My Booky Wook 2 (15 page)
When you ask for room service, they don’t sound like they’re going to get it for you, it feels like a gamble; they may, they may not. Outside the window there are people carousing, you can hear the glamour clinking about in stilettos and laughing too loud at crap gags in the courtyard as you try to crawl through jet-lagged sleep on your hands and knees and you feel like there’s a party down there and I should be at it but I’m too scared to go. And I can’t drink. The first night I was up all night not drinking, peeping through the curtains at the tipsy glamour flirting with a pretend producer.
The next day Adam Venit and Sean Elliott inundated us with meetings. Nik was wearing a suit for the first time, he looked like he’d found it. Nik’s metamorphosis over the time period from me getting Sarah Marshall (which is what I think the film should’ve been called) to now is so stark that if David Bowie had done it, people would’ve said, “Fucking hell, David, don’t you think you’re going to alienate your fans with such a dramatic transition?” He’s lost two stone, dresses impeccably and has sharpened right up.
We had meetings at Universal and Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox – my favourite because every time I went into it, I sang the Twentieth Century Fox theme tune; it wasn’t too many times because people wouldn’t have me, they were getting annoyed.
We were having meetings with producers, which seemed to go fantastically; only when I heard the same producer who had dubbed me the “next Richard Pryor” telling a valet that he was the “Mozart of parking” did I realise they tell everyone that they’re fantastic. When people say the Americans are full of bluster, I think “Hogwash!” because I enjoy people being nice to me. I don’t think that when you leave the room, they go, “What a motherfucker, man!” Their frequency of communication, their social setting is more upbeat.
America in a way is the most religious country on Earth. It’s not secular. They are culturally devoted to consumerism, it’s a fundamentalist consumer society – “We absolutely believe that we should take your money, and we’ll do it smilingly because it’s polite, because you’ve got to hand it over anyway, if you want a doughnut.”
A lot of the meetings were fruitless and pointless. Everyone was very pleased to meet us, but I quickly realised you had to have something tangible to offer, otherwise you’re just going there to compare smiles with people who have better dentists than you. On the way to meetings, I’d make up ideas for films, because if they don’t have a part for a sort of rookery-haired English libertarian, then you’re fucked.
Fortunately, one of the people I met, Judd Apatow, did have a part for a rookery-haired English libertarian. Actually it was meant to be for a floppy-haired bespectacled English librarian, but he changed it on the basis of my audition for the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This was a real stroke of luck.
We’d met Judd already, but Judd hadn’t really made the connection that I’d be good for the part of Aldous Snow, it was an assistant at the agency Endeavor who said, “I suppose while he’s here he could go read for the part of that English author in that new Judd project.”
Then someone got us the script, which we didn’t bother to read in the car on the way over as we were tired and kept thinking we were on holiday. (When we were early for a meeting at Universal Studios we went on the tour where Jaws jumps up and scares you. It made us late but it was also fun, I’d recommend it.) Me and Nik, all bleary eyed and baffled, made our way to some backstreet meet. I can’t imagine those LA streets ever seeming familiar, like Hackney Road or Haverstock Hill or Brick Lane; just endlessly repeated grids, like those automobile play-mat carpets with roads on for little boys to push toy cars. As if the town planning was done by Fisher-Price.
We went into the designated building, where there was someone from Desperate Housewives auditioning in this anonymous casting director’s office. It looked like the kind of place that could disappear at a moment’s notice – you could turn up on Wednesday to audition for a big film, then on Thursday if you popped back to retrieve a favourite pen you’d discover that the whole operation had packed up and cleared off. “But I swear I was at an audition here, I swear I was.” It was like where Joe Pesci got whacked in Goodfellas. Rodney Rothman, who I now know was the youngest person to be head writer on Letterman, co-wrote on loads of Judd’s productions, he’s a brilliant troubleshooter, he saw me and Nik in the corridor and later revealed that he overheard me asking Nik why we were there, like a toddler at a dentist. He registered Nik’s patient reply: “It’s that Judd Apatow thing, mate,” and I went, “Oh alright then, mate, well I’ll just go to the toilet.”
Rodney went back into the room and announced, “This next one should be good” – sarcastically, because we sounded like a couple of bewildered idiots in a corridor. Which we were.
