Amanda Plummer quotes: "I don't play roles everybody likes. I'd rather have a career I'm proud of. Like everyone else, I need to eat. But I'm a very unbusnesslike person, and I keep my price low. I'm not a mass product. I'm not everyone's cup of tea."Critic John Simon likened her in the play Artichoke in 1979, to "Shirley Temple doing Boris Karlof." Reporter's comment about Butterfly Kiss: "one might think she sounds like Tinkerbell doing Travis Bickle." Amanda says "I'm lucky I'm not a babe who wants to do character roles" and says she drives an unbabelike 1979 1979 Volvo and lives in a rented house in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles with the English screenwriter Paul Chart. "I like taking a path into new country, and I always take the darker path. Not because it's dark but because there's a secret there that you share when you get out. That's what I liked as a kid. That's how I approach my work. With a face like mine, it's lucky I have a heart that likes that. I don't find anything interesting about the choices a character faces in major films or theater projects. The characters are just cut -out dolls with the American flag sewn on them." "My mother was larger than like. She was very glamorous, which is probably why I was a tomboy. Fortunately, now when I wear something nice I don't lose my identity. My grandmother was schizophrenic. I'd look into her eyes and see a self that had no opinion. I was allowed to say or feel anything." "I had a strong propensity, which i still have, to be invisible. In grade school I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods. I was going to be the hero of my own life. When you live in a world of make-believe it's not because something is bad but because something is more in the make-believe. Everything was more heightened, more love, more death. I'm an opera. If I didn't act, I'd be all over the place. It's not easy to follow in the parents' footsteps. Now it's O.K. but it wasn't at first. I'd hear a lot of, That's not your voice, that's my voice. You sound too much like me: you're doing that on purpose."
When she went to audition for the part of Cattle Annie for Lamont Johnson, he says "She came in to read in a torn man's shirt, torn jeans and hair hanging all around her face. Not improper grooming. No grooming. period. She was smoking furiously, and I kept wondering if she was going to set herself on fire. So I went over and pulled her hair back to see her marvelous bone structure, and it was like I raped her. Her eyes got frightened and she withdrew. I said- but we can't see you acting- and she completely changed." "Ask her to be a character in a story and she's on fire. She walks on crumbling groudn, and she knows it, and yet she keeps right on taking the next step. It's the danger you smell around people who live on the edge that makes them exciting. And she's got plenty of that"
Elizabeth Ashley who played a psychiatrist opposite Ms. Plummer's pregnant nun in Agnes of God, the play, says: "She's one of those people who has no physical skin, no calluses, no shell. She doesn't act; she absorbs."
To play Eunice in Butterfly Kiss, she had a lot of absorbing to do. The director, Michael Winterbottom, says of her: "Eunice's sense of isolation, her feeling of being at odds with the world and other people, her wanting people to recognize who she is but feeling a great distance between them-- maybe that's what appealed to Amanda about the character, and why she's so good at the role. We wanted a story of two opposites, one person being aggresive and strong and forcing people to pay attention, and one being passive and quiet and being ignored. We thought it would be too crude if one were a man and one were a woman. We thought it would be nicer if they were of the same sex."
Lawrence Bender, producer of Pulp Fiction, thinks that the trend to pursue big roles in small movies rather than small roles in commercial ones, took off when low-budget movies stopped being synonymous with exploitation movies. "In a low-budget film, there are fewer financial pressures, and an actor like Amanda can take more risks," he says. "She's a chameleon, and a chameleon you can't take your eyes off."