About a week before Oscar nominations were announced I went to New York to do a talk show. Afterward my brother and I walked around the city in the dark for a while. I knew he wouldn’t judge me, so after a while I said, “Everyone keeps telling me that I’m gonna . . . which I feel like they shouldn’t, you know . . . because . . . I mean, am I going to wake up next week disappointed that I’m not an Oscar nominee? ’Cause I’ve been not an Oscar nominee my whole life and I’ve been okay.” Saying it felt better. Then just for good measure I added, “And you know what, some of these other people look VERY at home being feted and adored and it’s creepy and I think they’re fuckin’ charlatans.” Being a little bit petulant felt better, too.
The very last piece of press I did for Up in the Air was in Tokyo. The movie was released in Japan several months after the US release and a little while after the Oscars. I got to run around Tokyo for a day, which was INCREDIBLE. The following two days were jam-packed with interviews. During one roundtable, the lone English-speaking journalist said, “I’ve been following the press that you’re doing and it seems like different publications are writing their own version of you. You know, you’re like the overwhelmed newcomer or the independent, serious artist or the mainstream, commercial star. Do you feel pressured to play along with what they want? Do you ever feel like you’re lying?”
Maybe it was because it was the end of my tour or because he was a fellow American in Japan so I was having a bullshit Lost in Translation moment, or maybe because if I’d suppressed the crazy for one more second I would have ruptured something.
“Honestly? Some part of everything I’ve said in the last six months has been a lie.”
He laughed. “Including that?”
“Yes,” I said, totally serious.
Fame Changes Everything, a.k.a. I’m in Vogue but I Still Don’t Have a TV
Fame did change things. For example, when you Googled “Anna Kendrick,” the second wife of colonial New Hampshire governor Benjamin Pierce (also named Anna Kendrick) was no longer the first result. Make it raaaaaaaaain!
The other new development was that strangers got real friendly and said hello to me and asked for pictures. And that’s the end of the list.
Fame doesn’t change much else. It doesn’t change how you feel about your high school “nemesis” or how your passive-aggressive uncle treats you (it just shifted from “Maybe if you got a real job you could afford a car that doesn’t break down every week” to “Well, we can’t all be Hollywood actresses who eat gold and poop caviar”). And believe me, I was loath to discover fame wasn’t changing me. I really hoped that I’d be transformed into a benevolent, self-possessed woman. Even when I got nominated for an Oscar, I was still just an anxious, jaded procrastinator. Maybe we all have imposter syndrome and perpetually feel like our real life is right around the corner, and if daily (often unearned) praise from strangers didn’t help me out with that, I guess we’ve all just got to put in the work.
The incident that really should have made me insufferably smug only confirmed to me that I was a squirrelly little weirdo. A few months after the Oscars, I ran into the prettiest girl from my high school on a trip home. She approached me in the street, and we chatted for barely thirty seconds before the conversation petered out. Then I noticed her bag.
“Oh hey, I have that purse.”
“I know,” she said, “I got it because of you.”
This should have felt so satisfying! Instead my stomach lurched at the batshit-crazy notion that people I used to know could find out what kind of purse I was carrying at any given moment. And that they would then buy it! I want to go back to being the loser in the corner, please!
But maybe I was reading too much into it. Besides, it’s not like the fact that she bought this bag meant she’d had some moment of clarity where she’d realized the short, frizzy-haired girl from high school wasn’t a total freak after all. She probably just saw a picture on the internet one day and went, “I think that girl is from my hometown. Cute bag.” Or maybe she’s obsessed with me and has a lock of my hair under her pillow. Who can say?
Don’t Look a Paparazzo in the Eye and Other Lessons I Learned the Hard Way
Junkets
A press junket is a full day of interviews to promote one film. The film studio or distribution company will rent out a number of hotel rooms, stick you in one, and bring in upward of seventy journalists to talk to you, one at a time. Every first-time junketer will come out of their room around lunchtime and say something like “They’re all asking the same questions, can’t we just give the answers once and they could all share it?” The mistake there is the assumption that anyone is interested in the answers. This is not Meet the Press; no one is dying to hear about how we related to our characters. You are an actor, and they need hits for their website; let’s all do our part in an orderly fashion and go home.