One of the most entertaining started while I was doing a single guest spot for a forgotten series. I was guest starring with a fellow actor I had seen around town but didn’t really know. As actors are wont to do, we immediately told each other our life stories in between takes. His was an absolute doozy.
When he had been living in San Francisco as a young, deeply closeted gay man, he had wanted help with his inability to have sex with women. He didn’t actually have a problem, of course, because he was gay, and gay men aren’t supposed to want to have sex with women. But he hadn’t figured that out yet, so he went to a female sexual surrogate, a therapist who actually has sex with clients to help them overcome fears of intimacy. I had never heard of this, but apparently it’s legal in some states; you can actually get a license for it.
As the therapist makes love with you, she talks to you every step of the way, explaining what she is going to do, asking you how it feels and if you like it. (His story completely turned me on, and I began wondering if there was a porno movie out there with this plot.) These methods, however, would not work for someone like my friend, whose issue had been that he didn’t want to be gay. When his sex therapist informed him that the following week’s lesson would be cunnilingus, he quit.
Oddly enough, about a year later I got cast on Boston Legal to play . . . wait for it . . . a sexual surrogate therapist.
My character, Joanna Monroe, was the former sex therapist of Alan Shore (played by James Spader). She was called back into action because Alan’s friend, who had Asperger’s syndrome, had fallen in love with his blow-up sex doll and needed her help. Her license had expired because, who’d have thunk it, her husband wanted her out of the sex game, but nevertheless, she agreed to help.
I couldn’t wait. I had the story I’d found fascinating the year before to use as background research, and although I was kind of embarrassed because the script called for me to drop my robe and stand virtually naked in a room full of cast and crew who were strangers to me, I was excited to try my hand at being intimate with a clinical bent.
I ended up having fun with the whole run. Joanna Monroe would eventually be busted for prostitution while in bed with the client, and Alan Shore would successfully defend her. I recurred in this role for three more episodes, at the end of which Joanna (with Alan as her lawyer) would prevent her now ex-husband from taking her daughter away from her. (He had this funny thing about his kid’s mother being in the sex trade.)
Despite the fast pace of the shooting on this show, James Spader and I had some really lovely talks, and I found him to be extremely smart and deeply thoughtful. Though I never saw him be anything but courteous to everyone on that set, I could sense that he was not a man who suffered fools. Almost as if explaining what I was thinking, he offered this: “A long time ago I asked myself, do I want to be right or do I want to be kind? I opted for kind.” This little piece of wisdom reverberated through my occasionally bitchy self.
I saw James perform a four-page closing argument in one flawless take. He always had reams of dialogue and he was always off book and word perfect. You had to be when you worked for David Kelley. Though I never actually laid eyes on him, David Kelley’s words were known to be meticulously crafted, and were to be spoken as written. Even though I have a lot of improvisation under my belt, I don’t mind in the least speaking someone else’s words. It’s almost a relief. I’m a pretty quick study and enjoy the certainty of knowing exactly what I’m going to say.
But nonetheless, one day on the set, for the life of me, I could not remember my lines. In the scene, Joanna Monroe was testifying in an effort to keep her daughter, when I was suddenly afflicted with a terrible case of actor fog. It was the moment of my close-up, a shot that included an intricate camera move initiated by a line in my monologue, but because I kept blowing the lines, the camera kept having to go all the way back to the beginning position (which was an ordeal) and we would have to start all over. Now, in my defense, I can say the speech was wordy and full of run-on sentences, though I am sure it was written that way intentionally. I kept blowing it, take after take after take, on and on for what felt like hours. The crew must have been frustrated and the cast bored. (Lainie Kazan was playing the judge, and every time I looked up at her I was more thrown off, because she was sound asleep.) And then in the midst of it all, we had to stop shooting, because it was my birthday and someone had brought a cake.
I felt like an amateur. The marvelous actress Pamela Adlon, who was playing my husband’s attorney, will always have my love and undying gratitude for her comforting words, actor-to-actor: “Jane, it happens to all of us. We all go brain dead. Today it’s your turn.”
