Ellen Burstyn looks back on her career in interview with TV son Chris Meloni

Seven decades into her acting career, Ellen Burstyn has more work to do than ever.

The 90-year-old Oscar-, Tony- and Emmy-winning actress is beloved for her role as Barney Stabler in Law & Order: Organized Crime, and will reprise her most famous role in the new sequel, The Exorcist: Believer. Replay one. ”

Christopher Meloni, who plays Burstyn’s TV son Elliot Stabler in Organized Crime, talks about the factors behind her longevity, her most famous performance, and what she turned down in an interview with the legendary actor for Interview magazine. He talked about one role he regrets.

“This is very strange,” Burstyn said. “I’ll be 91 in December, and I’m busier than I can remember at any time in my career. And I just don’t understand it. I mean, there’s so much about ageism in Hollywood. What? How did I understand?” Left behind? ”

Meloni asked her why she thinks her schedule is so packed right now.

“I don’t know, but I’m probably the only actress alive who could play a great-grandmother or something because everyone else who could play a role like that is probably already dead,” she joked. Ta.

Meloni, 62, and the Exorcist star have a playful exchange about Organized Crime that extends to the set. She told Meloni that she is better known for her work on “Law & Order” than for her 70 years in the industry.

“You know what I was thinking yesterday? One day on set, you said, ‘Why are you doing this to me, Dimi?’ That’s a line from ‘The Exorcist.’ ” Burstyn said. “And my real life son said that line to me and I was so freaked out. It was like I was in two realities at the same time when you said that.”

“Then I thought, ‘I lost my mom a few years ago, so you’re my mom in my life and in my work,'” Meloni said.

Last year, Meloni told TODAY.com that Burstyn was her “surrogate mother.”

“I didn’t notice it. … It was kind of creeping up on me, creeping up on me,” he explained. “So she’s a professional. She’s kind of easy to work with. She’s a very interesting actress, so I’m always drawn to that.”

Burstyn is also best known for playing a mother in the 1973 hit film The Exorcist, a horror classic in which her young daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is possessed by a demon. Burstyn’s character, Chris McNeil, begs her priest to perform an exorcism to save her.

“This is a human drama and a psychological drama,” Burstyn told Meloni during an interview with Interview magazine. “This is the only film I’ve made in my 70 years in the film industry that is in the Library of Congress. It’s a historic feat.”

Her role in The Exorcist was part of the fertile era of the 1970s, when she starred in The Last Picture Show and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award She won the Best Actress Award. 1975 Oscar Awards.

She said those ten years were her favorite ten years of her film career.

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“That was back when studios were still run by filmmakers, not corporations,” she told Meloni. “And then a script was submitted because someone was interested in the story and wrote it, and the producers liked it and thought it would make a good movie. It was entered into a computer and they said, ‘The first version was written. It’s not because I said, ‘X is millions, so secondly, X is going to be millions, and it has to be a big name. ”

She will reprise her role as MacNeil in the new sequel, The Exorcist: Believer.

“First of all, I don’t know if anyone in the history of filmmaking has ever recreated a character they played 50 years ago,” she said. “Sounds like it’s new to me.

“You can’t make a movie like this without going through a lot of real and emotional stuff. So what happened in that movie, touching on things from the first movie, fascinated me. .”

Burstyn also reflected on the “terrible” British accent she once sported on the show and the legendary film she passed down.

She said she turned down the role of Mildred Ratched, a cruel nurse in a mental hospital played by Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film swept her with major awards at the 1976 Oscars, and Fletcher won her Best Actress award for her performance in it.

“At the time, I was married to a mentally ill husband and spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals and with other patients,” Burstyn said. “And the idea of ​​playing a mean nurse made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to take on that particular mentality.

“It was the right decision at the time, but in hindsight it was hard to pass up the opportunity because I had won an Oscar the year before and I thought, ‘Maybe I could have won it two years in a row.’ ”

The “Requiem for a Dream” star also opened up about what keeps her going well into her 90s. She regularly walks her dog, reads, attends concerts and hangouts with friends and entertains guests, she said.

She also eschewed the excesses of Hollywood as she got older.

“The secret is to eat well, exercise, don’t drink, smoke or do drugs, and be determined to live healthy,” she said. “That’s what I decided after decades of doing bad things.”

Burstyn’s outlook on life is also beneficial to her.

“I try to make sure the first words out of my mouth are ‘thank you,'” she said. “Thank you for being alive. Thank you for being safe. Thank you for being healthy. Thank you for still being strong even though you’re over 90 years old. Thank you for the dogs. .I mean, I have a lot of work to do.”Live with gratitude. ”