Five years have passed since the university bribery case hit the front pages in which Felicity Huffman was involved and in which she tried to use money to get her eldest daughter into a university for which she was not qualified.
Now, the actress begins to look for her personal and professional redemption.
Neither of them is being easy, as she herself anticipated and is seeing firsthand.
Who was one of the
Desperate Housewives
of the famous series of the first two thousand and was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a transsexual woman in
Transamerica
, tries to recover her life and her career and, also, the respect of the public, and little soon he talks about it.
Huffman, 61, gave an interview to the British newspaper
The Guardian
on the occasion of her return to work.
Between February 15 and March 16, viewers will be able to see her live and up close on the stages of the Park Theater in London, where she will play one of the protagonists of the play
Hir
.
Making her debut on the British stage will be Paige, the mother of a troubled family: mistreated by her husband, who has suffered a stroke, her eldest son has just returned from fighting in Afghanistan and her youngest son Max has stopped being her daughter. Maxine and begins to open up about her transsexuality.
An intense role to return to the stage.
“Her personal problems are entirely related to the fears she had and how much she loved her children, and that is exactly what her character goes through,” says the creator of the work in the same talk. , Taylor Mac.
More information
Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, prison, fall from grace and second chances
When asked a polite “how are you?”, Huffman responds “I'm grateful to be here,” somewhat shyly.
“But how am I?
I guess I'm still processing it."
When asked how she feels about the scandal of the case that affected her five years ago, in which she pleaded guilty and for which she spent 11 days in jail — she was sentenced to 14, in addition to 250 hours of prison service the community, to one year of probation and a fine of $30,000;
books and documentaries were made about the matter—she says: “Are you referring to
Varsity Blues
[the name the police assigned to the case]?
How am I doing is a somewhat tricky question.
As long as my daughters are fine and my husband is fine, I figure I'm fine.”
Felicity Huffman leaves the Boston courthouse with her husband, William H. Macy, after being sentenced to 14 days in jail for the college fraud scheme in September 2019.MediaNews Group/Boston Herald vi (via Getty Images)
The interpreter has had a relationship with fellow actor William H. Macy, who was never charged in the plot, since the early 1980s.
They married in 1997 and have two daughters, Sophia, 23, and Georgia, 21. In March 2019, a plot was uncovered in which more than 50 parents, including major businessmen and figures from the world of entertainment such as the actress of
Forced Parents
Lori Loughlin and Huffman herself, paid an intermediary and mastermind of the plot - Rick Singer, who earned more than 25 million dollars and who in January 2023 was sentenced to three and a half years in prison - to falsify their children's records, fix exams or place them as elite athletes in a university sports club and, thus, the adolescents could access some of the most demanding educational centers in the country.
Huffman confessed to her involvement and paying $15,000 to have her eldest daughter's college entrance exam rigged.
Sophia did not know that her mother had falsified the results of the university entrance test and even less that she was immersed in a corrupt plot.
She couldn't get into college then, so she later re-examined, achieved the necessary grades and now studies theater at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Yes, every time I walk into a room, that's there.
I did it.
It's white on black,” the interpreter once again acknowledges in the interview with
The Guardian
.
He recognizes that since then his life has never been the same.
He has barely worked, other than in an episode of the series
The Good Doctor
last year and in a podcast that he voiced a few months ago.
“I did a pilot for ABC recently and it didn't make it.
It's been hard.
It's like part of your old life died and you died with it.
"I'm very lucky to have a family and to have love and means, so I've had a place to land."
In the talk, the performer tries not to delve too deeply into the issue of the Varsity Blues
case
that led her to prison, but it is inevitable that it will come to the fore due to the great impact it has had on her life.
She also talks about the fact that today she could not play the role for which she came close to winning an Oscar almost 20 years ago, in 2006, that of a transsexual woman in
Transamerica
.
“She wouldn't be able to do it now,” she admits.
“I think we have to make the public reflect and that means including everyone.
For a long time there has been inequality and now the pendulum must swing the other way.
But I hope it leads to a situation where everyone can play any role.”
Until now Huffman had only spoken about the matter once.
It was in a television interview with the American network ABC last December, where more than about how she felt, she told the reasons that had led her to join that fraudulent network.
“I felt like I had to give my daughter the chance to have a future.
“It was my daughter's future... which meant she had to break the law,” she explained then.
“I thought: 'Turn around, don't continue, don't continue'... but to my shame, I didn't do it,” he recalled, explaining that when the ringleader of the plot began to tell him that his daughter had no chance of entering the university and showed her “the criminal scheme” it seemed to her — “and I know it seems crazy,” she admits — that she had no other option to give her daughter a future and that she would be “a bad mother” if she didn't do it. : “So I did it.”
When the FBI entered her house at gunpoint in the early hours of the morning and asked her to come with them, she thought it was a joke.
In the interview, Huffman acknowledged that she owed “an apology to the academic community and to the students and families who sacrificed and worked really hard to get there legitimately.”
Now, as she did in her community work, she is collaborating with an association called A New Way of Life, which helps women who have been in prison reintegrate into society.