Patricia Arquette: Boyhood

Being part of Richard Linklater's 12-year opus, Boyhood, gave Patricia Arquette an experience she had never had in her 27-year career as an actress. Twice, she talked to couples who said that after seeing the film, they agreed to have a child together. "That's pretty far out," she says of the 'Boyhood baby' phenomenon. In the film, Arquette plays a single mom, struggling to raise her two kids Mason (played by Ellar Coltrane) and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). She shows us a kind of single mom that we don't get to see very often in American film and television, where a 'single mom' has become somewhat of an archetype. Her greatest role, however, is being a mom off-screen, something that she says helped her get serious about acting: "I don't think I would have succeeded if I hadn't been a mom."