You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (20 page)

It soon became clear that even the good cream cheese couldn’t soothe the drama that bubbled forth from the small house. People threatened to move out and never did. There were disproportional threats of violence waged when the last bag of microwave popcorn was gone. Phone messages from agents and managers may or may not have been delivered in a timely manner. When I got a job filming out of the country, our group home disintegrated; everyone moved out, going back to wherever “home” was, or to live with other boundaryless friends who must have also been lonely only children.

I packed for the shoot and locked the front door, leaving my weird little home to take a deep breath and enjoy the quiet. Paula kept up her constant vigil, keeping her house company, watering roses, and bullying aphids. All that was left of our commune was the smell of sit-com scripts left out in the rain, cheap cigarettes, and desperation.

My career planning tended to focus on the location of the shoot rather than the quality of the script. When I found out that a TV movie called
Bermuda Triangle
would be filming in Honduras, I was in. It was my first time traveling to a developing nation, and it suited me. We were staying in a simple but lovely hotel, and when we snuck out from the watchful eye of the production company to explore, that’s when I saw the place for real and loved it. There was great comfort to be found in the ways it was so different from where I lived. This is not to say that there were no problems; poverty and corruption were clearly visible, but the place felt honest about the issues and didn’t concern itself with further unnecessary obstacles like a fear of gluten or inadequate lashes.

The chances of getting recognized here were slim to none. Surely, in a place like this, people had other things to do than watch television. Most places were without electricity or even doors that closed all the way. It seemed that the entire male population napped on the beach between the hours of 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.; this was not a place that had been overtaken by American priorities.

In the US, life in public was becoming a blur of grabbing and hugging
and signing and flash photography. The social anxiety that had hounded me since tape day of
Night Court
was reaching a fevered pitch as I was unfailingly mobbed in shopping malls and restaurants. It felt like I was being buried alive and I started to have full-blown panic attacks. Everything went dark and there was no air, just panic, sheer panic, and there was total silence other than the blood pounding, and there was shaking and gagging and praying that someone could make it end somehow, someway, very soon. It felt like I was dying, but death was welcomed if it could stop this avalanche of crushing dread. My armpits would start tingling at the mere thought of leaving my house and having someone ask me to sign their placemat, or go over to say hello to their cousin so they could take a photo of my sweaty, pale, panicked face.

This Honduran anonymity would be the biggest luxury of all, even better than the fresh mangos we had every morning. Here on a remote island off the coast, the rules were just different. We had to pay off the baggage handlers to locate our “lost” luggage. People boarded buses with a half dozen dead giant lizards, all bound together by the tail like a reptilian bouquet. Folks here had other shit to worry about. Better quality shit.

There were just a couple of restaurants in town, mostly just shacks on the sand with a couple of wobbly plastic tables. The roof of a bar near our hotel was thatched, and the warm breeze off the ocean made the grasses rustle softly. My mom and I were looking over the menu when the bartender glanced over at me. He was quite animated as he said a bunch of things in Spanish, and I offered up my confused, apologetic smile and the palms up gesture that indicates that you are entirely clueless. I hoped perhaps he was offering to crack me a fresh coconut with that machete sticking out of his belt but when I listened closely there was one thing he was clearly repeating—”HBO.”

“HBO? Si?” he inquired, pointing between the bar’s small fuzzy television and me. It was the only one for miles, and unfathomably, it was on HBO.

“Si, Señor,” I confessed, smiling sadly. “HBO.” My simplicity bubble
was thoroughly busted. My charming little theory about happy, simple people with more honorable interests than us materialistic douchebags from the Northern Hemisphere turned out to be total garbage. I autographed a bar napkin for him.

That was how the locals came to know me as HBO.

“Buenos dias, Señorita HBO!” they hollered as I walked from my hut to the set for a day of filming. I’d wave and try to keep my head down. Even in the land of shoeless children and roaming packs of scrawny wild dogs, it seemed that movies were still king.

