Scrappy Little Nobody (20 page)

I joked to the producer that I was mostly worried about the other actress in the car. My scene partner, Gemma Arterton, happens to be a great beauty and a class-A broad, and the world would be cheated if we lost her to my poor driving skills.

“You’re learning to drive a stick for that one shot?” The producer furrowed his brow. “That’s ridiculous.”

I was confused. Didn’t he know that? Surely the days of lessons and the dozens of emails coordinating them couldn’t have happened without the producer’s knowledge. An hour later, I got an email saying that a nearly identical car, with automatic transmission, would be used for my driving scene. I am now pretty annoying about cutting out the middle man, a.k.a. ignoring the chain of command and bothering the person in charge of an entire film set about every little problem I have.

On a recent film, we shot a scene in which a large wedding cake gets ruined. The characters all blame each other for the accident and pieces of the destroyed mass are lobbed back and forth in frustration. The fun part was that we had to shoot some of the aftermath before we shot the cake destruction itself. In order to create the conditions of a cake-fight aftermath, a cake-fight zone was constructed.

The art department commandeered a small room by the
kitchen of the rustic hotel we were shooting in. It was the last scene of the day, and after changing into my wardrobe I walked in, ready to be caked. Every surface was covered in clear plastic sheets. It was like something a serial killer would save on Pinterest under “Dream Office.” If you walk into a room like this and you are not shooting a movie: Run, buddy! You are about to be dismembered!

I stood in the middle of the room and the director—a grown man, my creative ally—threw handfuls of heavily buttercreamed cake at me while I shrieked, further tickled by every frosted assault. At one point I started screaming, “Not the face! Not my beautiful face!!” Don’t get too into a bit when you’re wearing four-inch heels and standing in a pile of icing. I lost my balance and crashed to the Saran Wrapped–ground. At this point I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, so I barely noticed. Two members of the art department wearing lab coats (seriously, I was in Dexter’s murderous paradise) helped me up and steadied me. Then they turned me around and held my arms so my
boss
could throw cake at my back. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to laugh and couldn’t help but think,
I am in the world’s weirdest, most precious porno right now.

I will also sometimes have to fake the use and subsequent effects of illegal substances. Sometimes that is not difficult because I’ve . . . got a good friend I can ask about it. Other times, it’s a
drug for which I have no point of reference outside of other actors depicting it on film.

I had to do several lines of fake cocaine in a heavily improvised film, so I asked around about how it would alter me. I’ve been around coke, I’ve been at many a party where I was the only person
not
doing coke, but I’ve never tried it myself. I once secretly rubbed some residue on my teeth because that’s what people do in movies, but I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t have much to go on. Luckily, most people in LA had experience with it (and lots of places, actually; I remember conferring with other Maine expatriates after the first month of living elsewhere and confirming in disbelief that this was the norm. “Do people do
coke
where you are? I know!! Who does coke?! Have they not seen ANY movie?!”).

It wasn’t hard to find someone on set to walk me through it. So here’s what I’ve got: cocaine makes you feel like the most important, most interesting person in the room. Why the hell would anyone do this drug? No, listen, it’s your time on earth and I’m not here to judge anyone in this life (except people who don’t like dogs—how do you not like dogs?), but that drug sounds horrible. Self-doubt is healthy! Self-doubt keeps me in check! It’s the rare social interactions when I DON’T hate myself that keep me up at night.

Oh god. I just remembered the time in middle school when I thought I could pull off a wallet chain. I’m just—I’m just gonna crawl under the bed for a while.

Jake Szymanski, the director of
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
, liked to call out direction during takes so we could work quickly and keep things spontaneous. One night, around four thirty in the morning, everyone in the cast was collectively covered in fake pig guts. The scene didn’t make it into the film, and explaining the setup would take forever, so you’ll just have to go with me here. It had been a long day, it was getting cold, and I don’t know why, but the fake pig guts smelled awful. It was like someone tried to cover the smell of rotting garbage with a full jar of nutmeg, but it didn’t quite work. Luckily, we were supposed to appear disgusted by them, but they really were rancid.

