Unqualified Page 8
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All that said, when I’m at a wedding, I’m a sucker for the sentimentality. I don’t cry very much in my own life, which is something I get from my mom. It’s kind of a problem. I wish I cried more; it would probably be a good release for me, though not crying helps me deal with rejection—a good skill to have in my line of work. The only time I do find myself crying is at weddings, and despite my personal stance on bridal parties, I’ve actually been a bridesmaid seven times. I don’t particularly like doing it, but I’m good at it. Granted, I’m bad with planning or organizing, but I’m great at being attentive to someone else and not really caring about what I look like, almost to a fault. I’m the first to acknowledge that this event is not about me. So while I do, admittedly, have a skeptical view of the wedding process, I recognize that there is something poignant and momentous to proclaiming your love for someone in front of a lot of people, most of whom you love, or maybe at least like.
Chris and I did that, though not at first. In 2009, we traveled to a friend’s wedding in Bali and we stayed on the island for a few days afterward for an extended vacation. We’d been together for two years, he’d already asked me to marry him, and we were staying at this incredible resort where we discovered there was an actual “wedding option” when you booked your room. So we decided to elope and got married that weekend, after all the guests left our friend’s wedding. It was a gorgeous ceremony that was just the two of us. We had already told our parents that we were probably going to elope, and we’d promised them that we would have a party at home, too. It took us three years to make it happen, and we had a big celebration that ended up being the wedding we’d been trying to avoid, but this time it was pretty incredible. We hosted seventy people at a lodge in Washington. My dad officiated the ceremony, and it was exactly the way we wanted it.
There was some minor drama at the party, but I remember giggling my way through it because it reminded me of the beauty of elopement, which was just me and Chris. Nothing major happened at the party—just my cousins getting in a fistfight on the dance floor, and some of Chris’s friends bringing strippers as dates, and then a girlfriend of one of Chris’s friends accusing me of hitting on her boyfriend. On my wedding day.
Your average wedding hoopla. Who wouldn’t want that?
Unqualified Advice: Not Enough Soul
If there’s one thing that the pursuit of romance and the pursuit of an acting career have in common, it’s rejection. It’s inevitable that the way you handle rejection in one of those arenas will inform how you face it in the other. For me, it feels a little like the chicken or the egg—the romantic rejection I’ve experienced has undoubtedly affected how I approach auditions, and the professional rejections I’ve received from casting agents has influenced how I approach relationships. And I’ve been acting for so long, and crushing on boys for so long, that I don’t know which came first.
Let’s start by recounting some of my most memorable professional rejections. There was the time I auditioned to play Joey’s sister on Friends. It was Season 8, and there were maybe fifteen actresses in the waiting room, all recognizable people, and at the very end of my audition, one of the producers laughed audibly—a big HA!—and I thought, Okay, I nailed this. After I was done, some of the actresses were asked to stay, but I wasn’t one of them. To the rest of us, the casting director just said thanks and sent us on our way. Everyone could see who was staying and who was going. As I walked out, filing past the row of women who still had a shot, the casting director poked her head out and said, “Anna? Why don’t you stay?”
“Okay, great,” I said, and headed back to my seat.
Then, thirty seconds later, there was her head again, peeking out the door. “Anna? You know what, it’s fine. You can go.”
I had to walk out—again—past all the other actresses. It was embarrassing, for sure, but there are benefits to being forced to face those moments. Namely, you build up the resilience it takes to pursue a career in Hollywood. Those moments mess with your head and pit actors against each other, but they have made me stronger, too.
Of course, that rejection made it all the sweeter when I was cast to play the birth mother of Chandler and Monica’s babies in the final season. I was in a Best Buy when my agent called and said I got an offer to be in five episodes. Like everyone, I was a huge fan of the show and I was thrilled but terrified walking onto that set. There was a moment that I was alone onstage, and I got to sit on the couch at Central Perk and see the picture frame that surrounded the apartment peephole, and it was magical and surreal. It was Friends (!!) and it was the last season, and it was not lost on me what a big deal that was. (I basically had IBS the whole time.) As we taped, I could feel the cast growing more and more sentimental, and I was in this unusual position of being a complete stranger but also, because my minor role was important to the characters’ stories, a part of their ending journey. During one run-through, Jennifer Aniston suggested a group hug and I was standing nearby so I started to take a step forward, but then I took a step back, I just didn’t know where to go. It was like, Should I? Do I belong here? And then Matthew Perry gestured for me to come in, so I awkwardly joined the embrace, which was incredibly bizarre. But the cast was so welcoming, especially Matthew and Courteney Cox. They were both impressively emotionally invested in the Monica/Chandler/baby story line, which reinforced the idea for me that these were characters they’d fallen in love with over time. I felt the weight of that.
Long before I auditioned for Friends, I faced an even more noteworthy rejection after attempting to land a different TV role. I was auditioning for a network pilot—a beautiful drama that I was really eager to be a part of. I went to four auditions and I knew that I was in the final rounds to play the big and emotionally powerful role of the pregnant neighbor who moves in with the main character and her son. It was pilot season in the early 2000s. I was still very much finding my way in LA. I had done Scary Movie and taped a pilot about a talking dog, but those were the entirety of my Hollywood credits, so landing this kind of meaty role felt like a big deal. I was getting close, and it was down to me and two other girls, but my agent called me the day after the audition to tell me I didn’t get the role. Then he started to laugh. “Your feedback was that you don’t have enough soul,” he said.
