In a new cover story for Variety, actress Melissa McCarthy speaks with Editor-at-Large Kate Aurthur about her role as Patsy Ramsey, the mother of the slain child pageant star at the center of the upcoming Netflix series The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey. In the wide-ranging interview, the Oscar-nominated actress, 56, opens up about the surprising reason she took the role and what she learned about the case—and herself—in the process.
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Playing Patsy Ramsey and Examining the Public’s Reaction
When the script for The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey first came across McCarthy’s desk, she said her initial impulse was to turn it down.
“I said, ‘Oh, no. I have no interest in that.’ I didn’t think it was any of my business to do, I guess?” McCarthy recalled.
But it was her desire to get back to work that changed her mind.
“I spent a lot of years not working, and somebody took the time to ask me — I should take the time to look into it,” she recalled.
After looking deeper into the case decades later, McCarthy was struck by how the Ramsey family had been treated by the public and media following the 1996 murder of their 6-year-old daughter. McCarthy, who was 26 at the time, thought back to her fascination with the tabloids that lined grocery store checkout lanes.
“I was really floored by the lack of humanity that had been shown to that family,” McCarthy said. “I have a very vivid memory of standing in a grocery store and looking at a tabloid and thinking, ‘“’How could you dress a little girl like that?'”
In preparing for the role, McCarthy came to accept a newfound compassion for Patsy Ramsey and the tragedy the family experienced. This case was a turning point in how the media covered tragedy. For one of the first times, a child’s trauma garnered wall-to-wall coverage as if it were a sporting event “like Wimbledon,” she said.
“This might sound nuts: I’m very fond of Patsy. I have so much compassion for them, what they went through, and go through currently,” McCarthy said.
When asked whether she had personally formed an opinion about the case, McCarthy shared her take.
“Yes. Just my personal feeling. My heart says no one in the family could have done that,” McCarthy revealed. “Which I probably am not supposed to say. But shooting that, I had to pick. I had to have that for myself, if nothing else.”
McCarthy hopes viewers will series the series and “realize, “Oh, God. I was part of that — I did that,” it gives us a little of our humanity back. And the hope is not to dredge it up for that poor family again.”
Netflix describes the limited series as an exploration of “one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in American history, and the devastating personal and public reckoning that followed the death of JonBenét Ramsey on Christmas night in 1996.”
All episodes of The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey premiere Dec. 10 on Netflix.
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