Jake was yelling out increasingly horrifying suggestions from the safety of his director’s chair. They were all hilarious. But when he yelled, “Zac and Anna, get some of the chunks of pig guts in your mouth so you can spit them out!” Alice took over.

Hang on. A note about Alice, my character in
Mike and Dave
: I don’t usually “take my characters home with me,” which is a method-acting thing, not a sex thing. If it were a sex thing, I would do it. But Alice was a force to be reckoned with. She was hard to control. Maybe it was because we were doing so much improv or because Alice said the things I wasn’t brave enough to say or because she’s such an idiot. I like playing idiots. I tend to play smart, because I look smart. Let’s be clear: it’s not because I AM smart, I just “read” smart on camera. The two things are unrelated in actors.

I let Alice have free rein a lot during that shoot. When the “real”
Mike and Dave Stangle came to visit the set, I spotted them across the lobby we were shooting in and yelled, “Get your dicks out!”

When they introduced themselves two days later, I pretended to be embarrassed about it, but I wasn’t. Alice made me reckless and unflappable. So I was not going to be as docile as Zac.

So we’re about to eat the fake pig guts— Hang on. A note about how sweet Zac Efron is: while we were making the movie, I was reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Zac struck up a conversation with me about my book and shared some stories about his Polish family coming to America during World War II. Then he took a breath to tell an anecdote he’d just remembered, but he stopped himself, like he’d thought better of it.

“I was going to tell you about this thing, but it happened toward the end of the war, so”—he smiled like a schoolboy with a secret—“I won’t tell you yet.” I followed his gaze down to my bookmark, nestled around the hundred-page mark.

“Zac, you know I know how it
ends
, right?”

“Yeah, but it’ll be better if I wait.” What a sweetheart.

So we’re about to eat the fake pig guts— Hang on. A note about
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
: it’s a tome of a book, an absolute monolith. Now, the
title
has an air of legitimacy, intellectual curiosity, even gravitas. However! Displayed on the cover of this beast, far more prominently than the title, is a huge, angry swastika. After a week of toting it around, I realized having a Nazi symbol clutched to my person everywhere I went looked . . . less than great. I got some electrical tape to cover it up and tried that for a day. Within an hour the tape
started to peel off, and a small but unmistakable corner of the emblem emerged, like a shameful secret, which was SO MUCH WORSE. Kids, it’s not the scandal; it’s the cover-up.

SO we’re eating fake pig guts, and by that I mean
Zac
is putting the fake pig guts in his mouth. What a trooper. I, on the other hand, get in full Alice mode and scream bloody murder across the pool at Jake.

“Why don’t YOU get over here and put this putrid fucking mystery meat in YOUR mouth, you PIECE OF SHIT!”

I said that to my boss. And the crazy thing was, I don’t think I was joking. Luckily for me, Jake laughed really hard anyway. Zac went for it, because he’s a better person than me, and did a couple of really funny, really gross takes. He was so close to me, I could smell it from inside his mouth.

My god. How is he not throwing up right now
?

And then he threw up. I was barefoot.

Sidebar: working with Zac Efron gave me a real-life understanding of how Charlie Manson got all those people to move to a ranch and do his bidding. Hear me out!

Last year I read this biography of Charlie Manson that managed to viscerally capture the atmosphere of the time and the mania of his followers. BUT I’ve still never been able to reconcile the whole “Yeah, but why did anyone follow this guy in the first place?” question. One week of knowing Zac and I got it.

Yes, Zac is unconscionably handsome, but I’m telling you that’s not why people love him. (And I’m the first to discredit the achievements of the attractive and attribute their successes only to their physical appearance. Charming, aren’t I?) People
are just drawn to this guy. They behave like monkeys around him. Women behave like monkeys around most famous men, but it has more of a
Magic Mike
, aren’t-I-being-naughty vibe. Women fawn over George Clooney and think they’re being cute. Men fawn over famous guys in a bro-love way and usually want to show off by buying the guy a drink. But you know those movies where some remote culture sees a dude in armor for the first time and mistakes him for a god? It’s like that with Zac.

