Scrappy Little Nobody Page 15
People are drawn to Zac because he has the confidence of The Alpha. In Hawaii, I once watched a pack of local teenagers shadow him around a series of waterfalls like they were baby birds on the Discovery Channel. It was as if they had no choice in the matter. We’d gone to do some cliff diving, and every jump that Zac was willing to try was soon mounted by the rest of the onlookers. Even the muscle-bound tourists and the aloof locals couldn’t help but steal a glance after they’d hit the water to see if Dad had been watching.
Based on his thrill-seeking recreational activities, I suspect some small part of Zac genuinely believes he’s immortal. And honestly . . . he might be. That’s probably what the magnetism is at its core. If there’d been an electrical surge, cutting off contact with the outside world, trapping us on the island forever, Zac Efron would have been the king of Oahu within forty-eight hours.
* * *
I. Debatable.
twilight
For those of you thinking, Wait, she was in Twilight?, I sure was! I was the sassy, awkward friend who broke up the relentless succession of intense stare-downs with musings on boys, tanning, and various school gossip. It was a sweet gig. The rest of the actors had to bring heart and honesty to fantasy situations involving life, death, eternal love, and the preservation of one’s immortal soul. All I had to do was make jokes about how everyone was acting weird all the time.
The best part was that I got all the fun with none of the consequences! I got to show up to this mega-franchise for one to three weeks per movie, bear witness to the madness, and act like an idiot. I was once allowed to go on a rant about the zombie apocalypse genre (which was mostly a shout-out to Edgar Wright) and it actually ended up in the film. And I wasn’t saddled with the creepy super-fame. Most of the cast couldn’t walk out the door without being mobbed, but, weirdly, the vapid friend from school didn’t inspire the same zeal in fans. None of the other filmmakers I worked with during those years had ever seen Twilight, but the series kept me in room and board while I did their movies for no money. It was like the world’s most ridiculous day job.
I have a vivid memory of my first day on the first movie. The cast and crew had been shooting for several weeks already and I was brought to the set to say hello to the director before my first scene the next day. Usually, a cast is happy to see additional characters; it’s nice to get some new blood. Walking into the lunch tent felt like a scene from Band of Brothers. These were Toccoa men and I was the idiot greenhorn showing up like, “Hey, bros! Who’s amped to get in there and rip it up?!”
Kellan Lutz is the sweetest guy, but that day I think he might have strangled me if he’d had the energy. Kristen Stewart—one of the most committed actors I’ve ever worked with—made a valiant effort to be friendly, but I could tell she was putting her back into it. Underneath every word, I heard You don’t know, man, you don’t know what it’s like out there.
Wet and cold is not an environment conducive to making friends. Imagine if the first four weeks of a new job were spent outdoors in the freezing rain. Even when you all got to go inside, you’d just want to sleep and defrost your toes. You can’t create many inside jokes when you’re mostly numb. We were shooting in Oregon and Canada, in some of the most breathtaking locations I’ve ever seen. I would have enjoyed them more if I’d been in galoshes and a winter jacket. As it happened, we were pretending it was late spring, and after my first thirty minutes on set, ice-cold water had seeped through my Converse and saturated my cotton socks. Only fourteen hours to go!
On a small set, I might have had the luxury of a fluffy coat to run to before and after a scene. On Twilight, I was referred to most often as “Number 44.” A coat wasn’t in the cards.
I’d also like to mention the real MVPs of the Twilight movies: the background actors. Sometimes referred to as “extras,” background actors have the most thankless job on set. By the fourth movie, old “Number 44” had at least earned herself itself a coat. But movie four was brutally cold. Especially the wedding scenes. Between shots the background actors stood around those space heaters that do almost nothing, but they didn’t have winter coats. And they would come back the next day!