It was my turn. Happy Birthday!
When I got the call to audition for the role of the psychiatrist on Two and a Half Men, I was excited for about a minute before realizing I couldn’t make it on the day they wanted me to read. Chuck Lorre cast me anyway. I learned firsthand a very valuable lesson: the more unavailable you are, the more they want you.
It was the second year of the series, and as Dr. Linda Freeman I was, at first, the psychiatrist for Jake, the kid played by Angus T. Jones. Before the end of that season, Dr. Freeman would have therapy sessions with both Alan, played by Jon Cryer, and Charlie (Sheen). Eventually, she was sitting down with just Charlie.
This role was layered with irony: as our characters went through the motions, both the doctor and the patient knew full well that any hope for therapeutic change on Charlie’s part was futile. In his constant pursuit of gratification, the character Charlie would return to therapy whenever he ran into a barrier he couldn’t skirt. I, as the therapist, enjoyed dryly busting his chops.
I absolutely loved locking eyes with him and playing these incredibly well-crafted scenes. If we could get through those several-page scenes all in one take, which we managed to do much of the time, it felt like a great accomplishment. Although a few of my appearances were pretaped, most were performed in front of the live audience, which always added a punch of adrenaline.
I would be invited back to the show three, sometimes four, times every year, and I was always thrilled to get the call. The writing was just outstanding and it was a very happy set, and Charlie Sheen was also such a pro. Our scenes could sometimes be up to eight pages long, and I’d work my butt off to learn the lines. Meanwhile, Charlie had not only our scene to learn but the entire rest of the show; he was always in almost every scene, with the show taped in front of a live audience. Twenty-some shows a season for so many years: he was a machine. He was also a kindhearted gentleman who was loved by the cast and crew. He further won me over by texting words of praise to me whenever he happened to catch me in a guest spot or movie.
Though I still longed for my own regular gig, I thoroughly enjoyed returning to see friends.
Friends were also great because they kindly remembered me when they were looking to cast projects they were working on. When I had worked with Paul Rudd on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he told me about some projects he was hoping to produce. One was a TV series about caterers in Hollywood; the other was a movie about energy drink salesmen. We both had wanted to work together again, and he had said he’d be in touch. Then one day, I got the call.
Paul was developing the catering TV series with the creative team behind Veronica Mars: Rob Thomas, Dan Etheridge, and John Enbom. I had done a guest spot on that show and I had really enjoyed working with them. For this series, each show would be set at a different catering gig around Los Angeles and would focus on the personalities and relationships of the waiters. Instead of pitching the idea around to get a pilot deal, as is customary in Hollywood, they’d decided to shoot it on their own nickel and shop that around. In June of 2007, we all got together at Rob’s house in the Hollywood Hills and shot the first episode of Party Down. Because they were paying for it themselves, the pilot was shot on a shoestring budget. Between shots we all hung out in Rob’s bedroom getting to know each other and laughing a lot. I’ve found that doing
something for fun and almost for free (we each got $100 for the day) can bring out the best in people. Plus, there’s nothing like undressing in front of folks you just met to inspire humility and togetherness.
The day was great fun for me, as I was hooked up with a whole new bunch of fabulously funny actors I’d never worked with before, including Ryan Hansen (Veronica Mars), Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer), and Andrea Savage (Dog Bites Man). Paul had intended to play the part of Henry, a frustrated actor who quits the acting game and becomes a cater-waiter, but his movie career was suddenly on fire, with one project lined up after the other, so he had to replace himself. He brought in his extremely handsome and self-effacing friend Adam Scott. We were also very lucky to have the entire Veronica Mars crew working on our humble low-budget pilot, so the shoot went swimmingly and the pilot ended up looking great.
