Judith Light Says It’s Time to Talk About What Makes Us Uncomfortable

There are interviews that begin with a carefully planned question, and then there are interviews with Judith Light, which begin with an enthusiastic discussion about a $15 Amazon purse that looks significantly more expensive than it is.

“That’s a great purse,” Light said almost immediately after sitting down with me at the Italian Global Series Festival in Riccione, Italy. 

After establishing that Amazon deserved the credit rather than some charming little Italian boutique, we moved on to television, mental health, soap operas, menopause, international storytelling, her husband’s Italian relatives, and the importance of giving audiences something they have never seen before.

In other words, it was everything you might want from a conversation with Judith Light.

Light was in Italy promoting The Terror: Devil in Silver, the latest installment in AMC’s horror anthology, which stars Dan Stevens as Pepper, a working-class man who is wrongfully committed to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital and discovers that something terrifying may be feeding on the suffering inside its walls.

If you recall from our earlier conversation with Light and our coverage of Devil in Silver, Light plays Dory, one of the hospital’s long-term patients.

Anyone who knows her primarily as Angela Bower from Who’s the Boss? or even as Karen Wolek from One Life to Live will quickly understand why the role appealed to an actress who has spent her career resisting repetition.

Before we reached that part of her remarkable history, though, Light wanted to talk about what it meant to bring The Terror to an international television festival at a time when entertainment can serve as one of the few things still capable of connecting people across borders.

“When you are part of a company and work with a company like AMC and AMC+, they brought us here,” Light said. 

“It was their intelligence and their wherewithal and their thinking ahead to make sure that we became international. And international is really important because it’s what unifies the world. It brings us all together.”

She also acknowledged something those of us who have spent years championing television have been saying forever: TV belongs at festivals alongside film, especially when long-form storytelling has become such an enormous part of how audiences experience entertainment.

“Fewer people are going to the movies, and more people are sitting at home and watching TV,” she said, prompting me to remind her that she was talking to the owner of a site called TV Fanatic and therefore preaching to a very enthusiastic choir.

For Light, though, the international reach of The Terror: Devil in Silver matters because its themes are not confined to one country or one particular moment in history. 

The series uses supernatural horror to examine the very real horrors of psychiatric institutions, overmedication, abandonment, and the way people with mental-health challenges are still too often removed from society rather than treated as complete human beings who deserve meaningful lives.

“One of the reasons I wanted to do it is because look at how we deal with mental health,” Light said. “Not only in our country, but mental-health challenges and people who have mental-health challenges around the globe. And we’re not really talking about it.”

She pointed to institutions like New Hyde, where patients disappear into a system most people would prefer not to see, and argued that bringing those places out of the shadows is an essential part of changing the conversation.

“When you overmedicate people, they don’t have a chance to come into the fulsomeness of who they are,” she said. “How can we help them? Not help them. They don’t need help. They need support. How do we give them a life that is worth living?”

Dory’s history reflects that abandonment in painfully personal terms. Her husband could not cope with her mood swings, so he brought her to the hospital and never returned.

“I mean, who does that?” Light asked. “Who’s the mental-health person in that case?”

Unfortunately, people do it, and Light connected Dory’s experience to the ways women experiencing postpartum depression, menopause, and other mental-health or hormonal changes have historically been medicated, dismissed, or hidden because their discomfort makes everyone else uncomfortable.

Her response to that discomfort was simple and perfect: “Too bad. We’re going to talk about it.”

Light has been having conversations television once avoided for decades, and she has done so while continually moving between genres, formats, and characters that bear almost no resemblance to one another. 

When I asked how she had gone from daytime television to becoming one of the most acclaimed and adventurous actresses working today, she immediately placed the audience at the center of her answer.

“I have too much respect for the audience and the intelligence of the audience to give them the same thing over and over again,” she said. “I don’t think they want that. I don’t particularly want to do that.”

There was nothing wrong with playing Angela Bower for eight seasons, she stressed, and she continued taking on movies of the week during Who’s the Boss?.

