Last year, Glenn Close was on Broadway as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” reprising a role she had originally played in 1993. Since 1974, when she made her début on Broadway, she has won three Tony Awards and three Emmys, and has been nominated six times for an Oscar. Like Desmond, many of Glenn Close’s characters could be described as “difficult”: sometimes scary and possibly insane, but, above all, just complicated. But Close bridles at the notion that any of them—even Alex Forrest, the unhinged lover she played unforgettably in “Fatal Attraction”— villains. “I don’t think of them as evil,” Close said to The New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman, at the New Yorker Festival in 2017. “The only evil character I’ve ever played was Cruella!”

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.