For my role in the television show, I was often shooting underwater. My character had a magical connection to dolphins that enabled her, within just a few moments of being in the water, to resemble a Shamu Show performer. The training area was in the ocean, but it was a large fenced-in area that looked like a giant underwater backyard. I spent hours training and learned how to do all that crazy stuff where the dolphins put their snouts on your feet and torpedo you though the water.

The first time I jumped in the training area, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the dolphins. I suddenly felt vulnerable and completely out of my element. This was their turf, and ecologically speaking, I was at a major disadvantage. The large school of barracuda that patrolled the fence line for abandoned dolphin treats didn’t help me feel any more secure. I covered up my nerves because I was worried that the producers would give too much work to my stunt double, who looked remarkably like me, except for the fact that she was thirty years old and actually had muscles on her body. She was hired to do some of the more daring, fly-out-of-the-water-on-a-dolphin’s-snout stuff. I told the producers I could do all of it, but they nodded, patted my hand, and hired a professional.

I liked doing stunts and when asked if I could do something, the answer would always be an unequivocal yes. As an actor, you always say you can do whatever the producer asks. Accents? Of course. Horseback riding? Sure. Work with explosives? Hell yeah. You always say yes and figure it out later.

This blind devotion to getting the shot tends to lead to some strange moments. I’ve been attached to a wire leash that was run through my pant leg and nailed to the ground, so that I wouldn’t fall when the balcony of a movie theater collapsed inches from my toes. I’ve been placed in a harness and thrown over a railing dangling above a series of escalators in a mall. I’ve been almost hit by cars and have fallen out of a tree into the arms of a waiting crew member. It was all just another day’s work. There might have been times that it scared me, but it’s all about getting the job, getting the shot, getting the audience, getting the fans, and getting the next job. If you are worried about your personal safety, people start questioning your professional commitment.

A local Honduran fisherman caught a four-foot long black tipped reef shark and offered it up for a role in our film. It would be absurd to pass up an opportunity like that, so we had to come up with a shark scene. The dolphin wranglers took over and kept the shark still until we were ready to shoot. Apparently, a still shark is a “sleepy” shark. Everyone was more comfortable with a sleepy shark.

We were shooting a scene in a submerged airplane that had, as the script went, crashed in the Bermuda Triangle, stranding my entire family in an unbelievable paradise populated with attractive guest stars, who had also crashed, along with their own emotional baggage and B-plot storylines. I needed to dive into the plane, which had settled to the bottom of the ocean, in an attempt to recover the insulin that my brother needed. This was a no-brainer; put the sleepy shark in the plane at the bottom of the ocean. Sharks love being put into planes.

For this particular scene, I had been waiting on a bare bones pontoon boat in the middle of the ocean and keeping myself thoroughly occupied with trying not to barf. Finally, it was time for my scene and someone came to get me for filming. This meant that someone in full SCUBA gear popped their head out of the sea, yelled my name and I jumped in the water, clad only in my hot pink bathing suit. We then shared a SCUBA tank and descended fifty feet to the wrecked airplane set.

When we got to the bottom, the director swam over. He was also wearing complete SCUBA gear and communicated via a waterproof wipe-off board. It said,

Shark too sleepy. Scene taking longer. Just wait.

I nodded. I pointed up and looked towards the bottom of the pontoon boat with a questioning look on my face.

He waved away my suggestion and wiped off the message.

Sit here
, the board told me. He pointed to the sand on the sea floor.

Some sort of oceanic assistant swam up and handed me an oxygen tank and a ten-pound weight. I sat on the bottom of the ocean and waited to shoot my scene. I placed the weight on my lap to keep myself from floating away and killed the time by doodling in the ripples of sand with my toes. I watched fish swim by. A little crab scuttled over next to my leg.

Sleepy Shark was being a total prima donna and took forever to get his scene right. He swam in the wrong direction and didn’t look menacing enough. When he finally hit his marks and the director felt they got the shot, someone simply pointed the shark in the opposite direction of the set and he swam away. No one asked him to do interviews or publicity. He didn’t need to recall his character motivation or what it was like to work with his co-stars. No one ever asked him for autographs or attempted to take incognito photos as he was eating dinner. Lucky shark.

Finally, we were able to shoot my scene and I swam around in a plane that the prop people had filled with rubber skeletons and long, tangled lengths of plastic seaweed. In this sequence, I was trapped in the plane when the door jammed shut. At the last moment before I drowned, a dolphin came to my rescue, shattered the cockpit window with his snout and I swam out amongst the floating shards of broken candy glass, to safety. Dolphin and I displayed a level of professionalism that had eluded Sleepy Shark and we got the scene quickly. He had clearly been an amateur.

(If you really want to see how this all played out, go to YouTube and search “Teenage girl underwater.” It has an uncomfortable amount of
views. I don’t think ABC intended the family-friendly show to be reduced to clips of me in my hot-pink bathing suit on YouTube, but footage lives on forever. We can never really escape. Even when it feels mildly perverted.)

When
Bermuda Triangle
wrapped, it was time to trade in my bathing suit for some snow boots and go back to Canada for a while. There continued to be this constant tension between trying to manage my career and live a regular life. I was offered a scholarship to a private school that had several other “non-traditional” students. They were athletes or classical musicians who had to travel on occasion and the school said they were used to making accommodations. I donned a plaid skirt, itchy forest-green knee-high socks, and revisited my familiar school-related intestinal issues.

I’d go to school for a week or two, then leave again, popping back in a couple of months later. Upon one of my returns, I found that the uniforms had changed six weeks prior and I was wearing the old clothes. That was humiliating in the profound way that only a clothing-related misstep could shame a teenaged girl. Out of pity and annoyance, the principal finally offered to let me write my locker combination on the back of his office door, because after months of traveling I would never remember it and the janitor was sick of sawing the lock off. My sojourn at this new school was brief, as I was told once again that my absences were just too frequent to be workable. High School Number Two was a fail.

While it still hurt, at least it was less shocking than being thrown out of high school the first time. It seemed clear that this whole idea of getting educated was just futile, and it seemed ridiculous to attempt to pursue it. My life had simply moved away from that stage and there was no way to regain it. Many of my co-workers had dropped out of school and become emancipated, so high school seemed like something that
was just dragging me down. It was best to cut ties before I got rejected anymore; the only thing that could be worse than being thrown out of two high schools would be getting thrown out of three.

I was still convinced that it was possible to manage both of my lives, the actor one and the normal Canadian one, though it often involved having to make choices in which one thing or another was inevitably sacrificed. Every decision felt like it would make an epic impact on my career, for better or worse, and people were counting on me. There was a whole domino effect of paychecks that started with my paycheck, and I felt a huge responsibility for that. Blame it on my Canadian-ness or just my massive capacity for guilt, but if I turned down a job I always felt badly for my agents and managers, who got a cut of my earnings.

I was offered the lead in a pilot for a television series. It looked pretty good and the chatter was that it would get picked up and turn into a regular gig. There was only one problem; it would be filming when my new boyfriend had his prom and I had already bought a dress. This would be my only chance to have this experience; girls that get thrown out of two high schools don’t get proms. I turned down the series, and disappointed a whole team of people. But I went to prom.

My memory of it all streams like a movie montage. My boyfriend and I piled in a limo with a bunch of his friends. I kept my mouth shut as the girls giggled about it being their first time in a limousine. We arrived on a small cruise ship that was decorated in cheesy prom stuff, with terrible food and loud music. Colored lights flashed and moved around, throwing a red glow on the boys who were in the corner, reaching into the pockets of their rented tuxes to retrieve the flasks they had smuggled aboard. An
Ace of Base
song shook the dance floor as the girls moved in clusters back and forth to the bathroom. I tried to dance, too, but the bent pin in my corsage kept coming loose, leaving the white rose to flop around upside down on my dress. My boyfriend and I had a fight about something, so I slow danced with his best friend to make him mad. But later that evening, in his parents’ basement, we apologized and made
up, in the traditional manner of teenagers on prom night. I could not have scripted a more classic experience for myself. It was perfect. The normalcy of it all was luxurious.