There and Back Again (37 page)

That scene was the single greatest acting experience of my life, and I'll never forget it. But getting there—getting to the point where I was capable of such work, of meeting the standard set by my director, my fellow performers, and the script of a lifetime—was a long process. Roughly twenty-five years.

Here's what I mean. There are four specific scenes in my career that I consider to be the equivalent of a complete educational experience—grade school, high school, college, graduate school—in terms of emotional maturity on screen. The first was in
Please Don't Hit Me, Mom
, when I was eight years old and received a spontaneous acting lesson from my mother. She had asked me if I wanted to be in the movie, and I thought it sounded like fun, even though I'd be playing her abused son. The role wasn't simply handed to me—I had to audition. So I worked on the scenes with my mother at home, and then we taped the audition on the set of the television show
One Day at a Time.
I don't remember feeling stressed or nervous, just comfortable doing the work with my mother. And I got the part.

The challenge came on the day we were supposed to film the most disturbing and emotionally charged scene in the movie: a scene in which the mother attacks her son in the family kitchen. We went at it according to the script. Mom grabbed me and threw me around and started banging my head against the counter, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs. Acting her little heart out. Instead of wailing like a frightened, wounded animal, as the script suggested, I covered my face and started to giggle uncontrollably. It was nervous laughter really, for I couldn't help but think,
Whoa, this is a little too close to home. I've known some of these moments.
We did a few takes, but each time I'd break out laughing, and the director would yell, “Cut,” and my mother would walk away, seething. Finally, she pulled me aside, crouched low, and put her face right next to mine.

“Look,” she said, and I could tell by her tone that I was in trouble. “I took a chance on you. What do you think you're doing? This is my career; this is my life.” She paused, looked back at the cast and crew. “These people are counting on me. They're counting on you!”

With that, I burst into tears.

As soon as I started crying, my mother turned to the director, made a circular motion with her hand, and whispered something that sounded a lot like, “Keep it rolling.” And that's what they did. Within seconds my movie mother was beating me about the head and face all over again, shouting her lines, and I was sobbing like a baby. Eventually the scene came to an end, the director yelled, “Cut! Print! That was brilliant!” and my mother wrapped her arms around me, gave me a big kiss on the cheek, messed up my hair, and said, “Now
that's
acting!”

“Yeah?” I sniffed.

“Yes.”

Proud and relieved, and maybe just a bit confused, I said, “Uhhhh, okay.”

That was my first drama lesson.

The second lesson came a few years later, in a miniseries called
The Rules of Marriage,
starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Elliott Gould, and directed by a man named Milton Catsalas, who later went on to become a world-renowned acting instructor in Beverly Hills. This, for me, was another case of art imitating life, for the movie centered on a couple in the midst of an eroding marriage. My parents were in the process of getting a divorce, just like the couple in the movie. I played their son. The audition included a scene in which the father sits with the boy in the front yard of their lovely home and tells him that he's going to be leaving. Milton played the part of the father in the audition, and when the script called for me to hug him and cry, I did precisely that. I mean, I wasn't really crying, but the feeling I experienced as we embraced was real enough, and he loved it. He noted it, congratulated me on the work, and I got the job.

When we shot the scene, however, something went very wrong. Elliott Gould, whom I liked and admired, and with whom I established a strong rapport, had some type of problem on the day we filmed that particular scene. I remember it was late in the day, and Elliott was beating himself up because he was having an extremely difficult time working up the requisite emotion. It's a strange and awkward thing when this happens. The director always prefers that an actor summon whatever it is that's required to produce a
real
emotional moment, to open the tear ducts in a manner that is plausible and effective. In other words, don't fake it.

Elliott was giving it his best shot, but nothing seemed to work for him, and with each passing take the anxiety and tension mounted. There were discussions about whether they should resort to using artificial tears, but Elliott balked at that notion. Meanwhile, Milton kept looking at me, the ten-year-old kid on the side, in much the same way that a baseball coach might look at a pitcher in his bullpen. I was the ace reliever, the guy Milton could insert into the lineup if he needed someone to capture the emotion of the scene. But I could feel that pressure, and when we shot the scene, I was just honest and reacted the way I had in the audition with Milton. Or so I thought. It didn't come across that way on camera. Milton had been more committed to me in the audition than Elliott was during the actual filming of the movie, simply because he was thoroughly consumed by his own anxiety over how he was coming across in front of the camera. There was no give-and-take, no partnership, no sharing of the emotional burden. It was almost as if each of us was performing a monologue, which was exactly the opposite of the scene's intent.

We shot the scene a couple of times, but it never really worked the way it should have, which exasperated Milton.

“What's wrong?” he asked me. “Why isn't it like it was the last time, in the audition?”

I had no answer, of course. I was only ten years old and following the lead of the adults. I didn't know what was wrong, but I knew it wasn't my fault, and that awareness caused me to lose respect in that moment for both Milton and Elliott. Over the years, as I matured and learned more about acting, my memory of the incident only intensified; how unfair, I thought, to expect a child to carry the full emotional weight of a scene when he's working alongside a seasoned professional who is having a bad day. Later, I audited Milton's class and reminded him of that incident. I told him how I felt, and he apologized. He didn't realize I had experienced the incident in that way, and he felt bad about it. I was impressed that he was so open to hearing me talk about something that had happened so long ago, and it was important for me to share the memory of that experience, because it really did screw me up for a while; whenever I had a crying scene in a movie, I had tremendous difficulty summoning the requisite emotion to make the scene work.
5

Crying in front of the camera is an interesting act, one that is often devoid of any real emotion. Most actors have ways of faking it and getting by. They can pinch a tear or two and project emotion that seems to match the quality of the scene, or they can rely on chemical help, a dash of instant tears. Really, though, it's extraordinarily rare that someone is talented enough and emotive enough to cry authentically on cue, in the moment, take after take after take. When it happens, it's no accident; it's usually a marriage of a great performer and the best moment in a great script. Here's the truth: a lot of the time, actors have a hard time crying because the scenes in which they are asked to cry really aren't that good. The writing doesn't facilitate the muse. It's a remarkable thing when you see an actor who is so emotionally available that he can be sitting off camera, eating a burger, waiting for his call, and then moments later, when the director says, “Start crying, please,” he does it. I've seen this, and I've often wondered, How can anyone do that? Because I just don't get it. But when it happens naturally, when the drama of the scene lends itself to real emotion—that I understand.

