Thing is, the “cat secretary” role was never the focal point of any scenes. She was a decorative character, adding a touch of flavor to offices across the TV landscape. Most of my lines were in the vein of “Mr. Garrett, your wife is on line two. Can I go home early to feed my fifteen animals, please?” Either that or I was hired to do laundry. I’ve washed laundry in a half dozen different TV shows. I guess I look clean? Which is kind of a compliment . . .
But who was I to complain? Every show needed secretaries! Finally, after six years of struggling in Hollywood, I was finding bigger success. My grandma got to see me on an actual TV show and brag about it to the checkout clerk at Kmart. I had pinpointed a salable stereotype I could play for the next twenty years, living the nomadic life of audition after audition (accompanied by panic attack after panic attack), begging to answer fictional phone calls in innocuous ways for decades to come . . . and I hated it.
The role was a shadow of the kind of characters I wanted to portray. No one had a place for my geeky, weird, homeschooled, video-game-loving inner self. They could only see me as an extremely clean but neurotic secretary. “Your nose is too weird to be the focus of the show, but you’re perfect for answering the phone in the background in a quirky fashion!”
I painted myself into a tiny corner, so I could be simpler and cleaner and more hirable by Hollywood. I was rewarded for it, but it made me miserable, and I didn’t even realize it.
When the system you want to be a part of so badly turns you into someone you’re unhappy with and you lose sight of yourself, is it worth it? Er . . . probably not. But self-reflection wasn’t my strong suit at the time. I just knew that I kept getting opportunities I couldn’t turn down, that I would have killed to have in the dry years before. I never stopped to wonder, Why am I so depressed all the time after all this success?
Instead of making big-girl decisions about my future, like setting goals for myself, working on other characters I could play, or hell, signing up for some good ol’ therapy, I turned to another world.
An online world. A game called World of Warcraft.
-?5?-
Quirky Addiction = Still an Addiction
How my obsessive personality steered me into a twelve-hour-a-day gaming addiction and an alt-life as a level 60 warlock named Codex.
Anal retentiveness is one of my most attractive genetic traits. (I also hit the genome lottery for “The ability to pack a suitcase efficiently.”) As a little kid, I filled out index cards on every movie I watched and stuck them in a yellow recipe box. The cards were filled with critical insight and searing analyses. Par exemple:
National Velvet
4 Stars
This made me cry because horses were in it, but the girl had purple eyes. I want purple eyes too.
I tend to obsess over things easily. Like eating oatmeal every morning for a year, wearing a pair of sneakers over and over again until my big toe pokes out, and having an unhealthy fixation on the martial arts personality Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Did you know his real last name is Van Varenberg?) When I travel, I read dozens of books about the locations I’m visiting, to the detriment of SEEING anything. I can’t show you many pictures of my trips to Thailand or Vienna, but if you want to discuss the history of Buddhism or secessionist furniture design, I’m ready to dish!
I have been borderline-ready to become addicted to something my whole life. And more common addictions got ruled out because I’m weird. Alcohol, I metabolize too fast (two sips I’m twerking, five sips I’m snoozing). I’m too neurotic to do drugs because they give you meth teeth (not all, but enough to make me concerned), and sex addicts get vagina warts. Or so I read on the side of a bus. What’s left that could become a trigger area?
Video games, of course.
At the height of my “auditioning for burger commercials” acting career in late 2005, my brother, Ryon, invited me to join a new online game called World of Warcraft. For nongeeks (Are there any of you out there reading? I like your hair!), it’s a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game” where millions of people can play together simultaneously. Ryon had been playing for a few months with his friends and thought I would enjoy it.
My brother and I hadn’t been close growing up. I know that sounds weird. You’d think, two kids locked in a house together, there should be some great indie-film, Wes Anderson bonding happening, right? Not so much.