If you told me I had to be in that weather with no relief, I would have bailed like the little bitch I am. Extreme cold messes with you. The elements don’t discriminate. And no amount of “you’re getting paid to do this” matters when your body’s basic survival requirements are in play. Someone once told me that the reason most Navy SEALs drop out isn’t because of the physical demands or the danger, but because they don’t want to be cold all the time anymore.
So now, when I’m standing in a patch of wet moss in open-toed shoes and a strapless chiffon sundress, watching my breath fog in front of my face (sometimes they try to make you suck on ice so they won’t have to remove the fog in post—don’t fall for it), I think: You are a fucking Navy SEAL, Kendrick! You will get through this scene, you will say this stupid joke, and if you lose a nipple to frostbite in the process, it will be for art!!
We shot that chilly wedding sequence in the forest outside of Squamish, British Columbia. Squamish had a population of about seventeen thousand people and, as far as I could tell, only one hotel capable of housing a film crew. The production company rented out the whole place.
The hotel was set back from the road and surrounded by grassy fields. My room was on the lobby level and faced the back of the grounds, overlooking a little lake and thick woods that started about a football field’s length from my window. It was probably quite pretty in the summer, or the deep winter, but muddy early spring gave it a foreboding quality. The only book I brought with me, I swear on my life, was The Shining.
It was a large hotel, much larger in fact than our crew needed, so the place was eerily empty. Renting out every room seemed like overkill, but by the time we made Breaking Dawn, the Twilight-mania had reached critical mass. Certain precautionary measures had to be taken for the security of the cast and crew. So it was just us. The lonely patients of an expansive asylum.
At least twice a day, someone I didn’t recognize would be in the lobby, getting kicked out as they protested that they really were waiting for a friend. The hotel staff knew no one was staying there but the cast and crew, and none of us had invited friends up, because no one wants to come to Squamish.I
I struck up a conversation with the receptionist and she said they were trying to stop people before they got onto the grounds, but the more innocuous-looking ones slipped through. The paparazzi, on the other hand, knew that legally they had to stay past the end of the long drive. She pointed down the road to five black SUVs, parked and running, just at the entrance to the hotel. Ho. Ly. Shit. I hadn’t even noticed them before!
I stayed in my room. The paps didn’t care about me—they were there for the Kristens and Robs of the world—but it was creepy knowing they were out there. Inside, I had nothing to do. The internet didn’t work and the TV was . . . Canadian TV, so against my better judgment, I read The Shining.
Our wrap party was that weekend. I felt like I hadn’t really earned the right to go to the wrap party, considering I showed up to film my entire role in the last two weeks, but I was happy to get out of the room. The wrap party was at the restaurant in the hotel, thirty feet from my room. Fair enough, and still counts! I had a few drinks, heard some stories about paparazzi caught sneaking around the back field, and after a while someone offered me some weed.
The paranoia came quickly, so I excused myself. Thank god my room was on the same floor; I wouldn’t have made it through an elevator ride without having a full-on claustrophobic breakdown. I got into my room and double-locked the doors. Then it hit me that being on the ground floor, overlooking those ominous woods, was not ideal in my current state, either. I couldn’t decide if having the curtains closed or open was more terrifying. Paranoia is one thing, but when people are actually watching you, it’s hard to talk yourself off a ledge. I paced manically across the room, alternately looking through the
peephole and the curtains on the back window. Why had I smoked weed in this creepy hotel? Why had I smoked weed after reading The Shining all day? Why did I read The Shining in this creepy hotel?!
I woke up the next morning to find all my luggage and a few pieces of furniture piled against the door.
Chat, Die, Repeat
The best part of Breaking Dawn (and maybe the whole series) was when we shot a dream sequence in which I was a dead body. It was so much fun! And inside a room-temperature studio! Kristen’s character has a nightmare in which she imagines she is marrying her beloved—totally normal, nothing weird going on—only to discover that she is standing on a veritable funeral pyre of her closest friends and family! (Man. Those movies got dark.)
