Scrappy Little Nobody (19 page)

“Oh, hi, Asia, are we sure they’re ready? I thought we were waiting on the animal wrangler to bring the cow?” I said, stalling.

“Nope”—tug, tug, tug—“the cow’s already set.” Tug, tug, tug. “Dion’s just swinging a lens and then picture’s up.”

I’d get desperate. “Oh”—tug, tug, tug—“I feel like the cow always
runs away a couple times before we actually shoot, though, so maybe just a few more minutes—”

But she was the matador, and she skewered me every time.

Our legendary costume designer, Colleen Atwood, had every piece that we wore custom-made, and she handpicked the perfect fabrics, laces, and buttons. Even the shoes were made by hand. The skirt on Cinderella’s “rags” was a dusty-blue linen. It was humble but lovely—the perfect choice for Cinders—but linen is a fabric that wrinkles like Jack Nicholson’s balls without Botox.

So I’m working in a corset and heels for sixteen-hour days, but every single time I sit—just sit down and have a little rest in between takes—someone has to steam my skirt, because it now has some minor wrinkles in it. I’m
Cinderella
, by the way. My body, my hair, every part of my costume has been painstakingly covered in soot and grime and grass. God forbid my skirt isn’t freshly pressed.

The most annoying part was that Colleen was right; it really did look better smooth. Dirty and disheveled added to the aesthetic, but wrinkled was distracting. It was this major production, Disney’s Christmas tentpole, and I couldn’t even sit down. So in between takes I’d walk over to a chair or a bench and just look at it. Longingly. Sometimes I’d lean on it. Or circle it like a cat. People on that set probably thought I had hemorrhoids.

My wardrobe on
Up in the Air
was perfectly curated for my character. But it felt so unnatural to me, as did the rest of my look—the hair and the makeup—that I started to feel claustrophobic in it as the weeks went on. I bought some glittery nail
polish in an alarming shade of blue and painted my toes so that I could be in control of one small corner of my body. Natalie would never wear something so juvenile, but I liked knowing that under my perfectly tailored skirt suit, I was still messy and strange.

My tiny act of rebellion was discovered on the day we shot a scene at airport security. I had counted on Natalie always wearing closed-toed shoes, but even in movie-land, the TSA is unflinchingly scrupulous. I pulled at the toes of my nude stockings until enough material gathered to obscure my sparkling nails. Our costume designer, Danny Glicker, as acerbic as he is brilliant, looked me up and down and raised his eyebrow.
Your secret’s safe with me, but that’s an unfortunate look.
No one else on set seemed to notice. That scene was cut anyway. Perhaps test audiences were thrown by how guilty Natalie looked during a simple airport security check.

When you start a new film, you come to work looking nice for the first week. Then, inevitably, you remember that you are in your personal clothes for thirty minutes each morning and your costume for the next fifteen hours. All right! Same pair of sweatpants every day for a month, here I come! By week three, if an actor is still coming to work in a full outfit at four a.m., you can be sure that they’re banging someone on set.

The same is true for your appearance from the neck up. You show up looking like hell on toast and, lucky for you, some poor
sap has to put your face and hair into some recognizably human arrangement before the first shot.

I’ve been told I have “working-girl hair.” I like this expression because it sounds like my hair is a swarthy, streetwise prostitute in 1930s New York. It’s actually a reference to the damage your hair goes through when you are on a film set. The more movies you make, the worse the damage from blow-drying, curling, coloring, etc. In this sense the term is supposed to be worn as a badge of honor, a testament to your work ethic—like calling your dark under-eye bags “success circles” or “ambition sacs.” What it actually means is that your hair is wiry and brittle with thin ends, and will need even more blow-drying, curling, and coloring to be made camera-ready.

I had very curly hair when I was growing up, but I WILLED IT AWAY and now my hair dries naturally into gentle waves. (I heat-style my hair every single day so I don’t look like Dale Dickey in
Winter’s Bone
.) I used Frizz Ease for years until my first on-set hairstylist pointed out that the frizzy “before” picture was just a straight-haired model who’d been photographed with “messy” hair through some contrivance. I’m sure the look was achieved with a crimping iron and some back-combing, but I felt so betrayed that I liked to imagine the model had run afoul of a rabid squirrel.

