Why Helen Hunt Disappeared From Hollywood

For a few years in the '90s, it seemed like Helen Hunt was destined to be a mainstay on the big and small screen alike forever. The actor landed her earliest movie role in 1977, playing a teenager in the disaster movie "Rollercoaster," which featured a singularly weird plot about a man trying to bomb an amusement park ride. Hunt continued to act over the next decade, taking roles in films like "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" and "Peggy Sue Got Married," plus the popular doctor drama "St. Elsewhere." But it wasn't until the '90s, when Hunt earned a trifecta of great, memorable roles, that she truly became a household name.

Hunt's big break came from "Mad About You," a 1992 sitcom in which she played one half of a New York City newlywed couple opposite Paul Reiser. Plotlines for the show mined married life for humor, but they also addressed typical New York problems, like heatwaves and the chance you might run into Rudy Giuliani. Later seasons focused on Hunt and Reiser's characters' (eventually successful) attempt to have a baby. "Mad About You" is an oft-forgotten part of the '90s sitcom boom, but it earned a whopping 12 Emmys and originally ran for seven seasons. By 1996, Hunt was taking over the summer movie season with disaster romance thriller "Twister," and a year later, she won an Oscar for her part in James L. Brooks' "As Good As It Gets."

The late '90s doesn't mark the end of Hunt's career by any measure, but it does mark a crescendo in her fame that led the actor to start thinking consciously about how famous she wanted to be. She would appear in plenty of major roles in the years that followed — in "Cast Away," "Pay it Forward," and "What Women Want," to name a few — but Hunt told The Guardian in 2022 that she was slightly uneasy with the level of attention that brought paparazzi to her literal doorstep. "There were a couple of years when I was a little spooked," she told the outlet. "I was afraid that I could never unring that bell."

Hunt's solution to the matter was simple: "I just became very boring." She's well aware that Hollywood stars aren't typically known for trying to become less famous, but it clearly worked for her. "There are some people who will live more exciting lives and keep going at that level — and it's their whole life, wherever they go, forever," she said. "I think by the 130th picture of me in my khaki pants with my yoga mat, that picture's worth nothing!" There were plenty of other stars paparazzi could bug for photos in the late '90s, and eventually they — and the media cycle that kicked up when Hunt was winning massive awards — moved on. "If you want it to go away, it will, you just have to be patient," Hunt told The Guardian in 2008.

When asked about her career over the last 20 years or so, Hunt has been open about the fact that she's often more interested in spending time with her family than in making movies. She gave birth to a daughter in 2004, and later told The New York Times that it was hard to find roles that interested her as much as the promise of family time. "I suddenly wasn't offered parts that were worth walking away from the most compelling thing I'd ever been involved with, which was my family," she told the outlet. "Maybe my dirty little secret is this is the life I'd been wanting."

Hunt has repeated similar sentiments a few times over the years. "Why go off and pretend to be someone's mother, or pretend to be someone's wife, when I finally had the chance to have that experience in my real life?" Hunt told People magazine in 2008. The actor, who started her own career at just nine years old, told the outlet she stepped away from Hollywood to "get a life." By starting a family, Hunt got one, and she decided that "it was hard to find a part that was as interesting as watching [my daughter] grow up."

Despite all the media attention paid to the idea that Hunt hasn't acted as much in the past two decades, the performer has actually never had a gap of more than 3 years in her filmography across the past 50 years. "I wrote and directed two movies and starred in them and had a baby. So yeah, I don't know what to say when people say: 'What happened?'" she told The Guardian two years ago. "That's a lot. You know, for me, that's plenty."

In the years that Hunt didn't appear on screen, she was actually often working behind the camera. She caught the directing bug after helming a few episodes of "Mad About You," but Hunt's first feature directorial effort, 2007's "Then She Found Me," was a full decade in the making. The movie, which is loosely based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, follows a religious schoolteacher who deals with major upheaval when her adoptive mother dies, her biological mother reappears, and she finds herself pregnant in the midst of a separation. Hunt played the lead role and put together a great cast that included Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and even an inexplicable appearance from novelist Salman Rushdie.

