My eyes were disproportionally large for my face and evolutionary instincts dictate that big eyes equal “cuteness” to human brain.The first few years of my life in the suburbs of Toronto were fairly standard. I was a picky eater, I had my tonsils removed, I fell down and required seven stitches in my chin. My Little Pony was awesome, and getting my hair brushed was terrible. When I was three years old I learned to read, and I fell in love with the way that letters fit together. Words and sentences became my closest companions.
I would lose myself inside of words, feeling victorious when I chose exactly the right one. Seeing others using words well could bring me to tears. I obsessively read everything available, even reading billboards aloud. Neon signs were particularly attractive, and sometimes announced the attributes of the ladies at such establishments as the Crazy Horse Gentleman’s Club. Luckily, “Live! Nude! Girls!” are all fairly simple words to get a three-year-old mind around. So, announce them I did, with only a slight grammatical adjustment resulting in an enthusiastic plea for the nude girls to “live.”
I don’t remember the incident that determined my path in life, but as the family legend goes, my parents and I were shopping in a farmer’s market in Toronto. A man approached them saying he worked for an advertising agency and he thought I would be perfect for a commercial they were casting. Apparently, he could see beyond the peanut butter all over my face and felt there was a thespian simmering below. The only acting I had ever done involved coaxing my cats into doll dresses and pretending I ran an orphanage, so how could I be in a real commercial? My parents, dubious of the random market man, accepted his card in an attempt to get rid of him efficiently and they quickly ushered me away. In all likelihood, there were lengthy discussions between the two of them about the chances of him being a pervert.
My family could be the prototype for nice, normal Canadian people. I’m an only child, and my parents and I thought of ourselves as the Three Musketeers. My mom’s curly hair was always unruly, and she had worn a size zero wedding dress when she married my father, a week after her nineteenth birthday. At age fourteen she had seen him across the high school gym and announced that she’d marry him. Mom usually got what she wanted.
Dad is the son of tobacco farmers who moved to Canada from Slovakia in the 1940s. My grandparents clung to the old country. They lived in a tightly-knit Slovak community, with people who all spoke the same language and made the same poppy seed rolls. Even though he was born in Canada, my father didn’t speak any English when he started school at age five, but he soon learned his way around the educational system and was attending law school when I was born. Law books cluttered up my parent’s tiny apartment and Dad would stay up all night studying for the bar exam, while simultaneously trying to rock me back to sleep. My father enjoyed the sport of curling and a couple Labatt Blues after the game with other kind-hearted, bearded Canadian men.
My parents loved home renovation projects and so we lived in a state of perpetual chaos. We moved constantly, because Mom said that packing up and starting over was easier than cleaning. Our kitchen boasted a half-taken-down-wall, exposing the ancient horsehair and mud plaster construction of our 1880s fixer upper. The cashiers at the donut place around the corner got used to us running in as soon as they flipped the open sign in the morning; their facilities were indispensable when our plumbing system was under repair again. Mom would step over a dusty sledgehammer to feed the dog. The cats would drop their toys into the basement through the hole in the living room floor that we never got around to patching.
I seemed to have come pre-programmed with a high tolerance for chaos, and never minded living in the pandemonium of various construction sites. Wherever we lived, the living room always swayed with Carol King’s Tapestry record playing on our old Victrola while the three of us sat on the floor and played Hungry Hungry Hippos. We were a regular little family who watched TV, not the ostentatious types who longed to be on it. We could not have been further from showy Hollywood; Mom got embarrassed when they called her name out loud in the doctor’s office waiting room.
But when my parents told their friends about the man at the market, they said they had to call and find out the details.
“You know, a pervert can’t really do anything to you over the phone,” they reasoned.
Peer pressure prevailed and my mom called the phone number on the card. As it turned out, the guy was legit and was casting for several commercials. When they asked if I was interested in auditioning, I immediately agreed. I’m not sure if I had any idea what I was agreeing to, but much like a dog, I always got excited about a ride in the car. So, we made the big trip from suburbia into Toronto and went to an audition the production company was holding. There, the casting director realized a few things:
My eyes were disproportionally large for my face and evolutionary instincts dictate that big eyes equal “cuteness” to human brain.
“Cuteness” sells stuff.
I could read. Therefore, I could memorize lines.
The casting director sent me to a talent agent, the agent sent me on more auditions and I ended up with a career. It all just snowballed, much in the way that you might only plan to go out to dinner with friends, but then someone mentions wanting to see a movie and then you find yourself still out at a bar at 2 a.m.