Not enough soul? What the fuck do I do with that? How do I get more soul?!
Usually, when you don’t get a part, your agent will deliver the news but protect you from the really harsh criticism. They don’t often reveal the notes, especially when a casting director says you’re lacking talent or you aren’t hot enough. In this case, I think my agent shared the feedback because it was so ridiculous. He didn’t say it as if to imply I needed to actually get more soul, he was saying, “You’re not going to believe this.” He was coming from a place of believing in me, and he acted as if this was the most ridiculous feedback he’d ever heard. But all I could think was, How do I interpret this rejection? How can I develop a soul that people will respond to?
Professional rejection made me incredibly guarded when it comes to relationship rejection. The question of how to value myself if casting directors don’t value me is a really hard one, and it’s one I bet plenty of other actresses struggle with, too. I never wanted to reveal my hand in a romantic relationship until I knew the guy was digging me. I don’t know if that’s a wise move or if it’s totally fucked-up. It definitely has a bit of an “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” edge to it. But when you constantly put yourself out there professionally, it’s hard to do so emotionally, too.
And, similarly, when you are rejected romantically, whether it’s the end of a long relationship or after just a single date, you question yourself there, too. If a person acknowledges they don’t want to get to know you better or spend more time with you, you feel pretty shitty. The ego bruise can be profound, so how do you get over it?
After Chad Burke broke up with me at
the beginning of college, I spent a long time wondering what I did wrong. Why does he want to move on from me? I’d wonder, legitimately baffled. My parents like me, why doesn’t he?
It wasn’t until Dave, the on-again, off-again college boyfriend, came along, that I was able to move on. Accepting defeat has always been an issue for me, and I think that speaks to my determination (if we’re being generous) or my pride (if we’re being honest)—it’s a fine line. In the past, when resisting defeat meant living in a state of disillusionment and trying to make a bad thing work, I did it. With men, I have stayed in relationships long past the time I should have bailed, but I never let the failure of one relationship deter me from the next. With acting, I emotionally invested myself into what might seem like the silliest of projects (see: frozen yogurt commercial; a Red Robin training video) and continued to audition, even when I didn’t have enough soul.
Dave’s arrival didn’t suddenly erase the memory of Chad, or the sting of that rejection, of course. And meeting Ben didn’t erase Dave, and Chris didn’t erase Ben. But I take comfort in the idea that once you accept that certain relationships will always haunt you, they actually make you a better person. Because now you’ve experienced the pain of loss and heartbreak and, at least in my case, humiliation. I like to think that those breakups made me a more compassionate and empathetic person and, in turn, a better actress.
These days, I have a wonderful family and a steady job and I’m lucky not to have to deal with too much rejection on any given day. But I still find myself thinking about it a lot. Mostly when I watch The Bachelor. I love The Bachelor so much, and I can’t help but feel for those contestants. They’re thrown into a competitive frenzy where the fear of rejection probably forces them to feel an emotional attachment to a guy they don’t know and probably don’t even like that much. Can you imagine being on a date where you are legitimately, not just in theory, competing in the moment with other women? That must be so much harder than getting rejected from a one-on-one date. Of course they’re crying! It’s 4:00 A.M. and they’re drunk and hungry and wondering why they didn’t make the cut. I totally get that feeling. It’s not about love for this stranger, but the knowledge that I’m being compared to twenty other attractive women and I guess there’s nothing about me that stands out.
In other words, they probably didn’t have enough soul.
Meet My Parents
For much of my childhood, my mom chopped my hair into a distinctly dude-like bowl cut. I know this wasn’t her intention, but it was a hairstyle that more or less guaranteed I wouldn’t be flooded with compliments, which was ultimately a good thing. At least it nipped in the bud what my mom would say when I was told I looked cute in a dress or got complimented on my appearance in any way. “And she’s also smart!” she’d always quickly add.
My parents were incredibly supportive and proud of me when I was growing up, and they still are. I’m unbelievably lucky. Reporters often ask me how my parents reacted when I told them I wanted to pursue acting, I guess because most actors’ families are understandingly skeptical of the entertainment industry. But my parents were always enthusiastic—if not a little delusional—about my show business dreams, and I’m so grateful for that. They wanted me to follow my passion even at a young age, but they also worked hard to ensure I kept a good head on my shoulders despite whatever success came my way.
When I was eleven, I played Scout in a Seattle theater performance of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a long run—four months, six shows a week—which was a lot for a little kid, and it was my first really big part. That’s when acting became my identity and school sort of became a secondary focus. In advance of the opening, I was asked to appear on a morning radio show with the other cast members. So at 4:00 A.M., my parents drove me downtown and listened in on the interview, in which I talked about my starring role. I was in sixth grade, and I was stupid, and I put on a weird pretentious act for my first big radio appearance. I spoke as if of course I was the lead, and I tried to come off as self-aware and sophisticated while I talked about “the industry” and “my passion” in the way I thought an actor was supposed to. When the interview was over, my parents were so ashamed. They wouldn’t talk to me for a full fifteen minutes—they were embarrassed, and didn’t quite know what to say to me as a result, but it was harsh and I felt horrible. It was my first taste of press, so their disapproval stung especially hard. But they were right. I was being an eleven-year-old asshole.
