فصل 30

30

I was in Atlanta, and it was the night before we were about to start filming the movie Middle School, based on the books by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts. At the cast dinner, I was thrillingly and frighteningly seated next to James Patterson himself—the author of countless thrillers, epic franchises that became Hollywood blockbusters, and a surprising number of children’s books. So I couldn’t help but ask him the question he’s probably been asked a million times: “How do you do it?”

He turned to me and said, “Keep going, keep going, keep going.”

Whoa. That pretty much says it all, I guess.

One day in 2011, I was sitting in my trailer after finishing a day of work on Parenthood. I had filmed a few scenes that morning, but we’d gotten through them fairly quickly. I’d already worked out that day, spoken to my dad, answered some emails, and had lunch. It was too early to start making dinner, and I didn’t quite feel like going home yet. I realized that for the first time in what felt like years, I had something I almost never had: extra time on my hands. When I was in high school and college, there were always a million homework assignments due, projects I needed to work on, plays and musicals to rehearse. After school, out in the real world, there was also always something hanging over my head: making enough money to pay the rent, pounding the pavement all over New York, and, later, driving all over Los Angeles, trying to get people to hire me, trying to land somewhere even a little bit permanent so that I didn’t wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach, wondering where my next paycheck was coming from. When I finally did land somewhere, on Gilmore Girls, there was hardly time to notice. The years I spent there were packed full: dialogue to memorize, long hours of filming, and all that went into publicizing the show. During the summers between seasons of the show, I hadn’t wanted to rest either. I did movies and plays whenever I could, anxious to keep the momentum up. Keep going, keep going, keep going.

So that day in my Parenthood trailer, the realization that I had free time was an odd feeling, and an unfamiliar one. And there was something else too. For a moment I couldn’t pin it down. It was almost as if someone else was in the room. Finally it came to me. It was a…voice, I guess? When it finally spoke, it asked me something unexpected.

Did you, um, make it? the voice whispered, surprised.

As a working actor, you’re always being asked when it was that you finally knew you’d “made it.” Most actors I know, myself included, respond with something resembling “never.” Acting is such a precarious profession that most of us wisely never relax, never stop watching our backs, never feel we have true job security. Even if the evidence is to the contrary, most of us feel we aren’t yet safe. If necessary, I could pick up a tray tomorrow and take your order—I remember those years like no time has passed. I never take this career for granted. There are far more actors who worked for a while and disappeared than there are actors who’ve stuck around for decades.

So when I tell you that a whispery voice in my ear asked me if I’d “made it,” I don’t at all mean in the red-carpet interviewer sense. I don’t mean it as in I saw my face on the side of a bus, or I won an award, or I just bought my fourth Ferrari. And it was then I knew I’d made it! I mean it in a subtler sense. The voice suggested that maybe the time had come to accept that I didn’t have to wake up every day with ulcer-inducing terror over where my next meal was coming from. Again, this was in 2011. I’d been supporting myself steadily as an actor since 1996, and the idea that maybe this was going to work out after all was occurring to me for the very first time. Actors: how therapists stay in business!

I mean, what was I thinking back then, when I decided to go into acting? Really, who did I think I was? Show business? Who does that? Starting out, I hadn’t known anyone with even the vaguest connection to this mysterious world.

In high school, I had the lead in the musical my junior year (You remember Hello, Dolly!) but didn’t get the lead my senior year, and I remember thinking, I’ve peaked. It’s all over. So I wondered what had kept me going after that, through thousands of rejections and with no way of knowing I’d be sitting in a trailer on the Universal lot one day twenty years later with my bills relatively paid and time on my hands.

I pictured the brownstone in Brooklyn I’d lived in after grad school with Kathy, my best friend from college. I remembered some of the jobs I’d taken to make ends meet: catering and waitressing and working as a tutor, answering phones as a temp and trying to sell CPR lessons over the phone. I kept all my appointments in a Filofax day planner, pagers were considered novel technology, and Times Square was still full of X-rated movies. Things had changed so much since then. I had changed so much. Far from being asked about “making it,” I’d found that the question that came up most often back then was some version of “When will you be giving this ridiculous pipe dream up?” Back then, I’d asked myself this with alarming frequency as well. When you have no credits on your résumé, there’s no proof yet one way or the other. There’s no way to know if the time you’re spending will someday prove to be time you spent paying your dues or time you spent fooling yourself.