You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (4 page)

Film sets are a unique combination of hectic rushing and incessant boredom. Hours, or entire days, can be spent waiting and then within a moment’s notice, people need to spring into action and make their specific contributions. Learning to entertain oneself is of great value to personal sanity on set. The teamsters, who are in charge of coordinating all the trucks and generators for the entire film production, apparently found that teaching a four-year-old to play craps was very entertaining. Simply hearing a four-year-old say, “Yes, thanks, I’d love to play craps,” must have been pretty terrific.

Many of the teamsters were classic truckers. Their guts strained the promotional t-shirt of whatever show they just finished shooting. Their long stringy hair was contained under a baseball cap and their use of the English language was deeply and creatively filthy. They were also fun
and truly kind and offered me my first sense of belonging to something, a feeling that I’d spend the rest of my life chasing.

These guys, many of whom were older than my parents, were who I considered to be my community, my peers. The teamsters and I would gather together and play craps for hours. They told me about snake eyes, and how to tell if someone had slipped in loaded dice. They gave me spare change to bet with and taught me how to trash talk. I reveled in being one of the guys.

On one commercial shoot, a nice, idealistic person drew a hopscotch board with pink chalk on the floor of the soundstage where we were shooting. When she proudly presented it to me, a little girl who should have been thrilled, I put on my best commercial smile and thanked her. As soon as she was out of sight, I hurried back to the dark corner of the warehouse, to blow on dice with my crew. I didn’t know how to play hopscotch.

“G’night, fellas!” I loved yelling when we wrapped shooting for the day.

“Sleep tight, kiddo,” gruff voices would respond from behind trailers and generators.

I’d go home and miss them until I was back for my 6 a.m. call time the next day. From shoot to shoot, the faces changed, but somehow the feeling of belonging stayed the same.

As a result of constant interaction with people a generation or two older than me, I became increasingly uneasy around other kids. My exchanges with them had largely been unpleasant. Being different in school is the kiss of death, as any fourth grader with a foreign accent or an affinity for avant-garde fashions can tell you. A group of kids at school once cornered me on the playground and asked if I thought I was a good actor. I looked at my feet and shrugged, admitting that I didn’t know. They proceeded to hold my arms and whip my bare legs with a willow branch.

“Act like that doesn’t hurt,” they demanded.

I failed my acting test and cried until snot ran down my chin. They finally let me go and walked away, proud that they had broken me so easily. When I went home, I changed into jeans to hide the welts and didn’t tell my parents about it.

I was humiliated by the fact that I hadn’t been able to act like the whipping didn’t hurt. Admitting to the incident would essentially be admitting to being a bad actor. What if casting directors found out that I hadn’t been able to fake it, and I never worked again and just had to stay there in school with those horrible kids?

I fed most of my breakfast to the dog, since I got stabbing stomach aches every school morning. I prayed to get another job so that I could be on set, the one place where I could just enjoy casino games with giant men named Tiny and have my freakiness be accepted.

Inevitably, I’d have to spend a few days or weeks trudging though school, wondering what I could to talk to my supposed peers about. Those kids didn’t have jobs. They didn’t play craps or travel to location shoots. They weren’t up late last night because filming went long and they didn’t worry because we were losing the light. They didn’t know the exhilarating tension of the sun going down and how booking this location for another day would cost the production thousands of dollars that wasn’t in the budget, so you just had to get the shot and didn’t have time to go “ten-one hundred.” And they definitely didn’t know that ten-one hundred was the discreet way of telling everyone within earshot of a walky-talky that you were sitting on the toilet. Kids my own age were worried about choir solos and Girl Scout cookie sales, things I was clueless about.

I tried to relate to the kids who practiced gymnastics or cello for five hours a day. They seemed to be comforted by their unusual skills, like I was, but the balance was never easy for any of us. The opportunities were astounding, and were only equaled by the sheer number of things that we gave up. I knew kids who wanted to be firefighters when they were five, but no one decided to suit them up, hand them an axe and
send them out there. However, the rules seemed different for those of us who showed musical talent, sports skills, or an affinity for crying on cue.

I saw some families exhausted by early morning swim meets on behalf of their phenomenon the same way my parents skipped family obligations because I had an audition. At a certain level, the assumption on behalf of kids like us was that
of course
this should be pursued. It quickly becomes “you have an audition/performance/competition!” instead of “do you want to go to this audition/performance/competition?” Because the tendency is to think who
wouldn’t
want to participate at that level, if given the chance? For the most part, I found it to be fun, but it was clear that there were other kids on set who felt forced and resented it. Those tended to be the ones who felt stifled, so they took control of the only things they thought they could control, and eventually overdosed in a random hotel room.

All I knew at the time was that at school there was simply no common ground between my “peers” and I. When I hung out with kids my own age, I’d inadvertently say something that made them stare at me, snicker uncomfortably, and walk away, leaving me flushed and rejected. The more I worked, the more snickering and staring occurred. It was a vicious cycle that left me feeling ashamed of myself and my job, yet desperate to get back to it since I felt completely unworthy of being part of the things that normal kids did.

Mom said I was an old soul and that I shouldn’t worry about kids my own age. I liked the idea of being an old soul. That made it sound like maybe being socially awkward wasn’t entirely my fault.

Acting is intrinsic to the human spirit. Humans have an innate desire to be someone else. Sometimes, we just want to be anyone else. It’s a relief to get the hell out of our own lives and try on someone else’s skin.
This desire is particularly prevalent in young humans: kids pretend to be adults, other kids, animals, or tables. They have no sense of one identity being superior to another because embodying a king or a floor lamp are of equal acting gravitas. No one needs to tell them how to throw an elaborate tea party for a stuffed sea lion and they don’t need to be smothered in praise and Screen Actors Guild awards for the dramatic reading they did for the pet parakeet. We’ve been performing since the dawn of time, it’s the way we tell our stories in a feeble attempt at immortality. Adults sometimes wonder if kids “know what they are doing” when they act, but it seems more logical to question the capacity of grownups, who have often misplaced their sense of fantasy and forgotten that it’s just all playing dress up.

