Scrappy Little Nobody Page 16

  If I’d been allowed, even once, to say, “Hey, I’m having kind of a shitty day,” I think I would have been fine. If my dad had been there to give me that look like, “These people are crazy,” I would have been able to handle anything. But admitting that I was lost and overwhelmed felt so ungrateful. Imagine if during final exams, everyone in your life was saying, “Finals are here! This is the best your life is ever going to get!” On top of being exhausted and grumpy, you’d feel guilty about your own, very human emotions. (And probably in crisis because Dear god, what if this IS the best life ever gets?!) This is why we talk about our feelings!

  About a week before Oscar nominations were announced I went to New York to do a talk show. Afterward my brother and I walked around the city in the dark for a while. I knew he wouldn’t judge me, so after a while I said, “Everyone keeps telling me that I’m gonna . . . which I feel like they shouldn’t, you know . . . because . . . I mean, am I going to wake up next week disappointed that I’m not an Oscar nominee? ’Cause I’ve been not an Oscar nominee my whole life and I’ve been okay.” Saying it felt better. Then just for good measure I added, “And you know what, some of these other people look VERY at home being feted and adored and it’s creepy and I think they’re fuckin’ charlatans.” Being a little bit petulant felt better, too.

  The very last piece of press I did for Up in the Air was in Tokyo. The movie was released in Japan several months after the US release and a little while after the Oscars. I got to run around Tokyo for a day, which was INCREDIBLE. The following two days were jam-packed with interviews. During one roundtable, the lone English-speaking journalist said, “I’ve been following the press that you’re doing and it seems like different publications are writing their own version of you. You know, you’re like the overwhelmed newcomer or the independent, serious artist or the mainstream, commercial star. Do you feel pressured to play along with what they want? Do you ever feel like you’re lying?”

  Maybe it was because it was the end of my tour or because he was a fellow American in Japan so I was having a bullshit Lost in Translation moment, or maybe because if I’d suppressed the crazy for one more second I would have ruptured something.

  “Honestly? Some part of everything I’ve said in the last six months has been a lie.”

  He laughed. “Including that?”

  “Yes,” I said, totally serious.

  Fame Changes Everything, a.k.a. I’m in Vogue but I Still Don’t Have a TV

  Fame did change things. For example, when you Googled “Anna Kendrick,” the second wife of colonial New Hampshire governor Benjamin Pierce (also named Anna Kendrick) was no longer the first result. Make it raaaaaaaaain!

  The other new development was that strangers got real friendly and said hello to me and asked for pictures. And that’s the end of the list.

  Fame doesn’t change much else. It doesn’t change how you feel about your high school “nemesis” or how your passive-aggressive uncle treats you (it just shifted from “Maybe if you got a real job you could afford a car that doesn’t break down every week” to “Well, we can’t all be Hollywood actresses who eat gold and poop caviar”). And believe me, I was loath to discover fame wasn’t changing me. I really hoped that I’d be transformed into a benevolent, self-possessed woman. Even when I got nominated for an Oscar, I was still just an anxious, jaded procrastinator. Maybe we all have imposter syndrome and perpetually feel like our real life is right around the corner, and if daily (often unearned) praise from strangers didn’t help me out with that, I guess we’ve all just got to put in the work.

  The incident that really should have made me insufferably smug only confirmed to me that I was a squirrelly little weirdo. A few months after the Oscars, I ran into the prettiest girl from my high school on a trip home. She approached me in the street, and we chatted for barely thirty seconds before the conversation petered out. Then I noticed her bag.

  “Oh hey, I have that purse.”

  “I know,” she said, “I got it because of you.”

  This should have felt so satisfying! Instead my stomach lurched at the batshit-crazy notion that people I used to know could find out what kind of purse I was carrying at any given moment. And that they would then buy it! I want to go back to being the loser in the corner, please!