The comedic drama took a circuitous route to theaters, with Hunt explaining in interviews and on the film's DVD special features that she raised funds for the film herself, got actors on board for minimum wages, and cast herself in the lead role to make the directing process easier (she also co-wrote the script). Hunt informed The Guardian that someone once told her that the people who get their movies made are just the ones who don't give up, so "I just hung in there and kept trying." According to the star, the film's distributor went bankrupt the day before "Then She Found Me" was released, leading her to take the self-financed route for her second directorial feature, too.

That movie was "Ride," a 2014 drama released by Screen Media Films. Hunt wrote and directed the feature, which tells the story of a single mom following her son to Santa Monica after he drops out of college and becomes a surfer. Hunt stars opposite Luke Wilson and "Titans" actor Brenton Thwaites. Both films were neither critical nor commercial successes, though Hunt received acclaim for her performances in them (with "Then She Found Me" having since become a hit among Letterboxd fans of Colin Firth).

Though Hunt has worked hard to get her projects made over the past two decades, there was one idea she just couldn't get started, even with the help of two high-profile friends. Hunt told The Guardian that in 2020, she, rapper, actor, filmmaker, and "Hamilton" star Daveed Diggs, and his frequent artistic partner Rafael Casal (who you might know from "Blindspotting" or "Loki"), tried to pitch their version of a "Twister" sequel to studios and were shut down immediately. Hunt described the experience as an eye-opening one when it comes to Hollywood's deeply entrenched ideas about race. As she explained:

"It was literally July 2020. The United States was on fire with the beginning of a 400-year overdue racial reckoning; and #MeToo hadn't been that long ago. There were three of us, each representing a minority of our own, one of us having starred in the [original] movie, and we couldn't get a meeting. It was sobering."

Of course, "Twisters" eventually got made without Hunt (although early reports indicated she might be in it) and with two conventionally attractive white leads. It was a huge hit, but it's tough not to imagine what Casal, Diggs, and Hunt's version of the film may have looked like.

Hunt has also been asked the state of roles for women on film, telling The Guardian in 2008 that during her years off, she wasn't watching enough movies to see what she was missing, but implying that the strong parts weren't exactly rolling in. "I'm sure if I had five great roles lined up then I wouldn't have had time to write this movie," she said in reference to her directorial debut. "While it would have been nice to have had more opportunities, I'm not really sure if they were out there to have." Generally, though, Hunt seems to take a no-drama approach to talking about her work choices, having once talked to Vulture about her choice to act in more independent films: "I can't say that it has anything to do with anything, other than a good script and a good part and an invitation."

If you miss seeing Hunt on screen, look no further than Starz's TV spinoff-sequel to the 2018 film "Blindspotting," a two-season wonder created by Diggs and Casal in which Hunt plays the overbearing but sweet hippy mother to incarcerated Miles (Casal). Hunt also returned to "Mad About You" for a one-season revival that revisited her and Reiser's characters as empty nesters after their daughter Mabel (Abby Quinn) leaves for college. Several original cast members returned, including Richard Kind and Carol Burnett.

In terms of recent projects, Hunt also showed up in a few episodes of "Hacks" (where she plays ruthless network exec Winnie Landell), in the World War II drama series "World on Fire," and in the movies "The Night Clerk" and "How it Ends." Hunt has also acted both on and off Broadway and on London's West End, in addition to starring in the sci-fi podcasts "Alethea" and "Solar." Hunt even went back to college at one point; in 2008, she told Redbook she was taking one college class per semester. In a not-so-positive development, though, she was reportedly hospitalized following a car accident in 2019, and she sued the car company involved two years later (per People).

Overall, Hunt seems to have a refreshingly unorthodox perspective on acting that has led to her taking roles only when she wants to, headlines be damned. "Movie acting is a great job for your 20s: You travel all over, you have affairs with people, and you throw yourself into one part and then another," she told Vulture in 2011. "There are times when I love it and I get to express myself in ways that I need to and wouldn't otherwise, and there are times when I really like my life and I don't want to cut my hair off and go to Tennessee and live in a hotel for three months." Fair enough!