In the hair and makeup trailer on my second film, rumors started to swirl about miracle flatirons from Japan. Previous generations of flatirons made your hair less curly yet somehow bigger and angrier, but not these. They were smaller, they were hotter, they’d transform you into the Amanda Bynes silk-nymph you’d
always wanted to be (think
What a Girl Wants
, not mug shot). The cost of becoming this new woman? Almost two hundred dollars. (Straight-haired women, don’t you judge me! Cheap curling irons are completely fine, but flatirons don’t work like that!) The hair department bought one, and I used it on the days I had the energy for the Sisyphean task of straightening my hair, one inch at a time, knowing the process would begin anew upon the next wash. I had to get one for myself. I had no money, but you bet your ass I put that bad boy on a credit card. I couldn’t go back to being Book Hermione when I’d had a taste of being Movie Hermione. If that reference went over your head: In the books, Hermione is supposed to be ugly. In the movies, she’s Emma Watson. Also, in the book
she fixes herself with magic
. So nothing is fair.

You don’t normally have your nails done on a film set. It’s fine by me; I’m heavy-handed and I don’t like sitting still, but I was recently talked into having biweekly manicures for a film. People will tell you that “gel manicures” won’t ruin your nails as long as you change them out every two weeks, but if you ask me they are filthy liars. Maybe by the time this book comes out the gel manicure will be a thing of the past, like electrolysis or those Anna Nicole Smith diet pills I definitely never took. Just in case, please let me share my painful experience. I wore gel nails for three months on this movie, and when they finally came off, my boyfriend wouldn’t let me touch him. My nails were so thin that they sliced and diced anything I came near. I was a human paper-cut factory.

I gain weight on every movie. Never ever have I left a set without
putting on at least five pounds. You’re not sleeping enough, you give up on exercise, and there is food EVERYWHERE. But the curse of the lady actor is to reach deep down, past the gurgling stomach acid, and find some willpower. When I’m trying to keep my ass in check, you’d think that fellow ladies would help me stay motivated. Instead, we end up torturing each other and ourselves. A group of hungry actresses (a.k.a. actresses) will talk about food with the kind of fervor and specificity normally found in
Star Trek
fan fiction. Some deep, hard-core stoner shit. Discussing food with girls on diets can feel eerily like porn dialogue.

“God, I would kill for a burger. Like a big, bloody cheeseburger on a brioche bun and some caramelized onions.”

“Oooh, brioche? You’re so bad. What about some bacon?”

“Fuck yeah, bacon.”

“And some avocado . . . and grilled pineapple rings.”

“Grilled pineapple? You pervert.”

When you’re a struggling actor, every job you get is a thrill and a relief. But unlike most professions, every job you get is temporary. The excitement is mired in the terror of knowing you’ll be unemployed again in a matter of months. So even mid-movie you have to send out your résumé. For actors, that comes in the form of the self-tape. You can’t make it to a casting office when you’re shooting in the suburbs of Baltimore, so you and
your castmates roll up your sleeves and put together a video in a trailer or a hotel room.

Rocket Science
, my second film, was basically a sausage fest. Luckily, the young men in the cast were gentlemen of the highest order and fine actors to boot. On a day off, we all went to one cast member’s hotel room to help him make a tape for a mafia movie. (We were young enough that this was an exciting project for all of us, not an obligation.) Aaron read lines offscreen, Nick operated the camera, Matt knew how to upload and send video. I didn’t have a job to do, but I was happy to be there for moral support. True to any self-respecting mafia movie, there was a tremendous amount of shouting in the scene. We were all very impressed with the performance but wondered if the surrounding rooms were annoyed with the volume. Several takes in, there was a knock at the door. A take was still in progress, so I jumped up to go silence the curious party.
I’m helping!

I gingerly whipped around the door without letting it completely shut behind me, like I’d seen crew members do when we were shooting. Outside was a stern-looking woman from hotel management who softened when she saw me. I held a finger to my lips, apologetic and pleading.

