There and Back Again (21 page)

“Thank you,” I said after recovering. “Let's finish.”

So, for me, there was considerable anxiety attached to the idea of a face mold. I knew what it was, of course. My father had spent hours in the makeup chair while filming
The Frighteners
, and his scrapbook captured every inch of the ordeal. I knew that in order to make a mold they'd have to put some kind of goop all over my face and stick straws up my nose so I could breathe. And if I didn't calmly endure the discomfort, I'd be forced to go through it all over again. Even though I knew it was coming, I tried to put it out of my mind, but I couldn't, for this time there would be no escape hatch. I had agreed to make the movie for less money than I needed to keep our new house, and by not putting everything into storage and renting out the place, I had painted myself into a corner, where at certain moments I'd experience anxiety that was totally unnecessary. For some reason, probably because I make everything more complicated than it needs to be, I had created a stressful environment, unintentionally torturing myself by trying to reconcile being a father, a husband, an actor, and a filmmaker. I knew that I had lucked into the role of a lifetime, that through my family and career and some quirk of my own talent, I had figured out how to get into this movie, and that was empowering to me. I couldn't back down on needing the house, and I don't know whether the anxiety was based on that dynamic or something else, because consciously I had no anxiety about going to New Zealand. That's our lifestyle. People sometimes say to me, “I don't know how you do that when you've got kids.” Well, you do it by not having that attitude. You say, “Fuck it! I'll go where life and opportunity take me. I'll be a global citizen.” That was my attitude and bravado, but beneath that swagger, on levels I barely understood, I was a wreck.

Upon hearing that I'd gotten the job in
The Lord of the Rings,
Eric Stoltz said, “My God, Sean, what a terrific break! You'll live off that movie for five years.” It was a relief to hear something like that from Eric, a solid journeyman actor, a star, an artist who had always been good to me. Nevertheless, even his encouragement couldn't completely quell the anxiety, which reached a peak on the morning I was supposed to have my face cast.

The appointment was for nine-thirty. I bolted out of bed at six, sweating, clutching my chest, quite sure that I was about to die. I reached over and grabbed Christine's arm.

“Honey, I'm in trouble here.”

“Huh?” She was still half asleep.

“I think I'm having a heart attack.”

Christine took one look at me and became genuinely alarmed. “Okay, we'll get you to the doctor.”

As she scrambled for the phone, I told her to wait. A few deep breaths later, the discomfort began to subside. My chest loosened, and my heart returned to its normal rhythm. After convincing Christine that I was all right, I took a shower, got dressed, and left the house. I hadn't gone more than a mile or so when another wave of anxiety rolled in: shortness of breath, tingling in the arms, a crushing pain in my chest. I sat at a stop sign for a few moments, waiting for the attack to ebb once again. And it did. Now I wasn't just scared; I was pissed! I couldn't believe this was happening, and I was worried that it might cost me the job. I'm not a cancel-the-meeting kind of actor, so I knew I had to get through the makeup process and then visit a doctor. Which is precisely what I did.

A battery of diagnostic procedures, including an EKG and a treadmill test, revealed that I had the heart and lungs of a healthy twenty-eight-year-old man. The cardiologist was thoughtful and considerate, but he made it quite clear that I'd experienced nothing more serious than a panic attack. Both Christine and I were relieved, but when I called my mother to tell her what had happened, she burst into tears. My mother, of course, has had various health issues her whole life, including panic attacks, and the relating of my episode provoked considerable empathy and concern on her part. I think she considered my anxiety to be a red flag, an indication that I was susceptible to the same types of emotional and psychiatric disorders that had at various times made her life miserable. Mom has always believed that her children should be aware of the possibility that such illnesses could afflict them, and while I know there is an undeniable genetic component to bipolar disorder, I have never been quick to embrace it as an explanation for the dynamics or problems in my life.