  But maybe I was reading too much into it. Besides, it’s not like the fact that she bought this bag meant she’d had some moment of clarity where she’d realized the short, frizzy-haired girl from high school wasn’t a total freak after all. She probably just saw a picture on the internet one day and went, “I think that girl is from my hometown. Cute bag.” Or maybe she’s obsessed with me and has a lock of my hair under her pillow. Who can say?

  Don’t Look a Paparazzo in the Eye and Other Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

  Junkets

  A press junket is a full day of interviews to promote one film. The film studio or distribution company will rent out a number of hotel rooms, stick you in one, and bring in upward of seventy journalists to talk to you, one at a time. Every first-time junketer will come out of their room around lunchtime and say something like “They’re all asking the same questions, can’t we just give the answers once and they could all share it?” The mistake there is the assumption that anyone is interested in the answers. This is not Meet the Press; no one is dying to hear about how we related to our characters. You are an actor, and they need hits for their website; let’s all do our part in an orderly fashion and go home.

  At first I found junkets disturbing because I thought the reporters were patronizing me. I’ve been sensitive to people talking down to me my whole life because I look young. When someone spoke to me like I was twelve, I would think, This motherfucker thinks I’m some idiotic little actress and they have to talk to me like a Miss USA contestant. I’d get all huffy about it. At my first Golden Globes I overheard an interview happening next to me and realized, Dear god, they’re talking to Dame Helen Mirren in that same sugary, condescending tone. So now it’s annoying, but I don’t take it personally.

  Some on-camera journalists are so cheesy it’s jarring. I had never noticed it when I heard their voices on TV: “Coming up! We’re gonna chat with the owner of YouTube’s newest furry sensation: Reginald the mongoose!” I get why they use the voice: it feels right on TV, it keeps the audience engaged, and they are doing the right thing to use it! But in person, it’s shocking how unnatural their demeanor is. Every time I talk to one of these journalists—every single time—I picture them having sex. I don’t mean to, it just happens! I can’t stop myself! What is it like?! Do they have that same crazy energy? Are they like, “I mean, wow, Janet, this lovemaking is just sensational!” It’s all I’m thinking about. (Unless I do an interview and someone asks me about this part of the book, in which case, I’m obviously just joking.) (I’m not just joking.)

  And it can’t be easy for the journalists. It’s not their fault the studio scheduled them as interview sixty-one out of seventy. Just like it’s not my fault that by interview sixty-one I’m playing a game with myself where I try to sneak the word “kerfuffle” into every answer as a mental exercise to stave off the creeping madness.

  It’s the day of a million questions, yet somehow it’s the same questions over and over. It’s like babysitting a toddler (but at least you can shake a toddler). Fatigue and repetition mess with you. That’s why they make great “enhanced interrogation” techniques. In fact, when trying to extract confessions from criminal masterminds, I’d recommend putting them in hair extensions, heels, and individual false eyelashes. They’ll tell you EVERYTHING.

  Print

  Print is a rude awakening. Seeing your conversational speech written down forces you to acknowledge how many lexical gaps you fill with phrases like “stuff,” “thingy,” “whatever,” and “urggsssghhh, ya know?”

  In every print interview I do, I resolve to speak as though I were writing. It lasts four minutes, tops. Without fail I feel like a pretentious douche who sp
eaks slower than Alan Rickman, and I revert to fast-paced colloquialisms because I’d rather save face in front of this one reporter than the rest of the world. I end up reading what I said, thinking, Am I THAT bad at communication? I’m going to be a nightmare in my inevitable marriage counseling.

  Print interviews are also a mindfuck because this person is going to write up not only what you say, but how you seem as you say it, and how you seem as you pause, and how you seem as you walk in. You become so self-conscious about every mannerism, so aware of trying not to act self-aware, it can feel like you are trying to disprove a negative. Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test says that if you are accused of being a psychopath, it’s incredibly difficult to prove that you aren’t one. Psychopaths are masters of mimicking healthy human behavior, so how does a real, healthy human prove that they aren’t faking it?