Obviously I was in my full regalia, great big hair helmet, chains and crosses and quicksand jeans. On the DVD extras of Sarah Marshall, Nick Stoller the film’s director, talking about his first impressions of the cast, said of me, “He had leather pants on and several belts.” I was belted all up.
If I go to a meeting in England about telly or stand-up, people are grateful that I’ve come. “Have a biscuit,” they say. “How’s yer mum?” In LA I was on a conveyor belt of actors.
Jason Segel, the star and the writer of the film, as well as the world’s most bonhomous and garrulous chap, like the Great Gatsby or some matinée idol philanthropist, and the director Nicholas Stoller were there, as was Shawna Roberts, who’s Judd’s trusted right-hand man, in spite of her gender, and an actress in just to read the lines for Sarah Marshall, my character’s girlfriend.
They made me do it once “on script”, and they laughed a bit, and then they asked if I was comfortable with improvising. The scenario they gave me was that my girlfriend doesn’t want to go horse-riding, I want her to go horse-riding, and I would do whatever I could to get her to go horse-riding. That’s something I’d been trained for at drama school, they teach you to use different ways of achieving an objective.
I did improvised games at Grays School and then at Italia Conti, at Drama Centre, and with my friends at the London Bridge flat when I first left home. Then Article 19, Soapbox Cabaret, stand-up comedy with Karl Theobald, stand-up comedy on my own. Malcolm Gladwell says that success requires ten thousand hours of practice, whether it’s been Bill Gates or the Beatles; he says mastery is not some sort of shamanic gift or, if it is, it’s also heavily supplemented by years and years of practice and work.
So if we’re in a hotel room, I’ll play the view of the hotel room, I’ll play the decoration of the hotel room – the sheets on the bed I’ll mention. The background, reference the relationship with the girl, I’ll give you something on the context of the character. At the time I arrived in that room, I was probably thirty years old, so I’d been improvising for half of my life, since I was fifteen. In a way, it was an opportunity that I’d been preparing for my whole life. All I needed to be able to do was not be so nervous and not be a dick and use what I’ve learned over all of those years. And thank God I was able to, because I was already way behind schedule on getting into movies.
Later that day they phoned up and said they thought I was perfect for the part, that they’d really like me to play the part of Aldous Snow, but that they’d need me to screen test with the girl that they were planning to cast as the eponymous Sarah Marshall, the beautiful Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars – a Buffy-style detective show. They wanted me to go to where that show was filmed, in San Diego, to read with her.
Instead of the advisable response, which would have been extreme gratitude and tremendous relief, I took a peculiar path, which I can only attribute to mental illness. The joyful news that I’d achieved my lifelong dream to appear in a Hollywood film was delivered by Adam Venit’s clean-cut, adorably gaff-prone college boy “Robin” Sean Elliott. Sean is the impeccably spruced, Janet Jackson-headset wearing, shimmering fulfilment of what you’d expect to find on the other end of a phone call from a talent agency in LA. I could tell from the tone in his voice that my reaction to this change in fortune was meant to be one of celebration, but I’d detected a loophole. Although Judd, Nick Stoller, Jason and everyone who had seen the audition had approved me and were keen for me to be in the film, the tape had yet to be watched by executives at Universal.
“Hmmm,” I said from the shoddy, hunched bath of my hotel that I was pretending to luxuriously bathe in but was actually a painful, porcelain prison, “if Universal haven’t seen it, how can I have the part?”
Sean, unfamiliar with nutcases, moved forward with his optimism-based itinerary. “Universal will approve it, they just haven’t seen it.”
I blew some suds off my insane hand with my crazy mouth. They didn’t go far, the wall was only eighteen inches away. “Well someone should show them the tape because until I get a contract, I’m not getting out of this wonderful bath,” I announced. When I look back at this senseless gamble that I was prepared to take with my cherished future dreams, it takes my breath away. I’m sure you must think as you read this, “What a pillock!” – and you’re right. I can only put it down to some residual self-destructive streak left over from my junky days, masquerading as a hard-arse, off-the-wall negotiating style.
“Russell,” said Sean, a little drained of the enthusiasm that had carried his previous statements, “Judd Apatow, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, is offering you his personal assurance that the part is yours. All you have to do is get out of the bath and go to San Diego with the director, Jason, and a few other guys and read with the female lead.”