Whenever something goes wrong, the slightest emotional slip, that's my mother's default. She's inclined to say, “It's a sign of manic depression, and you need to have it fixed.” My wife, whose family also has been burdened by mental illness, is more inclined to straddle the fence. She's not so easily convinced, but has on occasion suggested that I should consider evaluation. The truth is, I do a million things at once; the pace of my life is unnaturally accelerated, and an unpleasant by-product of that frenetic pace is an occasional dip into sadness or exhaustion. So it doesn't surprise me that my mother or my wife would feel a certain way, and I am open to the possibility. I'm not blind to it. But I don't like the stigma, and so I often just deflect the concern with humor, patience, and genuine reflection, and then I move on.

God bless my mom. She wrote
Call Me Anna
, a best-selling book about her experiences with bipolar disorder, largely because she wanted to destigmatize the disease, and that was a noble cause for her to have embraced. But there are a lot of things I would like to accomplish in my life, including holding public office someday, and I don't want to have to live with a diagnosis that will shape public opinion before I have the chance to achieve things that will give me the credibility to override that perception—especially when that diagnosis so often seems to be made with alarming speed and ease. A lot of people have anxiety attacks, a lot of people fret and worry. They aren't all manic-depressive.

I've worked very hard to allay my mom's fears, and my wife's fears, while at the same time being honest with myself. Last summer my mother picked me up at the airport in Spokane, Washington, and while we drove to her house she told me that the Arts & Entertainment network wanted her to be the subject of a lifetime retrospective. I was skeptical; sometimes Mom makes decisions that I deem too self-serving. I don't deny that her book helped a lot of people. I've seen it myself. Hundreds of people have come up to me, crying, saying how much the sharing of her experiences helped them. I know her story resonates on deep levels, but I also know that my mother needed money, and I know how adversely her book affected my father and my brothers and our family. So I wanted to be loyal to my mother and supportive of her, and let her tell whatever stories she wanted about me, but I had mixed feelings. My mother's book represented her statement about who she was, and in making that statement she was completely willing to give herself over to the psychiatric community—to her detriment in some ways, in my opinion. I think she largely abdicated certain kinds of personal responsibility, which exacerbated a lot of problems. I'm through the looking glass with my mother on this. I love her and I'm very forgiving of her, but I also don't want to repeat her mistakes. I recognize that there is an ambient perception out there, that as the somewhat hyperkinetic son of a famously bipolar Oscar-winning actress, I am the target of certain presumptions. That's okay. It comes with the territory.

Whether I'd be able to manage my anxiety while having my face encased in plaster, like the Man in the Iron Mask, was a legitimate question, and one I hadn't satisfactorily answered when I arrived at KNB EFX Group in the San Fernando Valley. Like Peter Owen, the folks at KNB are among the best in the business at what they do. Formed in 1988 by Robert Kurtzman, Howard Berger, and Greg Nicotero while the trio was working on Sam Raimi's
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn
, KNB had earned a reputation for greatness among filmmakers with a taste for lavish and sometimes gruesome special makeup effects. Among the films on the company's resume were
Men in Black, Scream, Pulp Fiction,
and
Mars Attacks
. And now they were doing advance work on
The Lord of the Rings
.

More than anything else, I felt inspired when I walked into the studio. It was like another rite of passage. My father had been through this. So had countless other actors. It was a process bathed in trust: you had to put your faith in somebody else—completely. To that end I was offered a tour of the facility designed to set my mind at ease by making the work less mystical and frightening. I was told that a particularly attractive actress had been in just a short time earlier, and that the boys at KNB had to prove their professionalism in making a full-body cast for her. They showed me masks and molds that had been designed for other actors. And then it was my turn; inspiration turned to fear.

“You ready?” Howard asked.

My mouth was dry, so I just nodded.

“Okay, have a seat.”

