I would not, could not with a fox!
Even though I was exhausted, that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t hold it together this time. My mom was grieving the loss of her mother. I knew that before, but I could feel it now, and seeing my mom in that kind of pain was simply awful.
I’d never been in a receiving line before, but everyone had nice things to say or a story to share. A few people seemed too happy to meet me given the circumstances. Some told me how proud my grandma was of me, and my mom would chime in, even through tears, “She was proud of all her grandchildren.” That was true. She talked about all four of us constantly; certain people just had selective interests. A few mourners seemed more focused on making weird comments to me than on grieving, which pissed me off, but I tried to grimace through it and chalk it up to faulty social filters after seventy or something.
Then, as my mother stood next to me weeping, a woman reached for my hand and smiled as though she was about to say something playful and a little bit naughty.
“So you’re the actress! Oh, you’re very good . . . but we know these aren’t acting tears!”
Lady, what the fuck did you just say to me? You mean the tears streaming down my face as we prepare to bury my grandmother and my own mother sobs next to me? No, these are not “acting tears.”
Maybe she says weird shit in every situation, maybe she felt like a jerk about it afterward, but I’ve never come so close to hitting someone who was smiling in my face.
I had to get to Vancouver, because I was shooting a scene in The Company You Keep the next morning. Oh yeah, that was happening, too. I’d been warned that the logistics would be tricky because of Pitch Perfect, but I had said yes because Robert Redford was directing and that seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.
Under the circumstances, leaving my mother to film a glorified cameo felt decidedly unimportant. There was already a car in the parking lot waiting to take me to the airport. The situation was not conducive to grief. I said good-bye to my relatives and got my suitcase out of my mom’s trunk. In the car I changed back into jeans and browsed Reddit on my phone. I bought some trail mix at the airport and got on a plane to my layover city.
When I arrived in Seattle I saw my final leg into Vancouver was delayed. I found an empty corner of the airport—it wasn’t hard because at this point it was almost ten p.m.—and I sat still without any technology. I really cried for her then. Before, I had cried from discomfort and I had cried for my mom, but now, in an empty row of airport seating, I thought about my grandma. I’d be lying if I said we were extremely close. Both of my older cousins had spent more time with her as they grew up and I was envious of the relationship they had. But she had bathed me in her sink, and taught me to read, and she’d been a moral standard my whole life. She was a devout woman, and even though I am not, I fully expect that she is in the illustrated children’s Bible version of heaven. If she was on some plane now where she could see my soul laid bare, I wondered if she would be proud of me.
I got on my flight to Vancouver.
We landed, I got my work permit, made it through customs, and checked into my hotel. I’d been awake for thirty-two hours, but I still ordered a burger and a vodka, ’cause sometimes you can’t call it a day until something good happens.
The next day, Sunday, I filmed a scene with Shia LaBeouf and Terrence Howard. Those actors have reputations for being . . . eccentric, but both of them were sensitive, warm, and professional, which I needed more than they could have known. But in retrospect it’s kind of a disappointment.
Mr. Redford was equally lovely. In one shot at the end of the night my character is looking at an image of Redford as a young man. In between takes, he came up behind me, looked at the photo, sighed wistfully, and said, “God, I had fun.”
My stomach flipped and I hoped that if my grandmother was hanging out in my soul, she got a kick out of that.
That night I showered and got on a plane back to the Pitch Perfect set. When we touched down in Baton Rouge, it was Monday morning. I don’t actually remember if I went to my room and showered before going to set . . . I hope for the sake of my coworkers I had time. We were filming the finale performance and I was glad to have something physical to focus on. Some of the cast asked me how the Redford thing went, but it seemed most did not know anything else had happened.
Working regularly has only made it harder to get home. Even when I’m not shooting, I have so many side projects that I have to check with five different “departments” in my life to ask permission to visit.