I groped for the rubber duck but found a more appealing tub toy. “It all sounds a bit fishy to me, Sean, driving to San Diego with strangers to read with a vampire detective. No. I’ll take my chances here in the bath.”
Sean said he’d see what he could do. Nik was at this point tied up in a meeting and unable to save me from attempted career suicide, so I determined that no matter what happened I would remain sub-aqua until my demands were met, like a one-man terrorist cell taking himself hostage – and, let me tell you, I was coming down with a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. I was identifying with my captor so strongly that I was in danger of releasing pearly ribbons into the tiny tub – never wise, as when you leave the bath you spend the rest of the day discovering crystallised sperm on your elbow.
Housekeeping and seasons came and went, but I remained in that bath. I refilled more times than Lindsay Lohan at a free bar. My hands and feet were as crinkly as my scrotum, and my scrotum itself looked like the Emperor from Star
Wars’s neck – which turned me on so much that I had another wank. Sean sent over a back-scrubber and some bath salts, which I appreciated but also took as tacit admission that my bath-time protest was a sensible tactic. Eventually Sean called to say that Universal had seen my audition tape and approved my casting. I leaped from the bath triumphant – well, as triumphant as you can be when cocooned in your own sperm – and popped on my clobber, far dirtier than when I’d got into the bath four hours earlier but convinced I’d scored a victory.
All that remained now was for me to travel in a van to San Diego with Nick Stoller, the savant, man-child director, adorable Jason, bookish, smart alec Rodney Rothman and Shawna Robertson, a woman as mercurially fierce and sexy as she is diminutive. San Diego is bloody miles from Los Angeles, but that is where Kristen Bell worked so I had no choice. It was a long, socially awkward journey, and had it not been for the entertainment gleaned from peeling bathtime fun from my forearms I might not have got through it. Kristen Bell is obviously a razzle-dazzle, titchy little wonk-eyed pebble of wonder, and the reading with her was a laugh. Everyone said we had chemistry and my casting was once and for all approved – I was to be the supporting lead in a big, Hollywood romantic comedy. It still astonishes me that I was prepared to jeopardise this tremendous opportunity in the blind service of my madness, but I’d gotten away with it. “If the film goes well …” I thought on the long, LoooOOOOoooong van journey back to LA, “I could get a chance to be in my own film.” But first I had to get through a three-month filming schedule in Hawaii – where I was even less famous and had no friends and no one to protect me from my sabre-toothed insanity. So much could still go wrong. It’d be a miracle if I could just get through the journey back to LA without letting the other passengers know that they were travelling with a madman.
†
Hawaii Not?
Nik wasn’t able to accompany me to Hawaii, nor was Matt, Gareth or Jack, as they all have lives and jobs outside of me. This was at a time when the work we generated didn’t justify exclusivity, so my professional friendships were polygamous. I was terrified of going there alone – whenever people remarked that working in Hawaii would be like a big three-month holiday I thought it would be more like a stint in a tropical penitentiary. Who cares about coconuts and rainbows if you’re alone? Unless “coconuts and rainbows” are the names of a couple of prostitutes who work as a pair – which would not be unthinkable. Coconuts could have big, brown boobs – nice, if a little hairy – and Rainbows would be made of white light refracting through cosmic dust and give great blowjobs – for which I’d willingly pay a little extra.
In the absence of my hoppos I went with a couple of human security blankets: my assistant at the time, Marsha, who was a sweet woman, and a girl I was seeing called Jordan. I kept them either side of me as a cushion of femininity. I thought if I took a girlfriend then I wouldn’t spend my whole time hankering after women on the set, getting all daft bothering make-up women and troubling actresses.
Marsha was a diligent pepper-pot of a woman forever fussing about. It’s interesting the relationship you have with assistants because, despicable though it may sound in this day and age, if I’m not careful they become like servants and I become a P.G. Wodehouse character barking giddy commands with epileptic, ever-changing needs spluttering out of my gob. And in these enlightened times one can’t very well take the crop to a person just because your breakfast is a bit late – how I lament those days, though I never lived through them. I’d like to see the return of the birch for failure to bring tea on time – I once had to wait till eleven-thirties for elevenses, delirious I was by the time it arrived. Earl Grey would never have put up with that, but then he was tea’s inventor.