Every time this happens it reminds me how quickly we take formerly miraculous things for granted. No Uber? How did we get places before? No Wi-Fi on this flight? I might actually die of boredom. No navigation on my phone? So I have to print out directions from the internet? Or look at . . . one of those big paper things . . . is it pronounced “map” as in “cap” or “mape” as in “vape”?
I don’t want to become complacent. Lazy is something I’ve always been, but complacent and entitled I want to avoid. When we made Up in the Air, George once said that actors have a bad habit of thinking that however well their career is going, it will only get better from there. Well, not me! I’m going to assume the world could collectively turn on me at any moment! I suppose I should try to find a balance, but that seems harder.
Film actors are treated like useless idiots, because we often are. But I started in theater, dammit! I used to sleep on the floor of the Port Authority at fourteen waiting for the bus home after traveling six hours to New York for one lousy audition! This was my dream! I don’t want to get used to any of it! Now where is the chilled oxygen I ordered!
When I first moved to LA, I didn’t have a TV, so I went to my one friend’s apartment to watch the Oscars. It was the year that Charlize Theron won for Monster. I watched her walk down the red carpet while I ate my questionable bodega hot dog and imagined that she must have spent the previous three weeks being expertly massaged and manicured in preparation. This was the most important night of her career. (It probably wasn’t, but I thought that at the time. The most important moment of her career was more likely a day on set, actually doing her job.) I assumed that a team of specialists were working around the clock to monitor her food intake, skin regime, and eyelash density.
When I was nominated, in the weeks leading up to the Oscars I thought, Doesn’t anybody care that I’m not going to the gym, and I’m falling asleep in my makeup every night, and I’m eating like Macaulay Culkin in the first thirty minutes of Home Alone? Isn’t anyone going to stop me? When is my Charlize Theron team going to parachute in and tell me what to do here?
I thought celebrities never had to take care of anything themselves. In fact, I’m still guilty of thinking this now. I look at anyone richer or more famous than me and think, Well, yeah, if I had a team of assistants, a nutritionist, and a trainer, I’d have Justin Bieber’s abs, too!
The weird thing is not how much people interfere with your life, but how little. No one wants to be the person to tell a celebrity they need to watch what they eat, or cut down on the boozing, or maybe just see a good old-fashioned therapist. (Obviously I already know I need to see a therapist, you don’t have to tell me.) For the most part I’m on my own. Well, I get LOTS of help when it comes to things I would gladly avoid, like showing up to junkets or putting on real clothes for those junkets. The people who sign my checks know that I’d be cool with skipping them altogether. They send a small army to make sure I do it. But when I need a ride to the doctor because I’ve gotten bronchitis for the eighth time in six months, I’m drinking a Red Bull and gettin’ behind the wheel.
And you know what? That’s good. It builds character. I never want to build character, it’s fuckin’ awful, but it keeps me from becoming reliant on other people. I don’t want to be like Paris Hilton, telling some judge that I didn’t know my license was suspended because somebody was supposed to read my mail for me. I want to tell a judge that I didn’t know my license was suspended because I don’t have my shit together, but at least that’s how I’ve always been! My ineptitude is not the result of fame! It’s part of my god-given personality!
I spoke to Colin Firth at a party once and before I shared an inappropriate story about watching Bridget Jones’s Diary on Ambien, he told my boyfriend and me that a few weeks earlier he’d gotten a flat tire on a country road. It was a very charming, self-deprecating story about how silly he felt not knowing what to do, and how he took a deep breath and figured it out, because he refused to behave like some helpless celebrity. Quite unfairly, my boyfriend and I started to use “Colin Firth” as shorthand for freezing up in the face of a minor problem. “Sorry I’m late, baby, the air conditioner kept turning itself off all day and I had a bit of a Colin Firth moment.”