Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (24 page)

In St. Paul de Vence, in the south of France, on a break from filming
The City of Lost Children
, circa 1994. Blake and Brandon, ten and four, respectively.
From the author’s personal collection.

Salvatore,
The Name of the Rose. From the author’s personal collection.

Johner,
Alien Resurrection:
Jeunet and me, redux. Alien Resurrection,
© 1997 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

Josiah Sanchez,
The Magnificent Seven:
taking my place among all the other Jewish cowboys? The Magnificent Seven
(TV series), © 1998 MGM Television Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

Guillermo del Toro and I in a moment of off-camera love. Out of multitudes!
Photo by Bruce Talamon, © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

Can you blush? Iconic moment between Snipes and me,
Blade II. Photo by Bruce Talamon, © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

William H. Macy and I in
Happy Texas:
if that ain’t a screen moment, I just don’t know what is.
Courtesy of Miramax.

Hellboy I
: where the rubber meets the road! Hellboy. ©
2004 Revolution Studios Distributions Company, LLC. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Hellboy with Liz and Manning: the adorable Selma Blair and the equally adorable Jeffrey Tambor. Hellboy. © 2004 Revolution Studios Distributions Company, LLC. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Clay Morrow,
Sons of Anarchy:
during some of his better times.
From the author’s personal collection.

Game-changers, all!!
From the author’s personal collection

(CHAPTER 13)

Birth of the Beast

“Close! The role does start with a B; it’s just not Beauty,” my agent said.

“Don’t send it!”

“Hear me out. The writing is great, the team is great, and CBS has ordered a go pilot. And you are on a very short list for one of the leads.”

“The Beast, right? Don’t send it.” The two films I was most known for up until that point had me completely and unrecognizably covered in makeup. And I kinda had this gut feeling that maybe my time spent behind bars like that had served its purpose. I’m thinking that if I had been in
Quest
and
Rose
in roles in which people knew it was me, then maybe I’d be getting better offers. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be the Lon Chaney of my generation. But the next morning, when I open up the front door to get the newspaper, instead there’s an envelope from my agent with a copy of the pilot script for
Beauty and the Beast
. I called him up, saying, “Did you not fucking hear me? I told you. I told you not to send me this script. Why’d you do that?”

“Hey! You want to work? You’re not the boss. I sent it. Deal with it.”

I said, “All right, fuck you, I’ll show
you
who’s boss! I’m not gonna read it.” So anyway, the newspaper finally arrives, and after I read it
from cover to cover and then was reading the back of cereal boxes and the label on a can of Lysol, I ran out of things to read and couldn’t avoid it. So I picked up that envelope, thinking,
Lemme just read page one
. By the time I got to page twenty I called my agent and said, “Okay, who do I gotta kill to play this fuckin’ role?”

“I knew you were gonna say that, ya little prick! So you read it anyways, right, you little lying fucking little prick?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help myself. Fuck you.” My manager and I were very fond of each other!

So Erwin, my new agent/manager at the time, set up a very high-level meeting with Tony Thomas (Danny Thomas’s son) and Paul Witt of Witt/Thomas Television, who at the time were incredibly prolific at half-hour comedies. They’d done a show called
SOAP
, and they were doing
Golden Girls
. They were also known for an amazing track record of getting pilots to series. In this industry, considering the amount of scripts floating around at any given time, the chances of getting a green light for a pilot are at about one in a million. Then after a pilot, there’s maybe a one in a hundred million shot of having it being picked up for even a few more episodes.