In the photo, one side of my head is shaved, and despite the wide smile, this was at around the time I was done with work; for a short while, at least, I wanted the kind of life any thirteen-year-old had. I wanted to make bad decisions; I wanted to smoke cigarettes. I just wanted to listen to the Cure. (Duran Duran weresolast year.)
So I quit.
My mom said, “Okay, I’ll call your agent.”
Proud of my newfound status as “just a kid,” I went upstairs to my room. But quickly, the panic set in. Working was my stability, and it was quickly becoming my whole world. Just twenty minutes later, I ran back downstairs.
“Don’t call my agent,” I said. “I’m good.”
I’m sure my mom had been downstairs just waiting me out—she knew me. And that was that. I worked from then on, until the day afterDead to Mewrapped.
At age eleven, I’d gotten a dancing job in a Nestea commercial, directed by a big-time British movie director. A young David Arquette was an extra in the same ad. I was dressed in a sweatshirt in the cut-off,Flashdance,Jennifer Beals kind of way. (?Jennifer had invented this look when she had wanted to take off her sweatshirt but didn’t want to mess up her hair, instead messing up a generation’s worth of perfectly good sweatshirts.)
During the filming of the ad, I was asked to suck on a straw thrust into the iced tea. As we were dancing, the director said to me, “Suck the straw more sexily.”
I froze. The director was trying to get me to be more into what I was doing, to more obviously enjoy sipping on the drink, but to a child who had been molested, I heard something else. I had come from somewhere else; I felt uncomfortable around men. I’m not even sure he meant anything by it, but what was an eleven-year-old supposed to do about it?
My work ethic taught me to push through, always. You can’t be a blubbering mess when you go to work. Ever since I was a kid, I knew you couldn’t bring your shit to set. And because I went to work so early—usually because we didn’t have a babysitter, so Mom would take me to whatever set she was on—that professionalism was ingrained from the very start; it’s just how it was.
And never once have I ever wished Ihadn’tbeen a performer. Because if I hadn’t?
I’d have been dead. I’ve watched my friends struggle their whole lives because of how we were raised in that Canyon, but I always had work, always had some place to go. I had an appointment to be somewhere, to prepare for something and to show up and do something. Other people were relying on me, and because I’m an abider of rules, I turned up. I worked, and I sucked it up, and I went back the next day.
Otherwise, coming from where I came from? Not just addicted. Dead for sure.
Work was discipline.
The day after my thirteenth birthday, alongside other thirteen-year-old accounts of my special day and my friends and a Christmas parade we’d all attended, I’d written in my diary,“PS. I still love Scott.”
I was about to head to my grandmother’s house in South Bend for a week. That Christmas we had made our usual trek to South Bend to see her. For some reason, my then boyfriend, Scott, flew in, too.
My previously adoring tone quickly changed, though. At some point during the visit, according to my diary, “That’s when I had to give my first blow job.” It’s a tragic indictment that I felt I “had” to do that, and yes, no great surprise, it was terrible. It happened on my grandmother’s couch, and frankly, that act was the grossest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. As soon as it was over, I felt myself starting to throw up, so I ran to the kitchen and I drank an entire diet soda, just to get the taste out of my mouth. Sex was no surprise to me, but still,it grossed me out. I’d been molested and abused as a young child, and I’d already seen plenty of porn. By the time I was ten, I had already watchedDeep Throat,and my friends and I had also watchedLetter to Susan,a lesbian porn movie just left lying around on VHS at a friend’s house. Watching it, I’d feel tingly, and weird, a mixture of unease and unhappiness and something unknown.
It all got to me, seeped under my skin, and it came out in my diary as anger toward Scott:“Know what? Scott went with me to Grandma’s. I hate him. He is the biggest asshole in the whole world. I’m gonna break up with him tonight.”
I never said no, but I can tell from those pages that I wasn’t ready, that I’d been pushed into a world I was too young for. Still, I soldiered on, my adult work ethic and responsibilities in tow.
At home in the Canyon, I was part of a misfit group of fatherless kids. We had been smoking since we were nine or ten years old, rolling up our school papers and putting oregano in them. We had seen our parents do it, whether with joints or cigarettes. It was just what we knew. We were scrappy, rough around the edges, a bit wild, but never really bad.
My shaved head made casting directors think I was tough, though, and after small roles in various movies and TV shows, I landed a plum character on a show calledHeart of the City—a cop drama about an L.A. detective raising two kids on his own. I played Robin Kennedy, and even though the show was canceled after one season—we were up againstThe Golden Girlson a Saturday night, which was death to ratings—I still managed to win a Young ArtistAward for Exceptional Performance by a Young Actress in a New Television Comedy or Drama Series.
While I was working onHeart of the City,something happened that grew to have an outsize effect on my life. What others might have taken as just another innocuous comment became for me a Mount Rushmore–size moment of shame. What that friend said, and what I felt it exposed, ended up setting a precedent for my life that has caused me untold pain.
I don’t hold that friend responsible—after all, who knows which words we say or things we do might dramatically affect those around us? She could not have known that three words would set me on a course that would lead directly to me being unable to bask in the successes I’ve been lucky enough to have had in my career. So much so that it is hard for me to even talk about my work in this book; the thought that anything I say might be construed as bragging fills me with a quiet terror. Deep down I’m proud of what I’ve done, of pushing past the deprivations of my life and having a successful career, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say that out loud.
And here’s why: I had made it clear to one of my dearest friends that I never wanted to brag about what was happening to me professionally. The phrase I used was, “Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing.” And I meant it—I didn’t want to be one of those people who thought that my job as an actor somehow signified that I was special. We actors can get so self-regarding, as though the act of inhabiting a character that is different from ourselves is some kind of alchemy, when in fact it’s a trade, as mystical and mysterious as knowing how to cut hair or unclog a sink.
Acting for me had always been a job of survival; acting was how my family ate. Just because there were cameras and audiences didn’tmean that what I did was necessarily hallowed or rarefied. I knew the techniques required to be funny, for example—that didn’t mean I had the keys to cosmic comedy. I just understood where the beats of a line needed to go, the correct timing, the most effective way to hit the right inflection. But it wasn’t like I was splitting the atom or saving lives in an emergency room.
So even by my early teens, I meant it when I said, “Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing.” But I was about to be caught up short by that plea. One day my friend and I were on Pico when I realized with a start that we were passing by the 20th Century Fox lot where I was filmingHeart of the City.We’d been chatting and I hadn’t been paying attention, and I remember vividly that the Doors were playing on the car stereo, so my mind was on the music. But echoing the entry on the title page of my journal—business address: “20th Cen Fox”—I innocently said, “Oh my god, that’s so weird. That’s where I live!”
There was a beat of silence.
“You’re doing it,” my friend said.
My blood stopped. And that was it.Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing.I had gotten weird; I had broken a sacred inner rule to never come off as someone who thought that acting was anything special.
Since that day, I have never spoken again about my accomplishments. Not a single day. I don’t boast because that girl whispered in my ear, and still whispers every day, “You’re doing it.”