Before shooting, everyone in the scene had to line up in their perfectly white dream-sequence outfits and get sprayed down with fake blood. That was someone’s job for the day, to be fake-blood-spray-down guy. Each of us then climbed into a preordained nook in an enormous pile of bloody mannequins. My nook was toward the top of the pile, near the happy couple, giving the impression that I was just underfoot. It was actually pretty comfortable, and I chatted with Kristen and Rob from my prostrate position. Then we’d hear “rolling” and “action” and I’d hold my breath and fix my eyes on one spot. Then I’d go back to chatting with Kristen, occasionally making sure that the actors pressed around and under me weren’t too uncomfortable. The spray-down had apparently not been thorough enough, and after a few takes, a stocky crew member in hiking boots climbed up the pile and poured blood on us from a bucket. It was so awesome.
Covered in blood, but her foundation is flawless. Movies make sense.
* * *
I. Beautiful country up there, I highly recommend a visit. Perhaps with a non–Stephen King novel.
big breaks
Up in the Air, a.k.a. Everything Is Amazing, Everything Is on Fire
I spent the first few weeks shooting Up in the Air certain that I’d be fired at any moment. I’d start to silently spiral before an important scene and George Clooney would have to snap me out of it, usually by throwing something near my head. George has been famous for a long time and knows the effect he has on people. He has a skill for making situations feel relaxed and informal, and keeping you in the moment.
About halfway through the shoot we all went to dinner, and for the ninety seconds of the evening where George wasn’t dutifully chatting with excited restaurant patrons, I made small talk with him about the scenes we had shot so far. He laughed a little and expressed some reluctance to talk about how it was going because he didn’t want to get in my head.
“I shouldn’t say anything. I mean, no one wants me to say anything because, you know, you don’t talk to your guy when he’s pitching a no-hitter.”
Not being a baseball fan I only vaguely understood this comment to mean I was doing well, but since it was exactly the kind of thing that might have gotten in my head, I decided not to look it up.
I left the shoot happy and proud and I couldn’t wait to show the film to my parents and my friends and the rest of the world. I had zero suspicions that it would be an “awards film.” It seemed so light to me, so intimate. Oscar films are epic! They deal with war, and death, and destruction! Of course, plenty of Oscar-winning films are about regular people in everyday settings; I just truly hadn’t thought about it that much. I was wholly unprepared for what came next.
When the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, someone told me things were about to get “loud and fast” for a while. Turns out loud and fast wasn’t how it would feel. It felt like being one of those frogs that doesn’t notice the water is boiling until she’s standing in the middle of a hotel room crying in socks and a stick-on bra. From September 2009 through February 2010, I was on a nonstop promotional tour in support of the film. During those six months, Up in the Air debuted to critical acclaim, I was nominated for an Academy Award, and I finally saw that video of the baby panda sneezing. Not a bad half year. Yet it was perhaps the most confusing period of my life.
The press for Up in the Air was a beast because it was all so serious. I didn’t want to let anyone down, so I tried to take it just as seriously as everyone else. You can’t imagine how soul-crushing it was for my misanthropic ass to be sincere for six months.
I didn’t know what I was doing. But the stakes seemed unbearably high. When everyone around you is acting like this is the most important thing in the world, you start to believe them. Nowadays, if you need me to do a “radio tour,” which is essentially three hours on the phone giving sound bites to various shows around the country, I’ll probably clean my bathroom mid-interview and mention my vagina at least once. If you throw me in a room full of “tastemakers” (whatever that means, I still don’t know), I’ll turn on my personal brand of awkward, sarcastic schmooze and hope for the best, because now I understand that they might love me, they might hate me, but no one’s gonna die.
But back then, each successive task felt like the most critical thing I would ever do. Every event was an anxiety-inducing clusterfuck or an exercise in solitude and tediousness. Now, I know it’s all a farce. I know how to snap myself out of it. This is not hard! This is not forced manual labor or the Cuban Missile Crisis! At the time, the pressure of these unfamiliar situations rattled my already shoddy emotional equilibrium.