I tried to project confidence, but inside I was dying. While giving me the tour, Howard had related the story of another actor, an action star, who had completely flipped out in the middle of the molding process. He'd started sweating and yelling, and then jumped up and ripped everything off. I laughed at the story and made some joke about how pathetic it was that anyone could let that happen, but at the same time I was thinking,
You know what? That's going to be me in about ten minutes
. Then they told me that Elijah had been in the day before.

“Yeah? How did he do?”

“Oh, he was great, man. Such a professional.”

That little shit!

I knew then that there was no way out. If Elijah could weather the process without complaint or incident, then I could, too.

As they stirred the mixture that was to be applied to my face, I asked a question.

“What happens if I have trouble breathing after it hardens? You do a little tracheotomy or something?”

Howard laughed. “Don't worry. You'll be fine.”

They kept talking, making jokes, trying to put me at ease. Really, though, I wasn't in the mood for conversation. I tried to be cordial, but what I wanted to do was just close my eyes and get through it. I'd seen makeup effects for a lot of movies, and I'd always wondered how I'd react when it was my turn. Here was the answer: not well.

“Some people tell me it's quite a soothing experience,” Howard said, scooping a handful of glop from a bucket.

Splat!

He smeared a patch over my cheeks and forehead. I tensed, and I think he noticed. I'm sure he noticed. “Just breathe. That's it. Nice and easy.”

I'd had two panic attacks already, and a third was imminent. Or so it seemed. Then a funny thing happened. The nervousness went away. The more of my face they covered, the more soothing it became, and I realized then that I'd live through it. There was a moment when they were working close to my nose, and I was concerned that my nostrils would get plugged with plaster and I'd choke to death, but that passed quickly. The truth is, they were extraordinarily good at their jobs, and I trusted them. Eventually, as they covered my ears and eyes, everything went dark, and a weird feeling of sensory deprivation took over. Three minutes passed. Four minutes. Five …

“We're waiting for it to harden,” Howard explained. “Sit tight. It's almost over.”

Someone tapped the shell, and it occurred to me then that I had no idea how they were going to remove the mold. Was it like a cast? Would they use a little circular saw on the top of my head? Around my neck? Didn't like the idea of that at all. I hadn't asked enough questions; I had trusted in the notion that if they killed me it would ruin their reputation and upset the studio, and no one wanted that to happen. Still, when I heard Howard say, “It's ready,” I felt another small surge of panic. I held my breath in anticipation of the whine of a saw, the sting of a razor, but neither came. Instead, someone reached under my chin and tugged gently on the mold, and I felt my skin pull away from it. The thing had enough elasticity that it could be removed like a ski mask. Just like that, I was in the open air again, breathing freely.

Howard held up the mask and explained how they would use it to create an image of my face, and then make innumerable latex molds from that image.

“You did great,” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied, feigning nonchalance. “You were right. No big deal.”

*   *   *

The molds for the hobbit feet, those giant furry slippers that would be individually applied in a tedious process each morning in New Zealand, were done later, and that was a ball. There's nothing panic-inducing about having your feet molded. In fact, it was while having those molds taken that it first dawned on me that feet were an issue. Even though I had read 160 pages of
The Lord of the Rings
, there was much I simply didn't understand. I just didn't get it:
Hobbits have big feet. So what?
I'm such a pug sometimes. I'm so
pugnacious,
and I don't mean that in the flattering sense of the word. I'm so busy thinking about things and approaching them in a way that gets me where I want to go, that sometimes I just miss the point—you know, I can't see the forest for the trees. I don't always get what's fun or funny or cool or interesting, usually because I'm too busy looking at things from my vantage point, through selfishness, really. In some ways I've been a victim of needing some type of ownership to other's people work in order to really appreciate it. I go to fantasy and science-fiction conventions now, and I see how people spend hours building miniatures. There was a time when I couldn't appreciate that. Oh, sure, I respected their right to play games and build models and be geeky—there are billions of people on this planet and everyone has their own interests—but somehow, as much as I tried to be a student of the business and an heir to a tradition of Hollywood success, I still just didn't get it.