Scrappy Little Nobody(50)
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 motherf*cker 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 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?”