Ship It(6)

Rico laughs. “Gotta move on, man. We have four more scenes to shoot before we lose the light.”

“I thought there was another beat we could’ve played after the fall,” I say.

The gaffer walks by carrying her burrito lunch.

“Here’s a beat I’d like to play.” Rico clears his throat and adopts the unnaturally gravelly voice he uses for Heart. “Smokey. I hate to tell you this, but it’s burrito Tuesday, and everyone’s hungry.”

Very funny. “Message received.”

He softens. “C’mon,” he says, apparently taking pity. “I’ll read lines with you over lunch.”

It’s still wild to me that I’m here, on a set, with a lead role in a TV series. A year ago, I was close to calling it quits on the whole Hollywood thing. It had been years of auditions and acting classes, indie shoots and student films. Of changing clothes in my car because the production didn’t have dressing rooms and getting chased off the location by security because we didn’t have permits. Of telling my dad I was fine, I was happy, LA was great, even though I hadn’t eaten anything in a week that I hadn’t stolen from the kitchen of the cafe where I waited tables. The good acting gigs, the ones that gave me hope, were rare. I was a Helpful Honda Guy for four blissful rent-paying months two years ago. That made my dad stop pestering me for a little while about my chosen profession. At least he could point me out to his friends on football Sundays when my spot played. But eventually, the commercial stopped running, the residual checks got smaller and smaller, the new auditions kept turning up bupkis, and I started to wonder if I should just move back to Broken Arrow, a failure at twenty-three, and think about applying to colleges.

When my agent called about Demon Heart, it was just another audition in a million for a role I’d never land. I didn’t get my hopes up. You can’t, in this job, if you want to survive. But then they called me back to read with Rico and for the first time, I started to think I had a chance. I was nervous as hell, but auditions are always like that, so it was nothing new. What was new was Rico. I recognized him, vaguely, from his previous work. Not that I had seen Star Command or anything, but he’d been on the cover of grocery store magazines enough for me to know who he was. In person, though, he had that sparkle that successful actors sometimes have—that alluring mix of charisma, attractiveness, and well-fitting clothes. He shook my hand, flashed me that smile of his, and we got down to business. In front of a few casting people, some people from the show, and a PA running a video camera, we started the scene. And that was the moment I knew I had a shot at the role. I’d never had an audition that crackled like that one did. Rico kept up with me, matching my energy line for line, as the rest of the room fell away. We became Smokey and Heart that day, for three blissful minutes until the casting director called cut. And then it was over, and I was sitting in my car in the parking lot, holding my validated parking ticket, smiling and hoping.

Four days later, I was standing in a Smart & Final when my agent called to tell me I got the job. I dropped my basket, walked straight over to the liquor aisle, and bought a bottle of champagne. My friends were all out at an improv show I’d already begged out of well before I got the call, so I drank my bubbly out of a coffee mug that night, toasting to myself on my futon in my studio in Koreatown, hoping this was the start of everything. Even though it wasn’t the kind of show I normally watched or cared about, this was a dream job. A series regular on a primetime drama? That is, as my agent would say, “a career-launcher.” I could go anywhere from here.

But then I actually had to do it. The daily grind of shooting ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, memorizing lines, working in the cold, the hot, the rain. Exercising, being careful what I eat, hitting my marks, finding the emotional beats in a scene while thirty crew people watch, waiting for me to cry or yell or break down on cue. The work. My Helpful Honda Guy commercial had been a one-day shoot, my indie films shot over a few weeks. Demon Heart shot eight days per episode, for twenty-two straight episodes. The day after we wrapped one episode, we started shooting the next. It was endless work, and I had never had to do it on this scale before. There were days, weeks even, that I was sure the dailies were coming back terrible, convinced the studio would call, the network would call, the showrunner would realize: We’ve made a mistake. He can’t do this.

But through it all, Rico, who has done this before, never made me feel dumb even when he probably should have. Every day on set I make mistakes, forcing everyone to wait on me. The grips, I’m sure, are onto me. Karen, the makeup girl, definitely knows. I’m faking all of this.

But Rico, Rico the goddamn saint, has never once pointed it out. And for that I love him every day.


Our burritos sit forgotten on the coffee table in my trailer as we play Red Zone 3 on my Xbox.

“The demon portal could only be opened by a pure heart. There’s nothing you could’ve done, Smokey,” Rico says, as Heart.

I shoot at a rebel fighter in the desert, then dodge return fire.

“I can’t… think about my lines while I do this,” I say.

“That’s your problem, you’re thinking too much,” Rico says, which doesn’t make any sense. “Just react.”

He gives me my cue again: “There’s nothing you could’ve done, Smokey.”

TAT-A-TAT. He fires a few rounds at my head in the game, forcing me to duck behind a sand dune to avoid him.