Jessica Lange Says Acting Career Might Be “Coming To An End”

Jessica Lange says she feels her acting career might be “coming to an end,” and that her current film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, wouldn’t be a bad way to go out.

In an interview with Rolling Stone posted yesterday, Lange addressed a wide range of topics and a look back at her own career when she was asked what roles she’d like to tackle in the future. (Watch the interview below.)

“I actually feel like I’m coming to an end,” said Lange, fresh off a dual role in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story 13.” “And maybe it’s not a bad way to end, you know, the last film being Long Day’s Journey Into Night and playing Mary Tyrone.”

Lange cited the dearth of roles for women and the difficulty in getting projects off the ground as playing factors in her feelings about the future, a subject that figured into her previous Murphy series Feud: Bette and Joan (she played Joan Crawford to Susan Sarandon’s Bette Davis) and also informs a project she’s been hoping to get underway for some time: A Marlene Dietrich biopic.

“We touched on this with Ryan [Murphy]’s project Feud with Joan and Bette about what happens when an actress gets to a certain age and they’re no longer viable,” Lange said. “That was the theme with Bette and Joan, [and] that is a recurrent theme for a lot of women, especially of that period.” She added that the Dietrich project would focus on “what she did, where she moved on from when Hollywood was kind of finished with her.”

Lange said the Dietrich project is one of a couple that have “been in the works for ever and may or may not happen. It doesn’t seem easy to get things made anymore, at least not the kind of films that interest me.”

Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by Jonathan Kent and starring Lange, Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan, was filmed in 2022, six years after Kent and Lange did the Eugene O’Neill play on Broadway (Lange won a Tony Award for her performance). The film was released in the U.S. last month.

Here’s the Rolling Stone interview: