Michelle Pfeiffer explains her hiatus, 'constant fear' that she's 'a fraud'

There are a couple of noticeable gaps in Michelle Pfeiffer’s acting resume – though she has three projects coming in 2017, following Where Is Kyra?, which premiered at Sundance. But before resurfacing on screens this year, her last IMDb credit was for the role opposite Robert De Niro in The Family, released in 2013.

Interview’s  April cover girl tells Darren Aronofsky, her director for Mother!, why she "disappeared" during those intervening years.

The Orange County native, now 58, explained that her nest being free of her two children is one of the reason's she broke the Pfeiffer famine.

"I've never lost my love for acting," she says. "I feel really at home on the movie set. I'm a more balanced person honestly when I'm working. But I was pretty careful about where I shot, how long I was away, whether or not it worked out with the kids' schedule. And I got so picky that I was unhirable. And then ... I don't know, time just went on."

"When the student is ready, the teacher appears," she continued. "I'm more open now, my frame of mind, because I really want to work now, because I can. And these last few years I've had some really interesting opportunities."

Pfeiffer, who braced Aronofsky for the possibility that she might be "the worst interviewee that ever was," explained that she hates doing interviews because she's scared someone might discover she's a phony. "I think it may be that I have this constant fear that I'm a fraud and that I'm going to be found out," she confessed before sharing that she told writer/director Steve Kloves she felt she was "ruining" the upcoming Murder on the Orient Express.

"But I think that's because I started working fairly quickly and I wasn't ready," she reasoned. "I didn't have any formal training. I didn't come from Juilliard. I was just getting by and learning in front of the world. So I've always had this feeling that one day they're going to find out that I'm really a fraud, that I really don't know what I'm doing."

We wholeheartedly second the Black Swan director, who tells the thrice Academy Award-nominated Pfeiffer, "Don't worry."