You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (29 page)

The beginning of our relationship involved some challenging moments, since I have read too many scripts and had too many tumultuous relationships with guys who thrived on drama. I was accustomed to having fights until dawn that culminated with me sleeping on the couch in my own house while some moron slept in my bed with my dogs. I tried to evoke such delicious drama with Jeremy, but he never bought into this idea of true love requiring sob-filled misery.

Nevertheless, I attempted to goad him. An itch would appear down
in my soul that could only be scratched with a salty comment. A scowling glance. A roll of the eyes. There is always that really good fight in the movie, that zinger that accompanies the turn on the heel and strut out the door. Yet anytime I would try, Jeremy would refuse to play this dangerous game with me. The most he would give me was a calm look and a firm, “I love you. Please don’t be mean to me.”

This just made me want to kick him in the head. He was so right. So calm. So reasonable. He couldn’t comprehend my desperate desire for him to hate me just a little; that is how the good love story always starts.

I wanted to leave a note that was vague, yet poetic. I wanted him to hear my voiceover reading the letter to him in a sad, yet sultry voice, and then he would run out into the rain and down the street yelling my name in a desperate, yet masculine way. I wanted him to catch me just before I was about to board a train and throw my baggage aside as if it were empty. I would be wearing a hat. As he grabbed me in an arched-back, bended-knee kiss, my chapeau would blow away and down the track.

To me, this narrow, black and white representation was real love. It was the only true love. If we didn’t break up in the second act, how can we make up in the third and live happily ever after? Jeremy thought this was ridiculous. When I told him that we should break up so we can make up again, he looked at me like I had slain a cat with a kitchen knife. What was wrong with me? Why did I think movies were better than reality? Jeremy didn’t think that life had to be like a movie to be good. There didn’t need to be one dramatic, conflict-filled scene after another to make it all worthwhile and keep people’s attention. He thought that I could stop worrying that the audience would get bored and walk out.

Even though I made so many mistakes, there was something there that was so significant and so different than anything else. My fear of a real relationship, a real commitment, made me try to set it on fire and watch it burn. But he wouldn’t let me. He held me so close that his arms seemed to wrap around me twice, like he knew that was the only way I’d finally feel safe. He told me he loved the thing that was deep down, the
thing that never changes and isn’t defined by any label.

This was reassuring, because my label was about to get very murky.

As a final, desperate attempt to find happiness in the film industry, I tried moving behind the camera. Perhaps I was just more of a crew type of person than a cast type of person. A friend had written a short film and he needed a producer. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had spent my entire life on set and saw what the producers did: they did a little of everything.

It was a small project; the crew was working for the credit and experience rather than the money, which was perfect since we had none. We were quick and efficient because we couldn’t afford to buy more film. Our actors were talented, and while I waited for the jealousy to well up inside, I never once envied their position on the other side of the lens. I ate orange Tic-Tacs without worrying that they would dye my tongue an unnatural color. I wore no makeup, my ugliest cut-off jeans, and a t-shirt with toy trucks on it. I went to work wearing my glasses and with my hair stringy and unwashed. No one cared how I looked as long as the shots were running smoothly and I broke us for lunch on time. Not being an actor was downright luxurious.

When the shoot was complete, I fell into my predictable post-wrap depression.
What the hell do I do now?
Everything had gone well, but that gaping hole was still there. It didn’t take long to realize that what was wonderful about that experience wasn’t the craft of filmmaking; it was the fact that I was being productive and not being an actor. I loved being creative while having the freedom of not acting.

As we worked with the editor and finished the short film, we realized that our director of photography was even more talented than we thought. The film looked gorgeous and expensive. It was beautiful enough to get the film into a showcase at the Cannes Film Festival. We would not be competing but we would be shown in a smaller theater during the festival.

This “work trip” to Cannes was a perfect opportunity to show off to my shiny new boyfriend and invite him to come to France. It was also time to test drive Jeremy in more serious, off-road conditions. I had taken boyfriends to my work events before, and many of them failed spectacularly. They either:

were starstruck and spent the evening stalking Mel Gibson

were clingy and couldn’t take care of themselves when I had to talk shop with someone

pouted in the bathroom because I talked to my co-star too much (likely with good reason)

took the open bar too seriously and then fell down

met the producer and immediately launched into the pitch for the screenplay he was working on.

There were a plethora of ways a boyfriend could go wrong and it was time to make sure Jeremy had game. What better way than to throw him into an international film festival? It was sink-or-swim time, and he claimed to be up for the challenge.

Hotels in Cannes cost more than our entire film budget, and were booked months in advance. So, Jeremy and I spent a few days before the festival in Nice, a short train ride away, in a little family-owned hotel with tons of charm, no elevator, and a room that was only two feet wider than the bed. We wandered cobbled streets, ate mountains of cheese, and drank beautiful wine until we were bursting. Then we ate whatever we could find that was smothered in Nutella.

Jeremy and I took the train into Cannes for the festival and toured
the sweet little beach town until the screening. My film was shown during the day and there were maybe a half dozen other people in the theater. With none of the glamour that you would associate with Cannes, it was kind of perfect. There was no “line” to be walked and none of the fancy-shmancy uncomfortable stuff. There was a party afterwards, under tents that were set up right next to the sea, where there was prerequisite chatting with film people.

Jeremy navigated the crowds with me, keeping a hand lightly on the small of my back to let me know he was still with me. He made easy conversation with a random collection of people and asked interesting questions. He was good. Very good. I watched him step up when I needed him and hold back when I didn’t. When I gave him the “let’s get out of here” look, he immediately whisked me off to the train station and back to our hotel.

We climbed the five flights of stairs to our tiny little room, and lay in bed listening to the clinking of silverware that wafted up from the café below. I tried to use my old high school French to translate the music that the street performers were crooning. The movie adrenaline (or was it anxiety?) finally dissipated, and every cell in my body relaxed. We held hands in the dark and fell asleep with the windows open.

After Cannes, we returned to normal life in L.A. Jeremy went back to his job at the theater and I went back to auditioning. The scripts all seemed to be painfully trivial contributions to the moronic roar of popular media. L.A. was enamored with the ditzy, the blonde, and the curvaceous, and my acting skills simply didn’t stretch that far. I was tired of reading for the role of the overly sexualized tramp. I read the first and last ten pages of scripts while watching reality dating shows, and then I told my agent I didn’t want to audition for it. Then I’d spend the evening crying in the bathtub, my tears mixing in with the French lavender bath salts that were supposed to bring me peace.

I wanted to be like those bath salts and quietly dissolve into nothingness, like I had never existed at all. If all the work dried up then no one could blame me for quitting. But I was working just enough for people to think that I still wanted it. I got a small role in a film with Christopher Walken. I signed the contract mostly because I was dying to know if his vocal intonations were as inexplicable in person. (I can’t find this movie on his IMDB page or mine, so I’m not sure it even got released. By the way, his voice is truly inexplicable.)