I spent the first few weeks shooting Up in the Air certain that I’d be fired at any moment. I’d start to silently spiral before an important scene and George Clooney would have to snap me out of it, usually by throwing something near my head. George has been famous for a long time and knows the effect he has on people. He has a skill for making situations feel relaxed and informal, and keeping you in the moment.
About halfway through the shoot we all went to dinner, and for the ninety seconds of the evening where George wasn’t dutifully chatting with excited restaurant patrons, I made small talk with him about the scenes we had shot so far. He laughed a little and expressed some reluctance to talk about how it was going because he didn’t want to get in my head.
“I shouldn’t say anything. I mean, no one wants me to say anything because, you know, you don’t talk to your guy when he’s pitching a no-hitter.”
Not being a baseball fan I only vaguely understood this comment to mean I was doing well, but since it was exactly the kind of thing that might have gotten in my head, I decided not to look it up.
I left the shoot happy and proud and I couldn’t wait to show the film to my parents and my friends and the rest of the world. I had zero suspicions that it would be an “awards film.” It seemed so light to me, so intimate. Oscar films are epic! They deal with war, and death, and destruction! Of course, plenty of Oscar-winning films are about regular people in everyday settings; I just truly hadn’t thought about it that much. I was wholly unprepared for what came next.
When the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, someone told me things were about to get “loud and fast” for a while. Turns out loud and fast wasn’t how it would feel. It felt like being one of those frogs that doesn’t notice the water is boiling until she’s standing in the middle of a hotel room crying in socks and a stick-on bra. From September 2009 through February 2010, I was on a nonstop promotional tour in support of the film. During those six months, Up in the Air debuted to critical acclaim, I was nominated for an Academy Award, and I finally saw that video of the baby panda sneezing. Not a bad half year. Yet it was perhaps the most confusing period of my life.
The press for Up in the Air was a beast because it was all so serious. I didn’t want to let anyone down, so I tried to take it just as seriously as everyone else. You can’t imagine how soul-crushing it was for my misanthropic ass to be sincere for six months.
I didn’t know what I was doing. But the stakes seemed unbearably high. When everyone around you is acting like this is the most important thing in the world, you start to believe them. Nowadays, if you need me to do a “radio tour,” which is essentially three hours on the phone giving sound bites to various shows around the country, I’ll probably clean my bathroom mid-interview and mention my vagina at least once. If you throw me in a room full of “tastemakers” (whatever that means, I still don’t know), I’ll turn on my personal brand of awkward, sarcastic schmooze and hope for the best, because now I understand that they might love me, they might hate me, but no one’s gonna die.
But back then, each successive task felt like the most critical thing I would ever do. Every event was an anxiety-inducing clusterfuck or an exercise in solitude and tediousness. Now, I know it’s all a farce. I know how to snap myself out of it. This is not hard! This is not forced manual labor or the Cuban Missile Crisis! At the time, the pressure of these unfamiliar situations rattled my already shoddy emotional equilibrium.
There actually was a weird side effect. I was in sound-bite pageant mode so much that I started compulsively saying deeply honest, often inappropriate things to people I’d just met. I had to come up for air. The only people I was interacting with at the time were fancy folks at fancy events, but if you weren’t a journalist, you were probably going to hear about my most recent sex dream. I’m sure these people just wanted a nice evening out and perhaps some sparkling banter from the young actress. What they usually got was an earful on my fear of mortality. People ask me now if I get nervous about being “too” honest on social media. The alternative is much more terrifying. The crazy wants out.
I felt like a fraud! I was being flown around, staying in hotels I could never afford and putting on clothes that someone else picked out. When I went home, I dragged a suitcase full of those items I didn’t own across my tar-stained carpet and dumped it out at the foot of my Ikea bed.