There actually was a weird side effect. I was in sound-bite pageant mode so much that I started compulsively saying deeply honest, often inappropriate things to people I’d just met. I had to come up for air. The only people I was interacting with at the time were fancy folks at fancy events, but if you weren’t a journalist, you were probably going to hear about my most recent sex dream. I’m sure these people just wanted a nice evening out and perhaps some sparkling banter from the young actress. What they usually got was an earful on my fear of mortality. People ask me now if I get nervous about being “too” honest on social media. The alternative is much more terrifying. The crazy wants out.
I felt like a fraud! I was being flown around, staying in hotels I could never afford and putting on clothes that someone else picked out. When I went home, I dragged a suitcase full of those items I didn’t own across my tar-stained carpet and dumped it out at the foot of my Ikea bed.
Each time I locked the door to my squalid apartment, I grew more fearful that my filthy secret would spill out: I am—at best—a normal human, and this has all been a big misunderstanding. A lot of people were devoting a lot of energy to maintaining the illusion that I was the ready-made ingenue. It made me feel disingenuous and guilty. I was participating in a con.
Sometimes I found it all too funny for words. I’d be at an afternoon tea in the penthouse suite of the Chateau Marmont wearing some boatneck sundress and think, Two years ago I choreographed a fake music video to “Fergalicious” with two drunk strippers in this very room. This is a joke! Other times it was harder to find the humor.
The trickiest parts were the constant assurances that I was having a great time. I’m not an idiot. I knew what was happening was positive, it just got . . . disorienting. I don’t mind hard work—I love a challenge!—but pretending everything is wonderful when it’s not makes me feel mentally ill.
I was expending all this energy, but I wasn’t creating anything, I wasn’t learning anything, and my job became convincing the world that I was off having the adventure of a lifetime. I did it well enough that my own mother bought it. When I stopped answering her calls she got upset with me. She assumed I thought I was too cool to talk to her now. In reality, I couldn’t pick up the phone because I knew the second I heard her voice I’d finally let go and burst into tears.
Once I talked to my mom (and did indeed break down crying), she completely understood why I hadn’t been in touch. That didn’t stop her from guilting me into taking her to the Oscars. When the show was over she looked shell-shocked. “I can’t believe you’ve been doing that for six months. I’m never doing that again.”
The
highs and lows were so extreme! Just when I’d reach a tipping point—convinced that I’d become nothing more than a commodity, disgusted with myself for taking this artistic experience, which had been so fulfilling, and packaging it up to be sold in pieces to people who couldn’t care less about me—something amazing would happen. I was trudging up the steps to my apartment when I got an email with the subject line: Dreams Do Come True. I walked through my door and onto my tar-stained carpet and opened it. It was Peter Travers’s review for Rolling Stone. It read: Kendrick is a revelation. I stood on that tar stain and wept.
I was a revelation, but I was still broke. At the end of one New York press tour I asked Paramount if I could stay in a less expensive hotel on the next trip and . . . keep the difference. They said no because “that’s not how it works.” I wanted to know why that wasn’t how it worked, but I could tell I’d already embarrassed myself, so I dropped it. Then I stole a roll of toilet paper out of the bathroom and put it in my suitcase because I knew I wouldn’t have the time or energy to buy any when I got home.
When reporters asked how I was handling my “new fame,” I tried to make a joke of it. “Well, I still go to sleep in the same bed as before this happened.” It always sounded like a platitude. Like “I still put my pants on one leg at a time” or “My friends and family keep me grounded” (yawn). But I literally meant, Nothing has changed. In fact, Mr. Journalist, the insecurity I feel about the Grand Canyon–size gap between my real life and people’s expectations is giving me relentless anxiety, so if we could just cool it, that would be great. I stole a roll of toilet paper this week. You can see how “fame” wouldn’t be going to my head.