I do think they loved that Scout performance, though. My parents still have this idea that I am destined for drama. After Scary Movie 2 and The Hot Chick came out, my mom constantly commented that I was getting overlooked. “Oh, Anna, they just don’t know what you can do,” she’d say. “I want you to be Joan of Arc or Amelia Earhart.” I could feel her frustration that Hollywood didn’t understand her daughter. I know she thinks I could win Oscar after Oscar after Oscar if I was just given the chance, which is so incredibly loyal. Can you ask for anything more than that in a parent? I love that my mother will always have that hang-up. “You are so untapped, Anna,” she says.
It’s not like I’ve never done a serious film. I had small parts in Lost in Translation and Brokeback Mountain, both Oscar nominees for Best Picture, though my role in each was to add some levity to otherwise fairly somber movies. A producer of Lost in Translation and a dear family friend of the Coppolas had seen Scary Movie, so one day in May 2002, I got a call from my agent about an audition. It was a very hush-hush project—they didn’t send me the script, and my agent didn’t even know what he was sending me in for. But he told me they wanted me to audition that day, and I was still in the stage of my career where you drop everything if you get an audition, so I went to this obscure office building up on Mulholland. There weren’t any other girls there. Normally if you go to an audition there are a handful of actresses waiting, but this was just me. So I walked into the office and it was me and Sofia Coppola. She was incredibly subdued, sitting with her video camera, and I started the scene. I hadn’t been given any notes for the role, but from what I could gather, the character, Kelly, was an obnoxious actress, and I felt like I knew her. It was one of those moments where a role is so well written that I knew exactly what to do. So I got to the part where I start singing the karaoke song “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon, and Sofia was laughing in her very subdued way, and I thought it was going well, and then we both heard the door handle start to jiggle. Sofia had locked it when we started, so we both stopped and stared at the handle, and finally she unlocked it and in walked Warren Beatty. It was just the three of us, and I immediately sat down and thought, I guess this audition is over, because here’s Warren Beatty. They hugged, and Warren asked Sofia how her parents were doing.
“Good, they’re in Thailand,” Sofia said. “How’s Annette?”
“Good, she and the boys are fishing up in Canada,” Warren said. Then Sofia gestured to me and said, “This is Anna, she was in . . . what were you in again?” So I told her about Scary Movie and Warren turned and sort of registered me for the first time and said, “Oh yeah, you were pretty fucking funny.”
The whole thing was like an out-of-body experience. I had no idea what to do. Should I immediately excuse myself? Should I talk to Warren Beatty? I felt like I was privy to all these Hollywood secrets I shouldn’t have been. The Coppolas are in Thailand! Annette Bening’s fishing in Canada!
When it was over, I walked back to my car feeling confident. But that was it. A couple of months went by, I didn’t hear anything, and I learned that a few of my friends had auditioned for the same role. I heard there was an offer out to a big-name actress (I don’t know who) and she refused it, so in late September I was offered the role. It was funny, because I’d always felt like it was mine, even when I heard they were waiting on somebody else.
I showed up in Tokyo for the last week of shooting, so everyone else had already been working together for a month. I had a scene with Sca
rlett Johansson and Giovanni Ribisi and their performances were so tonally muted, and then I came in with my loud splashy character—some of the crew actually had to adjust their mics—and I thought, I’m really messing this up. I don’t get the tone of this film at all. Everything is wrong about what I’m doing, but I don’t know any other way. It’s tricky to come into a movie at the end of filming. But I got over the fear and ended up having an incredible time playing Kelly, and Sofia let me do all kinds of ridiculous improv. In the best of ways, it felt like a very unstructured environment, which, oddly enough, was the complete opposite of the weird rigidity of making a spoof movie, where every prop has to be in a specific place. Lost in Translation felt very fluid. You could walk in and out of the frame as you wanted and say what you wanted and Sofia would watch us and give notes in her quiet voice. It was very different from anything I’d experienced.
That role and Brokeback not withstanding, I’m usually tapped only for comedy. So after I took the movie Smiley Face, I sat my mother down to break the news. “Mom, I’m doing this movie and I’m so excited about it,” I told her, knowing that I was wading into dangerous territory. “It’s a weird indie about a girl who’s stoned the whole movie and just wants weed.”
“Oh, Annie,” she said. (My mom calls me Annie, rhymes with Connie.) “You can’t do that movie. You are a role model!”
She was so disappointed, but I had to explain to her—I wasn’t a role model. I was known for a movie in which I got sprayed to the ceiling with cum. Today, it’s normal for movies to be offensive, or at least to toe that line, but at the time it came out, Scary Movie was known for its raunch. It was one of the most offensive movies around, and it helped launch a genre of gross, distinctly un-role-modelish films.