You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (22 page)

It was awful to incessantly worry about what came next. Not for one moment did I sit there and go,
ah! I did it. I’m successful.
When I bought real estate before I could drive, got recognized, or worked consistently, all those things should have made me feel like I was doing it right, but the system is not set up that way. That insatiable hunger for more is the thing that hooks you, that lodges itself deeply and painfully under your ribs and keeps you coming back. You are so desperate for the next hit, and surrounded by people who share that frenetic striving, that you don’t bother to question your motivation for getting on this roller coaster in the first place.

This cycle appears to be the same, whether you are doing walk-ons in commercials or if you are legitimately “famous.” That is the dirty truth that no one tells you; that is the hamster wheel that is Hollywood. The people walking down the red carpet and looking fabulous in front of the Step & Repeat are all terrified that we are currently in the act of committing career suicide. The movie could tank, the dress could be unflattering, the statement could be misinterpreted, the date could be wrong. The number of possible fatal missteps is endless, because the industry really is that fickle and the desire for money and fame is a bottomless
pit. The poverty mindset becomes ingrained—never working enough, famous enough, paid enough, perked enough.

It made me wonder if satisfaction was possible in regular life. Did people feel successful when the new dinner recipe turned out well? When they graduated from high school? Made their partner laugh? Or did everyone, everywhere, feel like they had to constantly do more, be more? Was the whole world consumed by this crazy, competitive, dissatisfying vortex?

Then again, maybe this was all just me. Maybe other actors found a way to feel content even within the narrow definition of success in Hollywood. I hope that they did, because it’s a soul-grinding thing otherwise. I never could manage it.

Although my tendency towards being an authority-fearing goody-two-shoes is strong, working in the film industry exposed me to all kinds of things that opened my eyes to the world. Some of those experiences were on screen, some of them off. And I’m grateful for every one because they made life so much more interesting.

My phobia of guns continued from my early John Malkovich days. Thirteen years after that first film in which I lost my mind in the presence of a gun, I did a TV movie called
Dream House
in which I had to shoot one. And the only thing scarier than shooting a gun is shooting yourself with a gun because you don’t know how to use the thing.

When you read a script, it’s always tricky to know what the end product is going to be like. The script for
Independence Day
seemed so crazy that I didn’t bother to finish the whole thing before my audition. The budget is often a factor, but it mostly has to do with the passion and vision of the production team that either lifts a show up, or damns it straight to hell. Creative passion can be hard to judge from just the
bare-bones outline that most scripts provide. There were other reasons to accept a role, even if the project looked less than stellar. If you rejected too much work you looked like you were getting a big ego. There was always the risk of pissing off the wrong people, or the siblings of the wrong people. Throw in the fact that there was a mortgage to be paid and there were many contributing factors that made me say yes. Even if the project was about a demonic house.

It was kind of like HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey
, except for the fact you have heard of
2001
, unlike my movie. Our technologically advanced house took on a will of its own and attempted to kill my whole family. Low-budget special effects and overly dramatic music seemed to be the vibe we were going for. Towards the end of the ordeal, my character takes matters, and a firearm, into her own hands and gets some shit done.

The gun handlers showed me the gun I would be using and upon seeing my panicked reaction, they promptly sent me to a shooting range to learn how to hold a gun without shaking and tearing up. It turned out the only shooting range in the small town where we were filming was in the basement of the police station.

On my day off, a police officer escorted me down to the depths of the building and taught me about guns. He showed me various holds, my personal favorite being the “teacup hold,” which both sounded adorable and allowed me to use both hands so my shaking would be less obvious. After listening to a lecture about the anatomy of a gun and general safety rules (don’t point it at anyone, don’t point it at yourself) the officer set me up in front of one of those paper targets shaped like a body.

He stood behind me, held my shoulders and told me to just take a deep breath and squeeze the trigger. Just like that. Just shoot something. So, I tentatively compressed the trigger and felt it catch. The gun bounced back in my hands, causing my elbow to ache as the bullet flew. The sound caused a primal fear in my pacifist vegetarian body, but my aim wasn’t half bad. Each time I actually hit the black silhouette, I instinctively apologized to it. Sorry, I hit the shoulder. So sorry. I nicked an
ear. The officer laughed at me and reloaded the firearm.

The day we filmed the gun scene, all I could think of was Brandon Lee’s heartbreaking death. He was killed when a gun backfired on set, severing his spinal cord. He was rushed to the same hospital in North Carolina that I went to when I broke my back. Post-1994, everything changed for actors using firearms on set. Before that, there was always this feeling of invincibility. Our industry was smoke and mirrors, but they were smoke and mirrors that we trusted implicitly. We never thought that the smoke could be toxic and the mirrors could slice us open.

The scene went fine. Despite the anxiety, I managed to remember my lines and the proper teacup hold. The gun went off as planned and we only had to do one take. I gladly handed the gun off to the handlers as soon as the director yelled cut, holding it out by the handle, barrel pointed down, like a dead, stinking fish. I made a mental note to never take another role where I had to work with firearms. I’m just not a good enough actor to look anything but terrified while holding a weapon.

Whenever a film wrapped, the depression hit pretty hard. After a few months of being part of that family, returning to the vast spaciousness and loneliness of being an unemployed actor is disheartening. Life is once again flooded with the physical insecurities, wondering when the next gig would come, going to promising auditions with the inevitable disappointments when the producers decide to go “a different way” with the role.