They say that your earliest memory speaks volumes about who you are as a person. My earliest memory is being on set for a Cottonelle toilet paper commercial. I was dressed in a frilly white dress and a man was on top of a ladder dumping out a cardboard box full of cotton balls on my head. The commercial was going to be in slow motion; me with my huge eyes, joyously attempting to catch the fluffy cotton balls that rained down on me. It seemed strange that this grown man’s job was to dump cotton balls on my head. My job was also ridiculous, catching aforementioned cotton balls, but I had just turned four. I reasoned that it was more acceptable to have a silly job at age four.
I went on to hawk everything imaginable, from floor cleaner to Kmart to the hippest fashion trends of 1983 in a mall runway show. I was the model for a coloring book that was given away by Kmart; bored kids waiting outside changing rooms could color a black and white version of me while I watered plastic flowers and jumped rope. (They gave me stack of these books to keep and for years after, I would color myself instead of cartoon zoo animals.) I was featured in one of those giant wallpaper books you find at a home design store, playing in a brightly papered bedroom with no ceiling and only three walls. I was on a KFC billboard holding a greasy bucket and grinning like it was my birthday. By the time of that shoot, I had been a vegetarian for a year but apparently the fear of being a sell-out isn’t prominent for a preschooler.
I did a commercial for Barbie’s McDonald’s Restaurant playhouse and assisted her in flipping brown, choke hazard mini-patties. I was a hand model for the Egg Board of Canada. My job was to hold a hard-boiled egg steady within inches of the camera lens, because no one can resist eating an egg if it is very close up. I ate cold, uncooked Chef Boyardee and dry heaved into the provided spit bucket at the end of each take, keeping my eyes closed tight so I didn’t have to look at the chewed up remains of mini ravioli from my previous takes.
PHOTO: KMART
By the time I was seven, Mom and I were quite used to running from auditions to wardrobe fittings to commercial shoots. It wasn’t the life that anyone else at my school was leading, but it felt natural to me. I saw them juggling piano lessions, basketball camp and math tutoring, so it seemed reasonable to assume it was kind of the same.
Me, in the middle, acting really excited about pasta in a can.
I attended school when it fit into my schedule, but that became an increasingly uncommon occurrence. Unlike most extra-curricular activities, my job was not only during after-school hours. Even if a commercial audition happened to be at 4 p.m., memorizing the lines, getting dressed, commuting an hour into Toronto and finding the casting office, all in the days before GPS, took much of the afternoon. In my mother’s small faux-leather day reminder from 1983, her all caps, excited handwriting reveals, “SCHOOL STARTS!” on September 6th. At some point, that got scratched and replaced with an equally enthusiastic “12:30 COMMERCIAL SHOOT FOR FLORIDA ORANGE GROWER’S ASSOCIATION!”
It’s easy to assume that all children have a childhood. It’s right there in the name. At the time, I assumed that what I was doing was childhood. What else could it be when you are eight years old? Mine just seemed to be a childhood in which I worked for a living, read through contracts, and was rarely around other kids. But childhood is supposed to be full of freedom, exploration, and silliness. I had those things to some extent, but there was also an enormous amount of responsibility. It was a different kind of responsibility than the one that dictated that you should put on clean underwear and never poke the dog in the eye. It was a responsibility to an entire production company. There was no room for being a moody little kid who wanted to throw a temper tantrum and not show up for work one day—I would have been sued for breach of contract.
The money issue also complicated the whole childhood categorization. My family never focused on the money but I was aware that there was a financial exchange involved. I suspected money was a big deal because my family didn’t have a ton of it. When I was nine, my parents talked to me about investments, and asked if it was okay to use some of my commercial income to help buy our modest house. After we moved in, I asked my mother which part of the house I had paid for. She quickly changed the subject and suggested that I go play in my room. I asked for clarification—was my room the part that I had bought? The look on my mother’s face told me that this was not a good line of questioning. We didn’t talk about money much after that, which seemed to make everyone more comfortable.
By the way, none of this is in the spirit of Oh, poor me. A regular childhood doesn’t sound all that great, either. There is bullying in school, peer-pressure, and competition. That all sounds like total shit, too. My particular brand of shit was not any worse than that; it’s just that childhood kind of sucks. You have so little influence in your own life; you can’t drive or pick out your own clothes and everyone is way taller than you. Did I have a childhood? Not really. Did I want one? Not really.
At a thrift store, my mother fished through a wicker basket of buttons and found me a pin for the collar of my faded jean jacket that read, “Why be normal?” I adopted it as my mantra and adjusted to the strangeness of spending the majority of my time with grown-ups. There were surely some kid things I missed. For example, I can’t come up with a single nursery rhyme and I have no clue how to play jacks. Instead, I learned different types of games.
