Helen Hunt Reveals Her Thoughts on Her Infamous Afterschool Special Role

Helen Hunt is an award-winning actor known for Mad About You, Twister, As Good as It Gets, and many more film and TV roles. She took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1997, and over the past 20 years, has largely pivoted to directing on both the big and small screen. But everyone’s got to start somewhere. And before all those well-received roles — and even before Girls Just Want to Have Fun, the 1985 teenybopper romp that gave her her first major role — Hunt played a teen so affected by the drug PCP a.k.a. “angel dust” that she launches herself from a second-floor window, bounces off the pavement, and starts slashing at her wrist with shards of broken glass.

The TV movie in question is 1982’s Desperate Lives — and while it gets lumped in with afterschool specials of the era, it actually aired in primetime. Desperate Lives certainly has its advocates — one IMDb reviewer called it “the best movie I have ever seen about teenage drug abuse in our schools” — but others found its over-the-top dramatics laughable, including Hunt herself.