Matthew Modine’s career has spanned more than 30 years, but it was a piece of advice he received from his father as a young man that has influenced his life, his activism and his new role in the upcoming film Miss Virginia.
“I didn’t know where to begin, it was so much mess, it was like an inch deep of horror,” Modine toldNewsweek Conversations, describing an overflown toilet he was tasked to clean at one of his father’s movie theaters. “My dad came to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know, it’s a mess. You can get angry about it, you can find the person responsible, but it’s not going to clean it up.’ It was an important lesson because when there’s a problem in the world, you can try to find the people that are responsible, you can get angry, but you have to clean it up.”
It was that advice that influenced Modine’s performance in the new film Miss Virginia, directed by R.J. Daniel Hanna and starring Uzo Aduba as Virginia Walden Ford, a true story about a single mother raising her son in the low-income neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. Ford successfully lobbied Congress to support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, giving her son and thousands of other children in D.C. the opportunity to attend private schools. Modine plays Congressman Cliff Williams, a character created for the film, who Miss Virginia works with to garner support for the program. READ MORE