for folks watching it.
It’s meant to make the viewer uncomfortable, isn’t it?
I’ve watched it I think three times now, and it’s like, ‘Okay, that gives me chilly bumps because it’s so uncomfortable.’ And that’s the whole point.
What brought you to Vegas?
For 15 years, we’ve been coming here, and every time we leave to go home, we’re like, ‘Ugh, I don’t want to go back to L.A. and deal with the traffic.’ We’re like 25 minutes off the Strip, but it’s close enough, yet far enough away so where we live is very quiet. We say we’ve done more things in this last year here than we probably did in the last 10 years in L.A.
