Scrappy Little Nobody Page 14

  You don’t normally have your nails done on a film set. It’s fine by me; I’m heavy-handed and I don’t like sitting still, but I was recently talked into having biweekly manicures for a film. People will tell you that “gel manicures” won’t ruin your nails as long as you change them out every two weeks, but if you ask me they are filthy liars. Maybe by the time this book comes out the gel manicure will be a thing of the past, like electrolysis or those Anna Nicole Smith diet pills I definitely never took. Just in case, please let me share my painful experience. I wore gel nails for three months on this movie, and when they finally came off, my boyfriend wouldn’t let me touch him. My nails were so thin that they sliced and diced anything I came near. I was a human paper-cut factory.

  I gain weight on every movie. Never ever have I left a set without putting on at least five pounds. You’re not sleeping enough, you give up on exercise, and there is food EVERYWHERE. But the curse of the lady actor is to reach deep down, past the gurgling stomach acid, and find some willpower. When I’m trying to keep my ass in check, you’d think that fellow ladies would help me stay motivated. Instead, we end up torturing each other and ourselves. A group of hungry actresses (a.k.a. actresses) will talk about food with the kind of fervor and specificity normally found in Star Trek fan fiction. Some deep, hard-core stoner shit. Discussing food with girls on diets can feel eerily like porn dialogue.

  “God, I would kill for a burger. Like a big, bloody cheeseburger on a brioche bun and some caramelized onions.”

  “Oooh, brioche? You’re so bad. What about some bacon?”

  “Fuck yeah, bacon.”

  “And some avocado . . . and grilled pineapple rings.”

  “Grilled pineapple? You pervert.”

  One Foot Out the Door

  When you’re a struggling actor, every job you get is a thrill and a relief. But unlike most professions, every job you get is temporary. The excitement is mired in the terror of knowing you’ll be unemployed again in a matter of months. So even mid-movie you have to send out your résumé. For actors, that comes in the form of the self-tape. You can’t make it to a casting office when you’re shooting in the suburbs of Baltimore, so you and your castmates roll up your sleeves and put together a video in a trailer or a hotel room.

  Rocket Science, my second film, was basically a sausage fest. Luckily, the young men in the cast were gentlemen of the highest order and fine actors to boot. On a day off, we all went to one cast member’s hotel room to help him make a tape for a mafia movie. (We were young enough that this was an exciting project for all of us, not an obligation.) Aaron read lines offscreen, Nick operated the camera, Matt knew how to upload and send video. I didn’t have a job to do, but I was happy to be there for moral support. True to any self-respecting mafia movie, there was a tremendous amount of shouting in the scene. We were all very impressed with the performance but wondered if the surrounding rooms were annoyed with the volume. Several takes in, there was a knock at the door. A take was still in progress, so I jumped up to go silence the curious party. I’m helping!

  I gingerly whipped around the door without letting it completely shut behind me, like I’d seen crew members do when we were shooting. Outside was a stern-looking woman from hotel management who softened when she saw me. I held a finger to my lips, apologetic and pleading.

  A man’s angry voice was still emanating from inside, and now a teenage girl was desperately trying to get rid of the woman at the door. To someone who had no idea why hotel guests would be screaming for, you know . . . make-believe reasons, this development looked suspicious, to say the least. The hotel manager looked at me like, Sister, if you’re in trouble, I’ve got your back. It was so courageous and supportive I was tempted to let her take care of me. I quickly remembered that this was real life and I figured ruining one take was worth it in this case. I threw the door open so she could see the collection of gangly young men filming their friend. Even in the throes of his heated performance, our resident artiste retreated from irate to meek instantaneously upon seeing the stranger at the door. We smiled nervously at the hotel manager. She looked us up and down.

  “It sounds like you’re killing each other in here. If you’re gonna make your little movie in the rooms you have to be less dramatic.”

  Special Skills

  Even low-budget films can be riddled with communication problems, and they only get worse and more frequent the larger the scale. As a result I have learned a number of specialized skills for absolutely no reason.

  One film sent me to lessons on a horse farm for weeks. I wasn’t learning to ride a horse, though, I was learning to sit behind someone riding a horse and not fall off. There wasn’t actually a lot of skill involved. All you had to do was learn to spend an extended period of time clutching at someone’s torso for dear life while galloping full speed, sans saddle or stirrups, on the aft of a sentient being (who weighed a literal half-ton and most days had a comically large erection).

  I panicked during my first lesson because something was digging into my thigh and none of the instructors seemed that bothered about it. Saddles aren’t made to have a passenger behind them, so when I mentioned my discomfort, there was a general attitude of “Yeah, that’ll happen.” When I pointed out the culprit, a metal ring about the circumference of a golf ball attached to the back of the saddle, my teacher frowned at it, gave it a tug, and said she’d try to take it off for my next lesson. Before you ask (believe it or not), I’m not the kind of gal who knows what purpose a metal ring might serve on the back of an English saddle, so no, I don’t know what it was.

  “It’s just really digging into my leg, man. I’m not sure I can keep going.”

  “Well, I’m supposed to take you on at least five more runs. Do you want to take a five-minute break first? Maybe drink some water?” By the time I got home, I had a bruise on my thigh the size and color of a rotting mango.

  At one point a renowned rider was brought in to work with me. A muscle-bound Spaniard who spoke almost no English, his connection with these horses seemed to transcend the laws of nature. On our first ride together we galloped past the stables through the rolling, sunlit hills. We took in the majesty of the countryside, and he turned back to me.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “Yes, beautiful,” I echoed.

  He cast his dark eyes away from me and gave the horse a kick. I gripped his chest and buried my face in his neck as we picked up speed, all the while thinking, When is this asshole gonna let me go home so I can ICE MY VAGINA?!

  The day of my big horse scene, as I perfected my mount and dismount, the director said, “You know what, I’m never going to use that. I’m going to end the scene before you get on the horse.”

  So I hadn’t learned to ride a horse, and as it turned out, there was no reason to spend all that time training my inner thighs to endure blunt force. But it wasn’t a total waste. I got to be outside in pretty weather, and I’ve got a head start if I ever get into S&M.

  I once played a chef, and although I did not get cooking lessons per se, I was sent to a knife skills course so that I’d look like I’d taken cooking lessons. In fact, I was flown from LA to Atlanta, more than once, on days that I didn’t shoot anything, solely for more lessons. I chopped piles of herbs, diced mountains of onions, cored bushels of apples. I got confident but not especially good. This became clear when I sliced off a fingernail halfway through a pile of cilantro. Given the choice, I’d take a metal ring to the thigh any day.

  When we set up the shot for my vegetable massacre, the director took a look at the monitor and called out, “Hey, Anna, don’t worry about the chopping. We can’t see your hands.”

  I’ve never driven a stick shift. Sidenote: I don’t know why people act so superior about this. I don’t churn my own butter, either; let’s not act like I’m a dick for doing the easier thing. I was, however, asked if I would learn for the movie The Voices. The film was being shot in Germany, and the car that the producer chose, like most Eur
opean cars, was manual. I expressed some hesitation but said that of course, if that’s what needed to happen, I’d learn. For three days, before and after work, I drove a beat-up stick shift around a former Nazi airbase with a patient stuntwoman. Why a stuntwoman? I have no idea. The scene demanded that I start the car, then drive precisely ten feet, just out of frame. Not exactly “The Driver” from The Driver.

  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.

  Cake Attack

  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.

  It Makes You Feel Like What?

  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.

  Exploding Pig

  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.