You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (27 page)

Writing had always been an important part of my life but it was something that gushed forth of its own volition. It was an unruly creative
geyser that would simply overtake me—often in the middle of the night when an idea would send me scrambling out of bed, searching for a pen like it would save my life. This was not something that could be funneled into the hours between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. My journals and attempts at fiction and screenplays had piled up over the years, lingering under my bed, surrounded by lost socks, and firmly categorized as a silly hobby. This was the first time I had seen someone take it so seriously.

Michael was a member of the Writers Guild of America, and they would hold events around town that would be of interest to their members. He invited me to a screening of the pilot for a new television series and a talk by the creators.

The place was crammed with writers, yet I felt a surprising element of comfort there. No one cared about what you were wearing or who you showed up with. It was an electric creative environment and there was a substance to the air that I normally found sucked out of the events I attended. We found two seats in the audience and the lights dimmed. The music swelled and it sounded like a movie.

“Seriously? This is for TV?” I whispered.

The opening credits of
The West Wing
came on. It was like nothing I had ever seen. It was fast-paced and funny and smart. I was far from being a political junkie, but the show still captivated me. I was interested in those characters and longed to know more about them. This was what great writing could do. Mere words, just some letters strung together with some negative space in between, could create something truly thrilling. Beauty and compassion and agony and life—it could all be created with nothing more than a pen and a healthy dose of commitment. There was great writing in the world; you just needed to work for it. It startled me that my first thought was not,
I want to be on that show
, it was,
I want to write like that.

After we watched a few scenes from
The West Wing
, Aaron Sorkin took the stage accompanied by heartfelt applause. I had clapped a lot in my life. I had clapped for actors in small, dark, poorly attended theaters
and I had clapped while sitting on the floor in someone’s living room after a Pepsi commercial during the Super Bowl. I had clapped out of respect for their effort and enthusiasm. I had clapped out of obligation because other people were watching and needing me to clap. I had clapped to clear the air of neediness. I had clapped so that others could relax and breathe again.

This clapping was different. I had to physically remind myself to stay in my seat and not run to the stage and embrace the man who had just cracked open my world. Sorkin talked about his writing process and inspiration. He talked about the characters like they were friends of his. And I thought,
yes, I get this.
When actors sat around to talk process, I picked at my cuticles for a while and then went to get a Jamba Juice. This gave me goose bumps and I scribbled notes on the back of a flier because Aaron Sorkin was speaking to my soul.

Suddenly, a light was shone on everything that I had suspected was missing. I had no enthusiasm for acting. I had just assumed I was a passionless person. But, creating a whole universe, pouring your heart out on the page, finding the exact right word and putting it in the exact right order with the breaks in the right place; that was electrifying. Not being a puppet to someone else’s vision, someone else’s shot, someone else’s editing whims. Words burrowed into my guts and made a home there. Words lightened my heart and jolted my soul.

But there was a problem. I was not a writer. I was an actor. It was too late for me to be anything else. So, I shelved the thought and buried that fire and distracted myself with my all-encompassing relationship.

My love proved to be somewhat contagious; Michael caught it and we became the kind of intense couple who sicken the world at large. He spent hours stroking my hair, outlining my birthmarks, calling them, “the places where the artist signed his masterpiece.” We had our own secret language and fourteen nicknames for each other and never included anyone else in our plans. We’d spend long summer afternoons with the curtains drawn to shut out the world, sitting on the floor listening to Bob
Dylan, and he’d tell me which songs were important and I’d believe him. We lay draped across each other at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday like we might have been victims of a carbon monoxide leak.

When Michael went to the gym, my eyes wandered to the top shelf of his closet, wondering if any of the bound books he kept stashed away were his wedding album. Was there any sign of apprehension in his face? Were there candid photos of him nervously fidgeting with cufflinks and a tie that felt too tight? Were there people in the pews thinking that he would be better off marrying a petite Canadian? And what about her? The faceless woman whose voice I tried to ignore on his answering machine when she called about lawyers and paperwork, was she apprehensive? Even more horribly, maybe they were both just thrilled to be together. Maybe they were as thrilled as I was, as I found myself in his bed with his old t-shirt pressed to my cheek. When I left for a location shoot in Canada, I took that shirt with me, and for the first time, I didn’t search for an on-set playmate.

When the shoot wrapped and I went back to L.A., Michael was waiting at my house. The second I saw his face I knew. He threw words at me, and I only caught some of them.

“…not even divorced yet…”

“…too much…too fast…”

“…I love you, but…”

My eyes glazed over. All those movie scenes of women being left flashed in my head. All the wailing and falling to the knees. All the false claims of pregnancy or threats to fling herself into a rushing river. I remember very little of my actual reaction, but I remember wishing that I drank. Michael gave me a hug and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Call me if you need anything.”

If I needed anything other than him, I suppose. The next day, with a puffy, tear-stained face and a credit card, I stumbled into an electronics store and bought a gigantic TV to console myself. I named the television Michael, in honor of my lost love. I dared the flickering screen to distract
me from my agony and immersed myself in a world of Sex and the City reruns.

Just to make the grief even more excruciating, after a few weeks Michael and I would pick at the scab and start talking again. We’d get back together, try to make it work, and only succeed at destroying each other a few more times over the next year or so. I’d leave, not trusting him; the next time he’d leave, feeling trapped. Then we’d both apologize and recommit to figuring out how to be together. The love and misery seemed inexorably entwined. For a while, that felt tolerable. Maybe that was just another concession of life, another thing that should be endured, because it looked so lovely on the outside.

