Scrappy Little Nobody (26 page)

We pulled up in front of a private plane on a deserted, pitch-black tarmac. I stepped out of my car and thought,
This is the most unreal situation I’ve ever been in and I’m getting a damn picture of it.
Still in the gown and the diamond necklace, I asked
the pilot to take my photo on the steps of the plane. Does taking photos in these situations negate your ability to seem cool in them? You bet your ass it does. But COME ON. This was impossibly swanky and no one else was around. I gave the pilot my best sheepish, apologetic smile and got on the plane.

“Hey, what took you so long?” Ben and his assistant had beat me there. “You’re doing a photo shoot out there now? We’ve got places to be.”

They’d both already changed into jeans and T-shirts.
How
, I ask you,
how?

I never posted my photo anywhere because it felt too douchey, but we’re friends now, so you guys know I’m super down to earth. Please ignore my previous comment about being a big deal.

Everyone got ready to take off and I grabbed my sweats and
a hoodie and headed toward the bathroom. I pulled the flight attendant aside and produced a small nail file.

“Hi, I’m Anna, it’s nice to meet you. I’m sorry to do this to you when we’ve just met, but I’m going to need you to cut me out of this dress.”

I
think of my mom as a softie. She emotes more than anyone else in the family. She has a big, easy smile, and most of my friends describe her as “adorable” within three minutes of knowing her. She’s a people pleaser, but she doesn’t take shit from anybody.

When I was in the second week of filming
Pitch Perfect
in Baton Rouge, my mother called me around five a.m. to tell me that my grandmother had died. She was ninety-three. The woman had made miraculous recoveries from illness and injury, but she’d said for years that she was ready to die, and a few weeks after asking express permission from both of her daughters, she let go.

My mom didn’t cry. Sometimes I forget that when it comes to serious matters, she’s kind of stoic and dignified. If she didn’t object to violence, she would have made an impressive and beloved general.

I didn’t cry either. The funeral plans would be made soon; she needed to discuss them with the rest of the family. We said good-bye and I got ready for work. It was Monday, which meant an early call time, so I needed to be out the door soon anyway.

I stopped at base camp to tell Debbie, our makeup artist. Actors
have weird interactions with the vanity departments. We tell them private things like “I think I’m getting a rash” or “I’m on my period,” the way a race car driver would tell his pit crew that the wheel’s pulling a little to the left. Sometimes, we have to tell them that a family member has died.

I stepped up into the trailer and very quickly said, “Hey, Debbie, I’m fine, but I wanted to let you know my grandmother passed this morning, so you may have to keep an eye on me.”

I’ve always appreciated when someone can sense that I am trying to keep it together and they don’t show too much sympathy.

“I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ll have you covered.” She put a tube of waterproof mascara on her station and gave me a nod.

Next, I had to go to set to tell Tommy, our second assistant director. When you start making movies, nobody tells you who to inform in the event of a death, but the second AD is an information hub, and I liked Tommy, so I decided on him. I rode to our shooting location in a van with a bunch of the cast. The small blessing of a five a.m. call time is that no one wants to talk. I did wonder if wearing my sunglasses pre-sunrise made me look more closed off than usual, but I also didn’t really care.

I found Tommy, and I don’t remember what I said, but I found myself crying hard almost immediately. I was caught off guard; I really thought I’d be able to tell him without breaking. I was choking through “Sorry, shit, I’m sorry, Jesus, I thought I could stay professional and just tell you and I’m really sorry.”

I felt like I was letting my mom down. I’d made it through that conversation with some dignity, and here I was crying in
front of Tommy, making him embarrassed and uncomfortable. He was very kind of course, and he didn’t offer me water, which I respected. He told me he’d let “them” know and went off to speak to whoever “they” are.

The truth is, I didn’t know what happened in these situations. I’d never wanted to ask, because asking would acknowledge that something bad might happen during a shoot.

Luckily, later that day my mom told me the family could have the service on Saturday. When I updated Tommy he looked relieved. So I still don’t know what happens if your family can’t have a funeral on your day off, and I’ve still never asked.

When I walked away from Tommy after that first conversation, Jinhee Joung, the actress who played Kimmy Jin, my character’s apathetic roommate, introduced herself. It was her first day and she wanted to say hi. I still had my sunglasses on and I was acting incredibly distant. I’ve always wondered if she thought I was a bitch or if she could tell I’d been crying, but I never explained myself. Maybe she just thought I was tired. Either way, her dry humor made me think that perhaps, like me, she didn’t put a lot of stock in “nice” anyway.

We were getting ready to shoot the activities fair scene, and once the sun came up, I was happy to be spending the day outside. One by one, all the producers came up and said something awkward to me. Obviously, they had the best intentions and it’s the Emily Post thing to do, and I’m the weird one for hating it so much, but I wished more people could tell the difference between the “leave me alone” vibe I give off all the time by accident and my actual “leave me alone” vibe.

I wasn’t sure if people in the cast would find out, and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to. I didn’t want anyone to think I was irritated with them, but at the same time I didn’t want to field more perfunctory condolences. But perhaps because death isn’t juicy gossip, or because everyone was used to me being a misanthrope, or because by noon that day Kim Kardashian had announced she was divorcing Kris Humphries after just seventy-two days of marriage, my news had not spread.