The guys in charge told me I could do anything I wanted with my character. Her name was Constance Carmell, she was a forty-nine-year-old actress whose ship had sailed and who had therefore become a cater-waiter. Rather than doing my stock-in-trade of smirking arrogantly and waxing superior, I made Constance into a sweet and passive soul who lived in a delusion of grandeur about her acting days gone by. Remembering Harrison Ford’s warning that leaving your mouth open made you look stupid, I let Constance’s mouth hang open a fair bit of the time. It was such a relief to play someone who wasn’t trying to dominate or impress. I loved everything about this project, and unlike many other projects I had done, I let myself want this one to succeed.
But after more than a year with no word of a deal, I woefully assumed Party Down was dead. I chalked it up to a very good time had with a bunch of fun people.
Paul Rudd came through again a couple of months later, when I saw him at the premiere of Superbad and he asked me what I was doing in the next few months. I said, “If I you want me to do your movie, then I will be doing your movie in the next few months.”
Little Big Men, as it was known at that point, was the story of two screwup sales reps for an energy drink called Minotaur. After they destroy the company’s Minotaur SUV (a van adorned with bull horns) and some public property, the guys are given the choice of serving hard jail time or doing community service through a Big Brother–type program called Sturdy Wings. Of course they choose community service (who wouldn’t?). This choice puts them at the mercy of my character, Gail Sweeny, who runs the program. Paul wrote the script with his friends and collaborators, David Wain (who would be directing) and Ken Marino, who had slayed me on Party Down with his character Ron Donald.
Four members of the unofficial comedy ensemble community: Kerri Kenney, Ken Marino, A. D. Miles, and me in Role Models.
Photo courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC
The movie would come to be called Role Models, and the two main guys were played to perfection by Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott. I played another version of my completely deluded, cocky characters, with Gail Sweeny boasting of heroically conquering addictions to booze, drugs, pills, and “bad thoughts.” Gail claimed she used to have cocaine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but now she was “addicted to helping.” As a survivor, she believed that this descent into hell and subsequent return uniquely qualified her to mentor children.
Warning them of my aversion to B.S.: Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, and me.
Photo courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC
Playing this part, I was lucky to get to perform some of the most deliciously ridiculous lines ever written. Taking an instant dislike to Seann’s Wheeler and Paul’s Danny, Gail pointedly informs them, “I’m not here to service you, I’m here to service these young boys.”
To this day, at least once a month a fella somewhere between adolescence and early manhood will sidle up to me and ask, “What did you have for breakfast?” It took me a while to realize they just wanted to hear me sneer “cocaine.”
We started filming in Venice Beach in September of 2007. As evidence of the power of “it’s who you know” in getting asked to be in comedy ensemble movies, this movie was peopled with actors from David’s movie Wet Hot American Summer, his improv group The State, and folks from Judd Apatow films that Paul had been in. The cast included an incredible lineup of funny people: Elizabeth Banks, A. D. Miles, Joe Lo Truglio, Kerri Kenney, Ken Marino, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Ken Jeong, and Joe Walsh. I knew some of them from before but was meeting many others for the first time. But because we were all part of this larger “ensemble comedy” community, we were almost immediately comfortable with one another. I love that, and it also helped that in ensemble comedy projects, selfishness just doesn’t fly. Whether you’re a big star (Paul, Seann) or a jobber like everybody else, everyone takes turns in the spotlight, supporting one another and understanding that the best joke always wins.
At the end of the shoot, the main characters dressed up as KISS and drove the Minotaur SUV they had destroyed earlier in the movie to fight the Battle Royal for LAIRE, a medieval war reenactment game played in a nature park. The entire cast came together to film these scenes, and the hundreds of extras partaking in the battle were actual medieval role-play enthusiasts playing their own characters, complete with costumes and weapons. The day shooting this was off-the-charts fun.
It’s usually pretty easy for me to end a project and just walk away, because I’m so used to doing it. But leaving behind the cast and crew of Role Models was very difficult; I really loved these people and had had the time of my life. I was so grateful to have been a part of such an awesome group.