  But here’s the thing: I am faking it. It’s an interview; the very construct is artificial. It’s a manufactured conversation. If anything, I make the mistake of buying into it more than a decent journalist ever would. Sometimes I think the writer and I are becoming friends, because they are such a good listener. (I know, guys, I’m not very bright.)

  So, aren’t we both faking? And I get it, journalists; you aren’t dying to talk to every ego-bloated actor who rolls through town, you do it because it’s part of your job. You ACT thrilled about it because of the social contract, and so do I! But I’m not thrilled. We just met! I’d have to be insane to be “thrilled” to talk about myself with a perfect stranger knowing that they plan to make every word of it available to every other human on the planet.

  There are some journalists I’ve known for a few years now and I always like talking to them. There are some who I meet and get along with because they are good at their job, and the fact that I feel comfortable immediately is solely a testament to them. Sometimes the ones who seem really unhappy to be there write very kind things, and the ones who seem really friendly write very passive-aggressive things. I once developed a crush on a journalist after spending less than twenty minutes with him. It wasn’t a physical thing; he was just good at his job, so I felt like we were having a good time.

  Afterward I admonished myself for thinking I had a “connection” with someone who is quite literally paid to be interested in me. He described me in his piece as though I was a robot capable of turning my “press face” on and off. The interview psychopath! This was one of the rare times I’d been completely caught up in the conversation—embarrassingly so—yet I’d been accused of being a big fat faker. What are you gonna do? I guess I should be grateful he didn’t say, “Fellow journalists: beware. This dummy clearly wanted to bone me.”

  Photo Shoots

  For one of my first big photo shoots, the Vogue team took me to the outskirts of Brooklyn. They were putting me in a feature they do every month that’s like, Hey, you don’t know this girl yet but she’s cool. Trust us. We’re Vogue. They gave off major “cool girl” vibes, and I needed to be friends with them immediately, so when they wanted to photograph me under a bridge that had clearly been roped off, I agreed. Once we were through the layers of plastic sheeting I realized it had been shut down because of a burst pipe. A pipe of what? I guess I’ll find out if and when I develop conditions consistent with radiation poisoning.

  Sometimes I like to run around photo shoots all carefree and wild, as a layer of protection. When I stay still and focus all my attention and energy on being the best little model I can be and still I get looks of disappointment and confusion because I don’t look like Kendall Jenner, it hurts my tiny feelings. (You can go your whole life as a happy, sane person, and then Kendall Jenner comes up and you wonder why you want to crawl into a hole and rot. No one should be compared to Kendall Jenner. It’s cruel and unusual.) So I run around a little. I’m not an unphotographable troll! I’m just a little scamp who’s not focused!

  When I behave, I find myself in the line of fire for innocuous comments that lodge in my brain and explode like tiny, hateful pipe bombs right before I fall asleep. The photographer for one artsy magazine told me to relax my shoulders, twenty-one times. (I’d always thought my shoulders were fine.) A photographer for a men’s mag asked, “Can we lose the bra?” in a tone that felt as rhetorical as “Can you get that report on my desk by Friday?” When he saw me glance at the monitor, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll slim out your legs.” (I’d always thought my legs were fine.)

  I have one piece of advice for photographers. I know you have no reason to listen to advice from me, but please, it’s good for everyone. If you are photographing an actress, or a bride, or a recent graduate who doesn’t have the jaded, knowing sensibility of a model, please just take lots of pictures and say lots of nice things. None of you shoot on film anymore! It costs you nothing to just keep snapping away and shouting praise! It’s like teaching a little kid to hit a baseball. You don’t stand there and stare at him like, This little chump isn’t even using a regulation bat. You throw the ball and say “good job,” and eventually he hits one. That technique won’t help A-Rod improve his batting average, but I’m not A-Rod—I’m the little kid with the Styrofoam bat who can’t see ’cause the helmet’s too big.