People are drawn to Zac because he has the confidence of The Alpha. In Hawaii, I once watched a pack of local teenagers shadow him around a series of waterfalls like they were baby birds on the Discovery Channel. It was as if they had no choice in the matter. We’d gone to do some cliff diving, and every jump that Zac was willing to try was soon mounted by the rest of the onlookers. Even the muscle-bound tourists and the aloof locals couldn’t help but steal a glance after they’d hit the water to see if Dad had been watching.

Based on his thrill-seeking recreational activities, I suspect some small part of Zac genuinely believes he’s immortal. And honestly . . . he might be. That’s probably what the magnetism is at its core. If there’d been an electrical surge, cutting off contact with the outside world, trapping us on the island forever, Zac Efron would have been the king of Oahu within forty-eight hours.

I
. Debatable.

F
or those of you thinking,
Wait, she was in
Twilight
?
, I sure was! I was the sassy, awkward friend who broke up the relentless succession of intense stare-downs with musings on boys, tanning, and various school gossip. It was a sweet gig. The rest of the actors had to bring heart and honesty to fantasy situations involving life, death, eternal love, and the preservation of one’s immortal soul. All I had to do was make jokes about how everyone was acting weird all the time.

The best part was that I got all the fun with none of the consequences! I got to show up to this mega-franchise for one to three weeks per movie, bear witness to the madness, and act like an idiot. I was once allowed to go on a rant about the zombie apocalypse genre (which was mostly a shout-out to Edgar Wright) and it actually ended up in the film. And I wasn’t saddled with the creepy super-fame. Most of the cast couldn’t walk out the door without being mobbed, but, weirdly, the vapid friend from school didn’t inspire the same zeal in fans. None of the other filmmakers I worked with during those years had ever seen
Twilight
, but the series kept me in room and board while
I did their movies for no money. It was like the world’s most ridiculous day job.

I have a vivid memory of my first day on the first movie. The cast and crew had been shooting for several weeks already and I was brought to the set to say hello to the director before my first scene the next day. Usually, a cast is happy to see additional characters; it’s nice to get some new blood. Walking into the lunch tent felt like a scene from
Band of Brothers
. These were Toccoa men and I was the idiot greenhorn showing up like, “Hey, bros! Who’s amped to get in there and rip it up?!”

Kellan Lutz is the sweetest guy, but that day I think he might have strangled me if he’d had the energy. Kristen Stewart—one of the most committed actors I’ve ever worked with—made a valiant effort to be friendly, but I could tell she was putting her back into it. Underneath every word, I heard
You don’t know, man, you don’t know what it’s like out there.

Wet and cold is not an environment conducive to making friends. Imagine if the first four weeks of a new job were spent outdoors in the freezing rain. Even when you all got to go inside, you’d just want to sleep and defrost your toes. You can’t create many inside jokes when you’re mostly numb. We were shooting in Oregon and Canada, in some of the most breathtaking locations I’ve ever seen. I would have enjoyed them more if I’d been in galoshes and a winter jacket. As it happened, we were pretending it was late spring, and after my first thirty minutes on set, ice-cold water had seeped through my Converse and saturated my cotton socks. Only fourteen hours to go!

On a small set, I might have had the luxury of a fluffy coat to run to before and after a scene. On
Twilight
, I was referred to most often as “Number 44.” A coat wasn’t in the cards.

I’d also like to mention the real MVPs of the
Twilight
movies: the background actors. Sometimes referred to as “extras,” background actors have the most thankless job on set. By the fourth movie, old “Number 44” had at least earned
herself
itself a coat. But movie four was brutally cold. Especially the wedding scenes. Between shots the background actors stood around those space heaters that do almost nothing, but they didn’t have winter coats. And they would come back the next day!

If you told me I had to be in that weather with no relief, I would have bailed like the little bitch I am. Extreme cold messes with you. The elements don’t discriminate. And no amount of “you’re getting paid to do this” matters when your body’s basic survival requirements are in play. Someone once told me that the reason most Navy SEALs drop out isn’t because of the physical demands or the danger, but because they don’t want to be cold all the time anymore.