We ended up walking away, both of us with claw marks on our hearts, since being together was slightly more painful than being apart. I will always be so grateful to him for many things. Everyone should fall so recklessly in love and have their heart shattered into bloody splinters. Everyone should sit sobbing in the driveway, watching their beloved drive away for the last time, just to know what that essential human experience is like. Because until you are truly broken, you’ll never fully understand your ability to put yourself back together again. Most of all I’m grateful because he taught me what it was to be a real writer. He showed me how to use authentic passion and discipline to bring out the best in myself.

Michael broke my heart and those cracks let in the light and set me free. He freed me to find all the beauty that came next. He freed me to embrace the writing that was my true purpose all along. Could I have written in L.A.? Sure, but I wouldn’t have. In Los Angeles, I was an actor. It had been stamped on my forehead at age four and I didn’t have the strength to do the amount of reinventing that would be required of me. I had almost eighteen years of career precedent behind me. There was no starting over there.

“It’s a spoof. A mash-up of
Star Wars
and
Shakespeare in Love
.”

“Well, that sounds…odd.”

But Joey was a friend and he was asking a favor. With this group of friends, weekends would often be full of student films, amateur productions, and guerilla filmmaking. Generally, I found reasons to be “busy,” choosing to stay home instead of running from the cops because we were filming in a restaurant where we didn’t have a permit. But the script for this short film was actually really good, and I’d get to wear Princess Leia hair buns. I wasn’t currently employed and had no plans for the week and so I agreed.

George Lucas in Love
ended up going viral, at a time when going viral meant that everyone handed everyone else a VHS tape of the movie. When something like that happens to an actor, you get calls. You get calls from people who want to tell you that you are fabulous. It’s important not to believe them, because if you do, your life gets considerably more complicated.

Filming George Lucas in Love. With Martin Hynes.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOSEPH LEVY
.

I got a call from the William Morris Agency. Everyone said I should listen to those kinds of calls. William Morris is one of the oldest and largest talent agencies and is incredibly well respected. They have represented everyone from Katherine Hepburn to Matt Damon and they wanted me. It was beyond flattering.

I had been changing agencies more often than I changed boyfriends, always thinking there was someone out there who was better. I tended towards the boutique agencies. (Remember how if you talk about a role being small you have to say how pivotal it is? It’s the same deal with agencies; you call the small ones “boutique” so that they seem exclusive.) I was wooed away from my boutique agent and signed with William Morris. My resume was reprinted on fancy paper stock with their striking letterhead. I had my headshots retaken, with my slightly smug smiling face beaming at the fact that the WM logo would be printed along the bottom.

William Morris thought that the popularity of the short film earned me the right to be “offer only.” I should skip the auditions because filmmakers should already know who I was and should just give me work. They were sure that Hollywood would be clamoring for the girl in the the hair buns, so my agent’s responsibility would shift from getting me auditions to “fielding offers.”

However, my field was proving to be a pretty lonely place. I had been in some popular films but this offer-only move was not warranted. It was a classic little-fish-in-big-pond situation. When the offers were not pouring in, I got that awkward call from my big-time agent. The call where they say that it’s just not working out. That I was not the right fit for them. That I might be better suited at a different agency. It’s the call where I got off the phone and cried, hating myself a little more and feeling like a failure, feeling like that elusive “success” had been there just within my grasp and had slipped away.

Like a flickering flame that I was inexplicably drawn to, I began again, crawling back to the boutique agencies, telling them I made a mistake and petitioning for representation. They had a need in their roster of
actors for an “ethnic type,” so I was back in. Right back where I was. Begging to do a job I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore, but feeling too scared to know what other options existed. I just waited for the inevitable burn.

I had done the Hollywood dating thing. Men with private planes had taken me to restaurants that boasted Michelin stars. We had our photos printed in tabloids, more because of him than me. We had done the hand-in-hand walk down the red carpet. But somehow it was not a surprise that the relationship with the true love of my life began with a kiss next to a dumpster in a Ralph’s grocery store parking lot.

When I was seventeen, I did a movie called
The Beautician and the Beast
, and became friends with the actor who played my boyfriend. Tim had just graduated from the University of Southern California theater school and kissing me on screen was his first job out of college. Kissing me off screen was not technically part of the job, but it came with the territory. Eventually we realized that it wasn’t a relationship suitable for real life, so we morphed into friends.

I quickly joined Tim’s large social group, all film and theater people from USC. Most of them had stayed in L.A. after graduation to pursue some branch of the entertainment industry, with varying levels of success. It was the kind of crowd where birthday parties and New Year’s Eve celebrations would inevitably include an enthusiastic group rendition of “Summer Nights” from
Grease
, complete with complex choreography and slightly cutting post-performance critiques.

Tim’s roommate, Jeremy, worked in management for a group of theaters in L.A. This fact alone made us utterly incompatible. I hated theater. With the promise of a good meal afterwards, I could be reluctantly dragged to go see it, but I was completely terrified to do it. Over the four years of our friendship, Jeremy had tried to convince me to do several plays for his company; he was particularly insistent when they were trying to cast the role of Juliet. I tried to be polite in my repeated rejections of his offers, but kept wondering why this guy had no clue who I was as a person.