But Light views performance as an act of giving, and that requires offering audiences something fresh rather than simply recreating what has already worked.

“It is important to me that I give the people who watch me something new, something fresh, something different,” she said. “And for my own self, my own artistry, I love to delve into that.”

Dory offered exactly that opportunity.

“I get to do a part like Dory that nobody’s ever seen me do before,” Light said. “And when I get to do that, there’s something new that gives my audience, the people that I so appreciate that watch me, something new to say: ‘That’s really interesting. I want to talk about it.’”

She credited AMC, executive producer Ridley Scott, and the creative team behind The Terror for being willing to take chances, both with her casting and with Victor LaValle’s novel.

Devil in Silver takes the anthology into a completely different time period and setting, but that willingness to reinvent itself is precisely what makes The Terror such a good fit for Light.

Our conversation about reinvention inevitably led us back to the places where Light first learned how to do it, including One Life to Live and the once-thriving world of daytime soaps.

Soap operas have often been treated as launching pads for young actors, and they certainly introduced viewers to generations of performers who later became major stars.

Light, however, bristled slightly at the idea that her time on One Life to Live was valuable only because it helped her move on to something supposedly bigger.

“It wasn’t just a launching pad for me,” she said. “It was the things that I learned about learning all those lines, the alacrity of shooting something, creating an emotional life that you could step into immediately because you have no time.”

Daytime dramas can produce up to an hour of programming every weekday, requiring actors to learn enormous amounts of dialogue, make immediate creative choices, and deliver emotionally complicated performances on schedules that would terrify people accustomed to the more forgiving pace of prestige television.

“It was a learning experience, a total learning experience for me,” Light said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

She believes the industry has lost something significant as the number of soaps has dwindled, particularly because fewer performers have access to that intense training ground.

“I think we’re missing it for that kind of placement for people to really start to work on their craft, create a character, go with the flow, learn the alacrity of that kind of work that you have to have sometimes in television,” she said.

That training remains useful even on a six-episode series like The Terror, where an actor may suddenly be handed a three-page monologue as production races against the clock.

“You’ve been on a soap, and you know how to do it,” Light said.

Thankfully, streaming has also opened doors to a wider variety of stories and roles, and Light praised AMC for building a home where performers and creators can continue exploring different kinds of work. 

She did not talk about the company like an actress fulfilling a promotional obligation, either. She spoke about it as a creative family she genuinely hopes to work with again.

By the time we reached my final question, we had covered the importance of television, mental-health advocacy, soaps, streaming, and a career that has somehow continued expanding for nearly five decades. So, naturally, it was time to ask what Judith Light was doing for fun in Italy.

The answer was unexpectedly lovely.

Before arriving in Riccione, Light and her husband participated in a heritage tour that helped them locate his Italian relatives, and they spent time with the family before continuing to the festival. She also visited San Marino with The Terror executive producer David W. Zucker, who gave the group a tour.

“It was just divine,” she said.

That warmth carried through the entire conversation, including Light’s belief that the increasing globalization of television can help audiences see beyond the borders and divisions that dominate so much of public life.

“We are one human family,” she said. “We are one body of the world. And if we’re not operating like that, we’re not going to have compassion or understanding for all of us.”

It was a fitting thought from an actress whose career has always been rooted in curiosity, compassion, and an obvious respect for the people watching her work.

Light does not want audiences to see the same version of her forever, and she does not want television to keep telling the same comfortable stories while painful realities remain behind closed doors.

She wants us to talk about them.

And if you have not yet watched The Terror: Devil in Silver, all six episodes are now streaming on AMC+, making it a particularly timely weekend binge for anyone across the Midwest or East Coast being advised to stay indoors as Canadian wildfire smoke combines with continuing summer heat. 

The atmosphere outside may already look disturbingly apocalyptic, but at least AMC+ can provide the higher-quality fictional version.

Besides, Judith Light would like to start a conversation, and when Judith Light speaks, television fans would be wise to listen.