  Paparazzi

  Generally speaking (knock on wood) I don’t have many problems with paparazzi. Occasionally I’ll see a photo of myself online that I didn’t know was being taken. It’s unsettling. Usually, I’m just worried I got caught picking my nose. So far, so good, but keep me in your prayers!

  When Up in the Air came out, there was a period where some paparazzi staked out my apartment. Of course, I didn’t know this for a while. The first time I spotted a paparazzo was in the basement of an Ikea in Burbank. I’d gone to get some storage boxes (the all-time greatest stress-relieving activity), and about half an hour into my shopping trip I looked up from my cart and saw a man taking photos of me.

  Okay, I thought, so this is it, this is the first time this happens.

  I put my throw pillows into the cart (yes, I know I was there to get storage boxes; perhaps you don’t understand how Ikea works) and walked over to him. He put his camera down. He looked bewildered but not defensive, like this wasn’t normal, but he didn’t anticipate a Colin Farrell situation.

  I pulled on the sleeves of my hoodie. “Hi. Um . . . how did you . . .” Know I’d be here? Find me? It all sounded so espionage. He knew what I meant.

  “Oh, I was just in here.”

  I knew that didn’t sound right, but I was so out of my element, I just accepted that he happened to be in the basement of Ikea with his long-lens camera at the same time I was.

  He nodded sympathetically. “Oh right, you’re new to the game.”

  Ew.

  I wasn’t offended in a righteous indignation way, like, My life is not some game! It was just a cringey thing to say.

  I suppressed an eye roll and said, “Right, so . . . what happens now? Are you gonna, like, follow me around the store?”

  “If I can get a good shot of you now, I’ll just leave, no problem. I promise I won’t follow you home.”

  Follow me home. I hadn’t even thought of that.

  Letting this guy take my picture so that he would go away seemed like the path of least resistance, so I went back to my cart and stood there.

  “Grab something off the shelf, and you can look up like you just spotted me. Don’t smile or anything, you can look annoyed.”

  Yeah, I’ll try to manage that.

  He took the picture, and, true to his word, he left. He called someone else from his agency to follow me home, so technically, he kept his promise. For the next three weeks or so, someone was outside my apartment. What they didn’t count on was my god-given ability to stay indoors and do nothing. The real beauty of it was I didn’t even have to alter my behavior. I wasn’t holed up Waco-style; I was just doing me. Every now and then a similar thing will happen. I’ll notice a strange car outside, and, as an experiment, I’ll take a trip to Home Depot, and when the car f
ollows me, I think, Looks like a two-week stretch of takeout and Netflix is in order; this poor man doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.

  On Being Nice

  The word “nice” means a couple different things for me now. In one area of my life, I can earn this descriptor very easily, almost too easily. People I meet who want to say hello or take a picture often say, “You’re so nice.” Don’t worry—never once have I deluded myself into thinking I’ve done something to deserve this compliment. It’s often said after a twenty-second interaction at a restaurant or in a hotel lobby. I could have no other redeeming qualities, but I’m “nice” as long as I haven’t crippled a bellboy.

  Don’t get me wrong, I find it incredibly sweet that anyone would say it, and I get that maybe they don’t mean anything more than “Thanks” but it comes out “You’re so nice.” Plus, people have said some weird-ass shit to me over the years, so I will take “You’re so nice” ANY day.

  In a professional sense, “nice” is harder to earn. Harder for me anyway. Because “nice” often means she did what we told her to, no questions asked. I’ve seen nice defined as: In working with XXXXX, I encountered no conflict which might have forced me to acknowledge this person as a fellow human capable of discomfort or creative input. Not all people in my industry feel this way—certainly none of the people I’ve talked about in this book—but many do. This is highlighted by the fact that, in the professional realm, the opposite of nice is not “mean”; the opposite of nice is “difficult.”