“I don’t care,” I said, and carried on with the scene.
Good things have happened to me, so, so many, including kissing one-quarter of John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
Then one year during the Shakespeare Festival I finally got to play a part I’d wanted since I was ten. I’d wanted to take the role of Maria inTwelfth Nightbecause she’s dirty and naughty. It was one of my happiest moments onstage.
I had always wanted to be taken seriously, even in comedic roles—see my diary from January 1988:
I’ll show these fuckers that I ain’t no comedy bullshit actress.
The role I had been looking for my whole life was that of Jen Harding inDead to Me.It was the greatest job I ever had because it was an incredible amalgamation of comedy and drama. You can’t have comedy without drama, and you can’t have drama without comedy—otherwise it’s self-indulgent. But Jen was all of the above and more and in between. Sadly, it would be my last job.
Maybe…
Dead to Meis the best work I’ve ever done in my entire life—there, I said it. And you know I don’t feel comfortable talking about my achievements (“You’re doing it”). But the truth is, I’d been waiting for this kind of character, this moment, all my life.
Dead to Meis about two friends, Jen and Judy, who initially meet in a grief group and whose lives become inexorably intertwined. It features a brilliant script, and an amazing cast. It was an entirely female-run show, made up of whip-smart women who were kind and loving and supportive. Even before my diagnosis, the set was a place of succor. And with Linda Cardellini, I wasn’t just playing opposite an astonishing actor: I was playing opposite someone I loved dearly.
Ill or not, I’m never going to have an actress in front of me like Linda ever again. She’s unbelievable. She made it easy for me to inhabit the role of Jen Harding. My secret was that I didn’t prep anything. I didn’t want to have a plan. I simply let it happen, like I learned to do on theAnchormanset. I wanted to sit across from Linda and react to whatever she was throwing at me. In turn, I quippedback at her until we were playing verbal ping-pong. I think that’s why the show felt so fresh. I was allowing the character to live through me, so much so that I wouldn’t even memorize the lines until I got into the makeup chair each morning. I’m lucky that I have a knack for it, which comes from years of vaudeville, as I like to call sitcom work. On sitcoms, the writers sometimes rewrite right in front of the audience, and you learn everything on the spot.
With Linda, I’m not just talking about her talent, which is off the charts. I’m really talking about the human being behind all of it, and the support that we created for each other.
That support and love began immediately. She and I met for lunch one day, and the next thing we knew, we were shooting—no rehearsals. The words came out of our mouths so organically and beautifully, like it was meant to be.
But again, it was the off-camera things that really cemented our friendship. At one point she had some stuff going on in her life—as we all do—and I told her to go home and work it out. That’s usually never an option, but on this set it was.
Do I need to tell you again that it was run by women?
When I first got sick, I missed two months. It didn’t matter. There was an intrinsic understanding that humanity comes above work, which is rare, especially given how much money is involved.
Sets on TV shows can be brutal places.
When I madeSamantha Who?,the days were eighteen hours long because of the camera setup: master, medium over the shoulder, medium close-up, close-up. This was the textbook, old-school way to shoot TV, which was how it went basically untilModern Family,when everything changed to handheld cameras. With handheld, the industry realized you could fit a twelve- or sixteen- or even eighteen-hourday of shooting with four different cameras into five hours.The OfficeandParks and Recfollowed suit.
On the set ofSamantha Who?,before the turn to handheld, I’d get so upset when we would have crew members driving home on the freeway at three and four o’clock in the morning on a Friday night. I didn’t have the balls to say anything about it until I madeDead to Me.But one night I found myself announcing, “Guess what we’re doing? We’re stopping work right now. Thank you,” and I did an about-face and walked off the set. I was not going to risk my colleagues getting into a car accident late at night anymore.
After I got sick, we could work only twelve-hour days anyway. I think they were all secretly happy about it—not the sickness, of course, but the time. For those of us used to endless days and nights, twelve hours was a picnic. No forced calls, when you have less than the mandatory twelve-hour turnaround, which includes drive time, from the time you wrap to the time you are due back at set. No late nights. My goal in life was to be so famous and successful that I could get “portal to portal.” Johnny Depp has portal to portal, which means his wrap time starts from the moment he gets home, not the moment he leaves. A rare perk.
Right before I got diagnosed, I was at the Golden Globes for my nomination for the second season ofDead to Me. I happened to be coming out of a bathroom when I noticed Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren walking hand in hand down the corridor. Helen stopped me, grabbed my hand, and looked me dead in the eyes.
“You are one of the best actresses I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Helen fucking Mirren.
I didn’t get the Golden Globe, but I took home Helen Mirren’s praise that night. I’d like to have her words tattooed on my ass one day. (There’s room.)
A few weeks later, just after we’d begun shooting the third season ofDead to Me,my doctor asked to talk to me on Zoom. I’d been having some numbness in my peripherals for a while, and I’d taken a raft of tests to try to get to the bottom of it. That day, I’d been asked by the director to stay at work to shoot one more scene, but I’d demurred—something I seldom ever did. I knew this call was going to be important. Maybe I already sensed how important, so rare was it for me to push back when someone wanted me to keep working.
It was a Monday at 7 p.m. My neurologist’s face appeared as we connected. He looked forlorn.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Something clicked off in my head. All emotions short-circuited. I went numb, completely numb.
“I want to show you pictures of your brain,” he continued.
To this day, his words reverberate in my head and my heart, my soul, my stomach, my solar plexus—everywhere.
“Here are the lesions,” he said. “There are about thirty.”