Film sets are a unique combination of hectic rushing and incessant boredom. Hours, or entire days, can be spent waiting and then within a moment’s notice, people need to spring into action and make their specific contributions. Learning to entertain oneself is of great value to personal sanity on set. The teamsters, who are in charge of coordinating all the trucks and generators for the entire film production, apparently found that teaching a four-year-old to play craps was very entertaining. Simply hearing a four-year-old say, “Yes, thanks, I’d love to play craps,” must have been pretty terrific.
Many of the teamsters were classic truckers. Their guts strained the promotional t-shirt of whatever show they just finished shooting. Their long stringy hair was contained under a baseball cap and their use of the English language was deeply and creatively filthy. They were also fun and truly kind and offered me my first sense of belonging to something, a feeling that I’d spend the rest of my life chasing.
These guys, many of whom were older than my parents, were who I considered to be my community, my peers. The teamsters and I would gather together and play craps for hours. They told me about snake eyes, and how to tell if someone had slipped in loaded dice. They gave me spare change to bet with and taught me how to trash talk. I reveled in being one of the guys.
On one commercial shoot, a nice, idealistic person drew a hopscotch board with pink chalk on the floor of the soundstage where we were shooting. When she proudly presented it to me, a little girl who should have been thrilled, I put on my best commercial smile and thanked her. As soon as she was out of sight, I hurried back to the dark corner of the warehouse, to blow on dice with my crew. I didn’t know how to play hopscotch.
“G’night, fellas!” I loved yelling when we wrapped shooting for the day.
“Sleep tight, kiddo,” gruff voices would respond from behind trailers and generators.
I’d go home and miss them until I was back for my 6 a.m. call time the next day. From shoot to shoot, the faces changed, but somehow the feeling of belonging stayed the same.
As a result of constant interaction with people a generation or two older than me, I became increasingly uneasy around other kids. My exchanges with them had largely been unpleasant. Being different in school is the kiss of death, as any fourth grader with a foreign accent or an affinity for avant-garde fashions can tell you. A group of kids at school once cornered me on the playground and asked if I thought I was a good actor. I looked at my feet and shrugged, admitting that I didn’t know. They proceeded to hold my arms and whip my bare legs with a willow branch.
“Act like that doesn’t hurt,” they demanded.
I failed my acting test and cried until snot ran down my chin. They finally let me go and walked away, proud that they had broken me so easily. When I went home, I changed into jeans to hide the welts and didn’t tell my parents about it.
I was humiliated by the fact that I hadn’t been able to act like the whipping didn’t hurt. Admitting to the incident would essentially be admitting to being a bad actor. What if casting directors found out that I hadn’t been able to fake it, and I never worked again and just had to stay there in school with those horrible kids?
I fed most of my breakfast to the dog, since I got stabbing stomach aches every school morning. I prayed to get another job so that I could be on set, the one place where I could just enjoy casino games with giant men named Tiny and have my freakiness be accepted.
Inevitably, I’d have to spend a few days or weeks trudging though school, wondering what I could to talk to my supposed peers about. Those kids didn’t have jobs. They didn’t play craps or travel to location shoots. They weren’t up late last night because filming went long and they didn’t worry because we were losing the light. They didn’t know the exhilarating tension of the sun going down and how booking this location for another day would cost the production thousands of dollars that wasn’t in the budget, so you just had to get the shot and didn’t have time to go “ten-one hundred.” And they definitely didn’t know that ten-one hundred was the discreet way of telling everyone within earshot of a walky-talky that you were sitting on the toilet. Kids my own age were worried about choir solos and Girl Scout cookie sales, things I was clueless about.
I tried to relate to the kids who practiced gymnastics or cello for five hours a day. They seemed to be comforted by their unusual skills, like I was, but the balance was never easy for any of us. The opportunities were astounding, and were only equaled by the sheer number of things that we gave up. I knew kids who wanted to be firefighters when they were five, but no one decided to suit them up, hand them an axe and send them out there. However, the rules seemed different for those of us who showed musical talent, sports skills, or an affinity for crying on cue.
I saw some families exhausted by early morning swim meets on behalf of their phenomenon the same way my parents skipped family obligations because I had an audition. At a certain level, the assumption on behalf of kids like us was that of course this should be pursued. It quickly becomes “you have an audition/performance/competition!” instead of “do you want to go to this audition/performance/competition?” Because the tendency is to think who wouldn’t want to participate at that level, if given the chance? For the most part, I found it to be fun, but it was clear that there were other kids on set who felt forced and resented it. Those tended to be the ones who felt stifled, so they took control of the only things they thought they could control, and eventually overdosed in a random hotel room.