A man’s angry voice was still emanating from inside, and now a teenage girl was desperately trying to get rid of the woman at the door. To someone who had no idea why hotel guests would be screaming for, you know . . . make-believe reasons, this development looked suspicious, to say the least. The hotel manager looked at me like,
Sister, if you’re in trouble, I’ve got your back.
It
was so courageous and supportive I was tempted to let her take care of me. I quickly remembered that this was real life and I figured ruining one take was worth it in this case. I threw the door open so she could see the collection of gangly young men filming their friend. Even in the throes of his heated performance, our resident artiste retreated from irate to meek instantaneously upon seeing the stranger at the door. We smiled nervously at the hotel manager. She looked us up and down.

“It sounds like you’re killing each other in here. If you’re gonna make your little movie in the rooms you have to be less
dramatic
.”

Even low-budget films can be riddled with communication problems, and they only get worse and more frequent the larger the scale. As a result I have learned a number of specialized skills for absolutely no reason.

One film sent me to lessons on a horse farm for weeks. I wasn’t learning to ride a horse, though, I was learning to sit
behind
someone riding a horse and not fall off. There wasn’t actually a lot of skill involved. All you had to do was learn to spend an extended period of time clutching at someone’s torso for dear life while galloping full speed, sans saddle or stirrups, on the aft of a sentient being (who weighed a literal half-ton and most days had a comically large erection).

I panicked during my first lesson because something was digging into my thigh and none of the instructors seemed that
bothered about it. Saddles aren’t made to have a passenger behind them, so when I mentioned my discomfort, there was a general attitude of “Yeah, that’ll happen.” When I pointed out the culprit, a metal ring about the circumference of a golf ball attached to the back of the saddle, my teacher frowned at it, gave it a tug, and said she’d try to take it off for my next lesson. Before you ask (believe it or not), I’m not the kind of gal who knows what purpose a metal ring might serve on the back of an English saddle, so no, I don’t know what it was.

“It’s just really digging into my leg, man. I’m not sure I can keep going.”

“Well, I’m supposed to take you on at least five more runs. Do you want to take a five-minute break first? Maybe drink some water?” By the time I got home, I had a bruise on my thigh the size and color of a rotting mango.

At one point a renowned rider was brought in to work with me. A muscle-bound Spaniard who spoke almost no English, his connection with these horses seemed to transcend the laws of nature. On our first ride together we galloped past the stables through the rolling, sunlit hills. We took in the majesty of the countryside, and he turned back to me.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Yes, beautiful,” I echoed.

He cast his dark eyes away from me and gave the horse a kick. I gripped his chest and buried my face in his neck as we picked up speed, all the while thinking,
When is this asshole gonna let me go home so I can ICE MY VAGINA?!

The day of my big horse scene, as I perfected my mount and
dismount, the director said, “You know what, I’m never going to use that. I’m going to end the scene before you get on the horse.”

So I hadn’t learned to ride a horse, and as it turned out, there was no reason to spend all that time training my inner thighs to endure blunt force. But it wasn’t a total waste. I got to be outside in pretty weather, and I’ve got a head start if I ever get into S&M.

I once played a chef, and although I did not get cooking lessons per se, I was sent to a knife skills course so that I’d
look
like I’d taken cooking lessons. In fact, I was flown from LA to Atlanta, more than once, on days that I didn’t shoot anything, solely for more lessons. I chopped piles of herbs, diced mountains of onions, cored bushels of apples. I got confident but not especially good. This became clear when I sliced off a fingernail halfway through a pile of cilantro. Given the choice, I’d take a metal ring to the thigh any day.

When we set up the shot for my vegetable massacre, the director took a look at the monitor and called out, “Hey, Anna, don’t worry about the chopping. We can’t see your hands.”

I’ve never driven a stick shift. Sidenote: I don’t know why people act so superior about this. I don’t churn my own butter, either; let’s not act like I’m a dick for doing the easier thing. I was, however, asked if I would learn for the movie
The Voices
. The film was being shot in Germany, and the car that the producer chose, like most European cars, was manual. I expressed some hesitation but said that of course, if that’s what needed to happen, I’d learn. For three days, before and after work, I drove a beat-up stick shift around a former Nazi airbase with a patient
stuntwoman. Why a stuntwoman? I have no idea. The scene demanded that I start the car, then drive precisely ten feet, just out of frame. Not exactly “The Driver” from
The Driver
.