After lunch our director, Jason Moore, was going over an upcoming shot with me. Because it was a Steadicam shot, for a moment we found ourselves alone in a crowd. We were both idly studying the prop flyers on the “activity booth” in front of us, and he took a breath. “Hey, I didn’t say anything before—”

“Huh-uh.”

By the time I hit the second syllable he was walking away. He really sees me. About a month later he brought it up again and we said a few sentences about it. That was it.

We shot more of the activities fair the next day, and on Wednesday we switched to nights to shoot the “riff-off.” Thursday was more of the riff-off and Friday we shot the initiation party scene where Jesse tells Beca they are going to have aca-children and Chloe gives her some bi-curious vibes. Not a bad night for Beca, actually. It was a little trickier for me. Night shoots start at sundown and go until sunrise, so we were scheduled to finish that scene around seven a.m. Saturday morning, the morning of the funeral. My flight was at seven a.m., so I packed my suitcase and brought it to set with me and got in a
van to the airport at five a.m. That wide shot of us all dancing at the end of that scene? I’m not in it.

I got through airport security and took off my makeup with a wet wipe in the bathroom. The sun started to rise. Since there are no direct flights from Baton Rouge to Bradenton, Florida, where my family was, my first leg took me somewhere in Texas. I understood that this was my fastest option, but as the fatigue started to set in, it was maddening to know that I was heading farther from my destination. The ability to sleep on planes would have been helpful. The next leg took me to Florida and I landed midday.

My mom picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to the funeral home. I changed in the car so we wouldn’t be late. I had borrowed a simple dress from the
Pitch Perfect
wardrobe department since I didn’t have anything in Baton Rouge that was appropriate for a funeral.

The service was lovely. Either the elderly are practiced at giving compliments or people really loved my grandmother. She may have been insensitive about weight gain and curt about proper piecrust technique and used terms like “lifestyle choice,” but she was generous to a fault and put others before herself. You could feel the love in the room. My mom started to lose it and so did I. Five years earlier, I’d refused to cry at my grandfather’s funeral as part of some misguided point of pride. My brother had done a reading and after every line, I distracted myself by making up a Dr. Seuss–like rhyme in my head.

“He will not be burned though through the fire he walks.”

I would not, could not with a fox!

Even though I was exhausted, that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t hold it together this time. My mom was grieving the loss of her mother. I knew that before, but I could feel it now, and seeing my mom in that kind of pain was simply awful.

I’d never been in a receiving line before, but everyone had nice things to say or a story to share. A few people seemed too happy to meet me given the circumstances. Some told me how proud my grandma was of me, and my mom would chime in, even through tears, “She was proud of all her grandchildren.” That was true. She talked about all four of us constantly; certain people just had selective interests. A few mourners seemed more focused on making weird comments to me than on grieving, which pissed me off, but I tried to grimace through it and chalk it up to faulty social filters after seventy or something.

Then, as my mother stood next to me weeping, a woman reached for my hand and smiled as though she was about to say something playful and a little bit naughty.

“So you’re the actress! Oh, you’re very good . . . but we know these aren’t acting tears!”

Lady, what the fuck did you just say to me? You mean the tears streaming down my face as we prepare to bury my grandmother and my own mother sobs next to me? No, these are not “acting tears.”

Maybe she says weird shit in every situation, maybe she felt like a jerk about it afterward, but I’ve never come so close to hitting someone who was smiling in my face.

I had to get to Vancouver, because I was shooting a scene in
The Company You Keep
the next morning. Oh yeah, that was
happening, too. I’d been warned that the logistics would be tricky because of
Pitch Perfect
, but I had said yes because Robert Redford was directing and that seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.

Under the circumstances, leaving my mother to film a glorified cameo felt decidedly unimportant. There was already a car in the parking lot waiting to take me to the airport. The situation was not conducive to grief. I said good-bye to my relatives and got my suitcase out of my mom’s trunk. In the car I changed back into jeans and browsed Reddit on my phone. I bought some trail mix at the airport and got on a plane to my layover city.

When I arrived in Seattle I saw my final leg into Vancouver was delayed. I found an empty corner of the airport—it wasn’t hard because at this point it was almost ten p.m.—and I sat still without any technology. I really cried for her then. Before, I had cried from discomfort and I had cried for my mom, but now, in an empty row of airport seating, I thought about my grandma. I’d be lying if I said we were extremely close. Both of my older cousins had spent more time with her as they grew up and I was envious of the relationship they had. But she had bathed me in her sink, and taught me to read, and she’d been a moral standard my whole life. She was a devout woman, and even though I am not, I fully expect that she is in the illustrated children’s Bible version of heaven. If she was on some plane now where she could see my soul laid bare, I wondered if she would be proud of me.

I got on my flight to Vancouver.

We landed, I got my work permit, made it through customs, and checked into my hotel. I’d been awake for thirty-two hours, but I still ordered a burger and a vodka, ’cause sometimes you can’t call it a day until something good happens.