John Malkovich understands this. I was in
Eleni
, my first feature film, at age six. I had a small, yet important part in the film. (Please note: if you are an actor, it is required that you highlight the pivotal significance of a role if you dare refer to it as “small.”) In my hugely important and climactic scene, I was to enter the room, while John, who had been plotting this revenge killing for decades, was pointing a gun at my grandfather, who had tortured and killed his mother. My job was to look at John with big six-year-old eyes until he drops the gun, overcome with guilt. Music swells, credits roll, the movie theater audience steps over discarded popcorn bags and Junior Mints.

The day we filmed the scene, my mom talked to me about the gun and explained that it wasn’t real and couldn’t hurt me. I had become accustomed to fake food, fake families, and fake living rooms, so this felt no different. I wasn’t nervous at all. My biggest concern was about getting the heavy sliding glass door open at the top of the scene. In rehearsals, it had gotten stuck and even though I had thrown all forty pounds of myself into opening it, I had missed my cue. They put someone just out of shot, to help me manage it.

We did a few more rehearsals to finalize the camera angles and lighting. John was showing restraint, holding back the emotion during the
rehearsals, and saving his acting energy for the actual take. The shaking and spitting and pulsing forehead veins that come with an attempted revenge murder were reserved for when the camera was actually rolling. John had just done
Death of a Salesman
with Dustin Hoffman, so people were starting to know the power of his performances, but this was still years before
Empire of the Sun
and his true minting as a celebrity. But everyone knew this was a powerhouse of an actor about to take on the most important moment in a serious film. The energy in the room was coiled and ready.

We rolled camera, and the slate was clapped very quietly, as a traditional sign of respect before a tense scene. The director called action and John went all out with the shaking and spitting and pulsing forehead veins. Just before my cue, someone on the crew thought it might be helpful for me to feel “real fear” because he figured no six-year-old could really understand acting. He suggested to me, quietly, off camera, that maybe the gun might really be loaded, that perhaps it wasn’t a pretend gun and perhaps I might actually die. Maybe my mother lied.

When it was time for my entrance, the crewmember slid the heavy glass door open for me and I saw the gun. And freaked. I screamed, cried, flapped my arms, pitched a fit, and refused to go on set. I must admit, it was a fantastic actress meltdown; current starlets could have learned from my all-encompassing technique. People gathered around to calm me, offer me Kleenex and fix my streaking make-up. I’m sure more than a few rolled their eyes and recalled the time-tested adage about why you should never work with children or animals.

Somehow through the sobbing, I heard John call me over to set.
This is it
, I thought,
this is when I get fired
. How humiliating to get fired at age six. John had just been in character, screaming and threatening to kill Oliver Cotton, and I was a little scared that some of that rage might be reserved for me, for ruining his shot and making him do that thing with the forehead veins over again. I was preparing to apologize and try to talk my way into keeping my job, as John sat down on the floor and
gently patted the ground next to him. I sat. The gun master who was in charge of the on-set weapons joined us on the floor and the two of them proceeded to take the gun apart. They showed me that there were no bullets inside. They explained that I was safe and that I was surrounded by a whole team of people who cared for me and would make sure that I was safe. Nothing bad could happen to me here.

I believed him. Not because he was a stunningly talented actor but because he was a nice man who sat on the floor with me when I cried. He acknowledged my concerns and talked to me like I was a person. A fellow actor. He understood that children are capable, he knew I could act. We tried the scene again and with m my newly instilled confidence, I pulled open the glass door and acted. Those big eyes that were the foundation of my entire career did their job as I looked at the pretend gun and I pretended to be scared. When the director called cut, there were high fives all around—we got the shot.

It was at that moment that it became clear that my peers were no longer those kids wielding the willow tree branch—my peers were teamsters and John Malkovich. This was where I belonged. This was where I felt safe. And there was nothing more satisfying than getting the shot.

At least—that’s where I belonged for the next few days. Because then we would wrap the movie, and everyone scattered, off to start pre-production on some new project. My little community was ripped apart. The post-wrap crash was always devastating and I would still be navigating the pain of that loss as I was plunged back into school. Back to being the weirdo and back to feeling desperate to return to set. My addiction to working was firmly implanted and I’d be on a hunt for the next fix. The next chance to get the shot.

At the age of seven, it was time to expand my range. I ventured into the world of voice-over acting. It was new territory for me, as it was
a dramatically different kind of performance than the kind to which I had become accustomed. There was no sound stage and no fifty-person crew. No craps games. No trailers or generators or lighting trucks strewn about. No wardrobe calls or hair stylists.

This type of work involved going into a little soundproof box all alone and speaking into a huge microphone. On the other side of a thick pane of glass, the adjacent room was filled with reel-to-reel sound tapes and a big board with a sea of buttons. I would perch up on a stool, my feet intertwining with the chair’s legs to keep me stable, while the director would lower the metal music stand down as low as it would go. Then, he would leave, sealing the soundproof egg crate-lined studio so securely that when the door closed my ears would pop. For a moment, it would feel like a coffin; small, padded, deathly quiet and deeply lonely. I would readjust the too-large headphones that would always slip backwards off my head and wait. Finally, the director, my lifeline, appeared in the glass window and I would get a silent point to say the lines that were printed out in front of me. Giant doe eyes could not help with this job; it was a new kind of acting. It might not have had my beloved on-set ambiance, but this particular gig was still incredibly exciting. I was going to be on
The Care Bears.