So, I looked for entertaining distractions and there are few places that were more distracting and entertaining than the Hustler Store on Sunset Boulevard. This was no dark, sketchy shack of fornication; it was the Gap of porn stores. The store was bright and cheery, with lots of windows and bubbly salespeople. They sold everything from conceivably modest massage oils, to far-from-innocent apparatuses that were
almost beyond my imagination. There was even a café inside the store, providing a place where you could take a break from leather and chains shopping by enjoying a nice caramel macchiato and Danish. This was sex the way Walt Disney would have wanted it.

I had gone to the Hustler Store with a girlfriend who was in need of a bedside companion. That was the kind of thing you did at the Hustler store, take a friend with you to shop, as if you were picking out new linens and wanted a second opinion. Except instead of debating thread count, we were researching the differences between Master Cock Model #200 and the #300 series.

As my friend wandered off down the aisle to compare speed options, I noticed a woman tiptoeing around the corner, clearly mortified by her surroundings. She was utterly adorable and undoubtedly an actress. There is no reason anyone should be that good-looking and not have a camera pointed at them. At my own 5’3, I seemed to tower over this pixie-lady. She had a button nose that had been recreated in Hollywood countless times.

She was obviously not a frequent porn store shopper and she looked as if she was going to implode as her wide eyes scanned the shelves of naughtiness. Suddenly, a man came over from the café, circling her like a starstruck shark. He was about as non-threatening as you can get; dorky and slightly puffy, wearing a sweater his mother probably bought him.

He approached her. Was she really who he thinks she is? Yes, she is, she admitted. The actress slid her hand behind her back, attempting to hide the bottle she had clutched in her humiliated grasp. Alas, her ninety-pound frame was not blocking much. She blushed an endearing pink color and I could hear her silent prayers for the floor to open and swallow her evil, porn-perusing self. The man was clueless to her discomfort and kept pressing her to recite her resume for him. Oh my God, he loved that scene in the last episode with that guy. She nodded as she frantically searched the store for a random sniper or a runaway llama that might cause enough of a commotion to distract her fan. The moment of truth.
He wanted her autograph. She needed both hands free.

It was like watching a turtle lay helplessly on its back in the brutal desert sun. I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked behind her and discreetly removed the bottle from her white fingers clutched behind her. Playing along, she released her grip and never looked back at me. She took the pen and Hustler flyer from the guy’s outstretched hands and looked up with her gigantic baby blues.

“Who can I make this out to?”

I placed the bottle back on the shelf and went back to my friend, who was waving a hot pink phallic monstrosity at me. I realized that it was okay that I was currently unemployed and it was okay that no one was going to watch my HAL rip-off of a TV movie. Fame came with a price, and it was more than the cost of even the extra-large bottle of Self Heating Boobie Oil.

My other unemployed friends spent their ample free time doing something more valuable than hanging out in porn stores; they took acting classes. Oh, how my friends loved acting classes. They took them with renowned teachers, visiting teachers, teachers who had taught famous people before they were famous people. They went to little spaces in strip malls next to doughnut places and they stood on a stage and cried and laughed and pretended to be in rowboats. They shared intimate details of their own lives so that they could release suppressed emotion. They told strangers that their dad smelled like whiskey and yelled at their mom and how that one time their cat ran away while they were on vacation. They unearthed their most tender and feeble parts in order to embrace their humanity and experience the universal pain. Then, they stood up and read someone else’s words and crawled around, wallowing in someone else’s pain while other people sat in folding chairs and watched.

When my friends stopped gasping at the fact that I didn’t have an
acting coach, they said that I HAD to meet theirs and they threw around glowing adjectives and guru terms. I was promised that my life and career would be changed and that I needed to clear my calendar for the next Wednesday night from 7-10 p.m. I would patiently explain how it was just not my thing and they would patiently explain that I just didn’t understand. Attendance was mandatory.

Then, of course, my friend bailed on me. He had to cover someone else’s shift that night, but he made me promise that I would go anyway. His teacher was expecting me. It sounded like a horrible way to spend a Wednesday night, especially without my friend to walk me through it, but undeniably, I held a small flicker of hope. I went because perhaps this class, this brilliant acting sage, could infuse me with passion. Maybe this person could convince me that this was the right career path for me, that this was something that could be fulfilling for the long haul. Maybe this person could be my light and lead me through the dark periods of unemployment and the growing restlessness I was starting to feel, even on set.

When I arrived at the class, there were actors milling in the hallway of every body-type and psychological intensity. There was the pretty waifish girl who existed solely on brown rice. There was the broody boy with dark eyes and dirty fingernails who wrote bad poetry. (Those were the boys that I wanted to lie around in bed with, listening to them analyze
Waiting For Godot
while I caressed their long, scraggly hair that smelled vaguely of goat’s milk.) Then, there were the people that the film industry cruelly termed “character actors,” which meant they were there to fill the role of the cranky neighbor or the hunchbacked bridge troll. They would all be standing around, drinking water from paper cones, touching each other lightly on the arm, saying, “Your monologue last week? It, like, moved me. From some deep place.”

It was uncomfortable, not being able to agree that the troll’s monologue had indeed been a monumental experience, so I went to the bathroom to kill time before the thing started. Looking in the mirror, I re-did
my ponytail and wondered why I couldn’t get emotional about this. I would sob about accidentally stepping on a snail, so where was my connection with this career that I had devoted my life to?