Chapter 11
The Dangers of Flattery
As I was waiting to see if the universe would answer my request for a steady meal ticket, I was not unappreciative of the short-term cherries I was being fed. A particularly juicy and delicious one came from Nora Ephron. I’d been a fan ever since I saw and loved her movie Heartburn in 1986.
I first met Nora at a screening of A Mighty Wind at the Directors Guild in 2003. This was not a formal introduction; rather, I was on my way into the ladies’ room as she was coming out. I was not only a huge fan of her movies, I’d become a fan of her blogging on The Huffington Post, so I almost lost my breath when, instead of passing me, she reached out to take my hand. I think I said, “I love you.” She said something about A Mighty Wind and my part, and I’m pretty sure it was positive because she left me with “Maybe we’ll work together someday.”
About three years later, when I was invited to a brunch in my Laurel Canyon neighborhood, I was thrilled to see Nora Ephron there. It was a lovely all-girl affair, and Nora was particularly sharp, witty, and interesting. I felt like I was holding my own until we started talking about the upcoming presidential election and I said something about Hillary Clinton having a “Pisces moon,” outing myself as an armchair astrologer. Even as it was coming out of my mouth, I regretted it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Nora, the unsentimental pragmatic New Yorker, wince, and I felt like an idiot.
This obviously did not turn her completely off to me, because in late 2007, when I was visiting Laura Coyle (who had moved to Connecticut to be with her parents), my agent Gabrielle called and said, “Can you get into Manhattan to have breakfast with Nora Ephron?”
The next morning, Laura and I hopped on the train into the city. Not even something as magnificent as my heading to brunch with Nora Ephron could keep us from our riotous silliness: the whole way down, we watched and rewatched a YouTube video in which Leslie Uggams completely forgets the words to “June Is Busting Out All Over.” We just killed it.
When we got off the train at Grand Central, we split up and I took the long walk uptown to Nora’s favorite breakfast place, a little deli joint called E.A.T. on Madison Avenue between 80th and 81st Streets. She raved about the food and then ate only a few bites of her eggs. (This must be how she can be a foodie and stay so thin.) Almost casually, she told me she was writing a movie about Julia Child. She told me the story of how Meryl Streep had launched
into her imitation of Julia while they were both leaving the theater after a play, and Nora had insisted she play her in the movie.
Nora then started to describe the role of Julia Child’s sister, Dorothy. Though Dorothy would be in only a few scenes, she and Julia had a close and loving relationship, and depiction of this relationship was essential to an accurate portrayal of Julia. Then Nora said, “You’re the tallest actress I know,” and asked if I might be interested in playing this small but essential role. The question was presented as if I could possibly be insulted by being asked to play Meryl Streep’s sister in a Nora Ephron movie. To sweeten the pot, she added, “You’ll get a trip to Paris out of it.” (The fact that the scenes I was supposed to shoot in Paris ended up being shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, did not make me regret accepting her offer one bit.)
In May of 2008, I started shooting Julie & Julia. Nora had written a screenplay based on two memoirs—one by Julie Powell and one written by Julia Child and her nephew Alex Prud’homme—and would be directing. The story intertwined two stories: that of Julia Child’s journey to writing and publishing her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and that of Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams) in her attempt, decades later, to whip up the tome’s 524 recipes in 365 days. By the time I arrived in New York City to begin work on the movie, the story of Powell’s time in Queens in the early 2000s was in the can, and the filming of Julia Child’s story in Paris during the 1950s was commencing.
I was excited and nervous. I would be working with the upper echelon of New York’s dramatic art world, including the woman everyone, including me, calls the “best actress alive.” I checked into the Empire Hotel near Lincoln Center and immediately had a wardrobe fitting for my authentic 1950s garb with Ann Roth, the Oscar-winning designer. She, like almost everyone I would meet henceforth on this project, was brusque and to the point. Not exactly cold, but definitely of New York. The LA small talk and superficial yet comforting intimacy were nowhere to be found, and I had to be a big girl and soothe myself.