Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(26)
The pilot, shot as full-length feature, was delivered in June 2007. After several viewings and much back and forth, Fox Studios decided to pass on making a full-blown series, airing it the following year as a standalone movie. It was a real blow for Meghan, who had harbored high hopes for the show. At least she could now add “stripper” to her acting résumé. Which she promptly did.
While Meghan worked on The Apostles, Trevor was in production on a Sandra Bullock/Bradley Cooper comedy, All About Steve, written by two of his clients. Bullock had taken control of the film as producer, leaving Trevor to manage his growing stable of writers and directors.
He was always hustling to get them work and to find new clients. When he went to coffee shops he handed out business cards to whoever was tapping away at their laptop. “What’s the worst thing that happens? I read a shitty script?” he laughed. He read scripts nonstop, going so far as to keep a stack in their bathroom at home as well as a supply of waterproof pens so he could make notes.
As for Meghan snagging a role through her boyfriend, that had proved to be a bit of a washout. At least so far. Not so with casting agent Donna Rosenstein, who called her in to read for the role of Sadie Valencia, the spoiled daughter of a Las Vegas casino owner in this story of a crime boss’s family who were struggling to go straight. There were solid expectations that the comedy, Good Behavior, which also starred Chicago Fire’s Treat Williams as her father and Schitt’s Creek’s Catherine O’Hara as family matriarch, would be well-mannered—and funny enough—to make a series for the ABC network.
When the show, which was filmed in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and also starred the Canadian actor Patrick J. Adams, was tested to a wider audience it got a thumbs-down. In the end, it was another pilot that ended up being broadcast as a standalone TV movie.
Work did keep coming, though. Now twenty-seven, Meghan was finished with Good Behavior, and she was cast as the teenage vixen Wendy in 90210, a reboot of the long-running series Beverly Hills 90210, which she had watched as a teenager. The new version was trying to be equally iconic but raunchier, sassier, and cooler.
In the series premiere, once again, Meghan’s character has a bawdy introduction, first shown outside West Beverly Hills High performing oral sex in another student’s car while pupils go back and forth. Her character lasted for just two episodes before vanishing without any plot explanation. The series, however, would run for five seasons. With various guest spots on established series like Knight Rider, Without a Trace, and the sitcom The League, she was almost becoming a familiar face to TV audiences. Real fame, or even just a steady paycheck—she was barely earning enough to pay for actors’ health insurance—continued to elude her. She was always on the cusp of making a breakthrough.
When director J. J. Abrams, who even before his mega successes with Star Wars was lauded as the mastermind behind Mission Impossible III and Lost, had her playing junior FBI agent Amy Jessup in his sci-fi procedural Fringe, she once again had high hopes that something would come of it. She appeared in the first and second episodes of the second season, and though director Akiva Goldsman, best known for his hit A Beautiful Mind, hinted that audiences may be seeing more of Agent Jessup she never returned to the creepy tale of spooky shapeshifters and parallel universes. In fact, she was next seen altering her personal universe in a more conventional way, snorting a couple of lines of cocaine in the knowing TV comedy The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down. Based on the award-winning 2006 independent film, which featured her Deal or No Deal co-model Leyla Milani, the show charts the vagaries of the LA dating scene.
In the sex, drugs, and anything goes movie, Meghan is shown as a single girl pouring herself into a super tight black dress—shades of Deal or No Deal—before heading out for the night, prowling the singles scene of downtown LA, where she knocks back some blow to keep the mobile debauchery moving.
With roles where she had snorted coke, performed oral sex, and taught striptease to her name, what better credentials than to share an on-screen smooch with former junkie, funnyman, and now British movie star Russell Brand. Her “exotic” looks won her the role of Tatiana in Get Him to the Greek, which filmed in the spring of 2009. With no lines, she remained uncredited in the official cast list. Still she fared better than Brand’s ex-wife, Katy Perry, and singer Alanis Morissette, whose scenes were deleted.
During this time, it was her partner who was getting the plaudits. Trevor was named by the Hollywood Reporter as one of the “Top 35 Under 35” in the Next Gen Class of 2009 for his work as a manager and producer. All those years of meetings and schmoozing were paying off—and he already had the pretty girl, as he had always dreamed of. Along with a glowing writeup in the Hollywood Reporter, the honor came with a party at My House, a Hollywood club notorious for its velvet ropes and bottle service, where Meghan did her best to shine as the beautiful and talented, as well as supportive, girlfriend of a bona fide mover and shaker.
Trevor could now afford to give Megan a few crumbs from his growing pile of scripts. At least it would stop her continually nagging him to give her a part in one of his productions. Two clients, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the writers behind Saw IV, V, and VI, had put together a nineteen-minute film, The Candidate, based on the short story by Henry Slezar. Meghan was cast as the secretary, in one scene showing off a beautifully written, hand-addressed envelope, an in-joke about her calligraphy skills.