My third acting lesson—college, so to speak—occurred when I was playing a college student: Rudy Reuttiger.
Rudy
is a movie that wants to make its audience cry, which can be a dangerous thing. Done properly, emotional movies stir something in the viewers and pull them into the experience. Done badly, they become unintentional jokes and black marks on the résumés of everyone involved.
Rudy
, I think, was exceptionally well done. The writer took great care to be faithful to the character's legitimately inspirational story, while refusing to fall prey to the pitfalls of overt sentimentality. That's a roundabout way of saying that Angelo Pizzo wrote a great script. My job was to inject honesty and believability into this blue-collar character, to make him a three-dimensional human being, and not just a sports-movie cliché.

A pivotal scene in the movie, and the most challenging for me as an actor, is one that depicts Rudy's acceptance to Notre Dame, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It's a powerful scene, one that begins quietly, with Rudy reading the acceptance letter while sitting on a bench. The director, David Anspaugh, designed the scene beautifully, with a crane shot that pans from humble Holy Cross Junior College, where Rudy is a struggling student working his way through school, to the glistening Golden Dome of Notre Dame. The point of the shot, made with elegance and grace, is to convey a sense of Rudy's journey: he's moving less than a mile away, but his life is about to change forever. The tears shed by Rudy as he opens and reads the letter represent not only an expression of joy over this accomplishment, but an awareness of what it means. It's nearly a perfect scene, one that captures the spirit of the entire movie.

On the day we filmed, David Anspaugh encouraged me to remain isolated from the rest of the cast and crew, which isn't something I normally like to do.

“I don't want you to talk to anybody,” he said. “You've got two or three hours before we shoot this thing, so just go away and clear your head. Don't speak to a soul.”

I did as instructed. To occupy my time, I read the script again, start to finish. I did that a lot on
Rudy
, partly because I was the star and felt significant pressure to be thoroughly well-versed in the subject matter, but also because I just loved reading the damn story. Anyway, eventually I made my way to the set, and we began rehearsing the sequence. Finally, it was time to shoot the scene. Everything was designed for me to succeed in that moment. I was working with a superbly composed scene and a thoughtful, sympathetic director; I was playing a character with whom I felt an innate connection. So I opened the letter and started to read, and …

Nothing. Not a drop. My tear ducts were dry, my heart empty.

We reset the scene. David shouted “Action,” and again … nothing.

David shuffled over to where I was standing and quietly tried to encourage me. He didn't want to make a big fuss about it, but the truth is, there was a lot riding on this scene. He knew—and I knew—that if I didn't nail that moment emotionally, it was a failure, in a big way, on a big stage. I was the title character in a major studio picture. I was expected to come through. Anything less than an honest, heartfelt rendering of the scene would be viewed as a failure on my part. But I was determined to keep trying. I would rather have failed big than to have faked the tears—a truly ignominious defeat.

“You okay?” David asked calmly. I was at once impressed and amused by the utter lack of urgency in his voice. He had the attitude of a great coach or manager who's dying on the inside, but knows he has to project confidence to his players. And you could tell he was thinking that way. He actually looked like he was playing the part of a coach trying to think of the right thing to say to his athlete.

“I'm fine,” I responded, although I really wasn't.

David clapped his hands together. “Good, let's try it again.”

So we did a third take, but that one stunk as well.

Now things were getting complicated. The Notre Dame officials and trustees who had been invited to the set were starting to shift uncomfortably in their seats. The crew members were looking at their watches. Most important of all, the sun was falling in the sky, resulting in the real possibility that David's gorgeous shot, so dependent on a sun-drenched Golden Dome, would lose some of its luster—or worse, it would have to be postponed to another day.

Once again David stepped out from behind the monitor and walked over to where I was standing, but now his appearance and demeanor had changed. This time he seemed less like a confident major-league baseball manager than a harried office manager who has to get the completed project to his boss by five o'clock if he wants to save his ass—and his job.

“Sean,” he said, with something like panic in his voice, “what's the problem?”

I didn't know what to say, how to explain what I was feeling, when what I was feeling was essentially emptiness. I didn't want to pull a star trip, didn't want to thrash about and make excuses. I didn't want to make a big fuss about my shortcomings as an actor to engender sympathy from the director. Instead I just looked at David and said, “I don't know.”

This was not what he wanted to hear. I'm sure he would have preferred that I communicate to him the root of my anxiety, but I had nothing to offer. So we stood there for a moment, the blocked actor and the panic-stricken director, with what seemed to be a giant clock ticking in the sky above us. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, David held up his hands, palms to the sky, and said out of pure exasperation, “What are you afraid of?”

And that was it, the key that opened the lock. I started sobbing hysterically.

Shocked, David put a hand on my back, presumably to console me. But noooooo. Instead he leaned in and whispered into my ear, “Wait! Please … wait!” It was a crane shot, see, and they had to set it up, and it just wouldn't have made sense for me to be crying before I even opened the letter.