All I knew at the time was that at school there was simply no common ground between my “peers” and I. When I hung out with kids my own age, I’d inadvertently say something that made them stare at me, snicker uncomfortably, and walk away, leaving me flushed and rejected. The more I worked, the more snickering and staring occurred. It was a vicious cycle that left me feeling ashamed of myself and my job, yet desperate to get back to it since I felt completely unworthy of being part of the things that normal kids did.
Mom said I was an old soul and that I shouldn’t worry about kids my own age. I liked the idea of being an old soul. That made it sound like maybe being socially awkward wasn’t entirely my fault.
Acting is intrinsic to the human spirit. Humans have an innate desire to be someone else. Sometimes, we just want to be anyone else. It’s a relief to get the hell out of our own lives and try on someone else’s skin. This desire is particularly prevalent in young humans: kids pretend to be adults, other kids, animals, or tables. They have no sense of one identity being superior to another because embodying a king or a floor lamp are of equal acting gravitas. No one needs to tell them how to throw an elaborate tea party for a stuffed sea lion and they don’t need to be smothered in praise and Screen Actors Guild awards for the dramatic reading they did for the pet parakeet. We’ve been performing since the dawn of time, it’s the way we tell our stories in a feeble attempt at immortality. Adults sometimes wonder if kids “know what they are doing” when they act, but it seems more logical to question the capacity of grownups, who have often misplaced their sense of fantasy and forgotten that it’s just all playing dress up.
John Malkovich understands this. I was in Eleni, my first feature film, at age six. I had a small, yet important part in the film. (Please note: if you are an actor, it is required that you highlight the pivotal significance of a role if you dare refer to it as “small.”) In my hugely important and climactic scene, I was to enter the room, while John, who had been plotting this revenge killing for decades, was pointing a gun at my grandfather, who had tortured and killed his mother. My job was to look at John with big six-year-old eyes until he drops the gun, overcome with guilt. Music swells, credits roll, the movie theater audience steps over discarded popcorn bags and Junior Mints.
The day we filmed the scene, my mom talked to me about the gun and explained that it wasn’t real and couldn’t hurt me. I had become accustomed to fake food, fake families, and fake living rooms, so this felt no different. I wasn’t nervous at all. My biggest concern was about getting the heavy sliding glass door open at the top of the scene. In rehearsals, it had gotten stuck and even though I had thrown all forty pounds of myself into opening it, I had missed my cue. They put someone just out of shot, to help me manage it.
We did a few more rehearsals to finalize the camera angles and lighting. John was showing restraint, holding back the emotion during the rehearsals, and saving his acting energy for the actual take. The shaking and spitting and pulsing forehead veins that come with an attempted revenge murder were reserved for when the camera was actually rolling. John had just done Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman, so people were starting to know the power of his performances, but this was still years before Empire of the Sun and his true minting as a celebrity. But everyone knew this was a powerhouse of an actor about to take on the most important moment in a serious film. The energy in the room was coiled and ready.
We rolled camera, and the slate was clapped very quietly, as a traditional sign of respect before a tense scene. The director called action and John went all out with the shaking and spitting and pulsing forehead veins. Just before my cue, someone on the crew thought it might be helpful for me to feel “real fear” because he figured no six-year-old could really understand acting. He suggested to me, quietly, off camera, that maybe the gun might really be loaded, that perhaps it wasn’t a pretend gun and perhaps I might actually die. Maybe my mother lied.
When it was time for my entrance, the crewmember slid the heavy glass door open for me and I saw the gun. And freaked. I screamed, cried, flapped my arms, pitched a fit, and refused to go on set. I must admit, it was a fantastic actress meltdown; current starlets could have learned from my all-encompassing technique. People gathered around to calm me, offer me Kleenex and fix my streaking make-up. I’m sure more than a few rolled their eyes and recalled the time-tested adage about why you should never work with children or animals.
Somehow through the sobbing, I heard John call me over to set. This is it, I thought, this is when I get fired. How humiliating to get fired at age six. John had just been in character, screaming and threatening to kill Oliver Cotton, and I was a little scared that some of that rage might be reserved for me, for ruining his shot and making him do that thing with the forehead veins over again. I was preparing to apologize and try to talk my way into keeping my job, as John sat down on the floor and gently patted the ground next to him. I sat. The gun master who was in charge of the on-set weapons joined us on the floor and the two of them proceeded to take the gun apart. They showed me that there were no bullets inside. They explained that I was safe and that I was surrounded by a whole team of people who cared for me and would make sure that I was safe. Nothing bad could happen to me here.
I believed him. Not because he was a stunningly talented actor but because he was a nice man who sat on the floor with me when I cried. He acknowledged my concerns and talked to me like I was a person. A fellow actor. He understood that children are capable, he knew I could act. We tried the scene again and with m my newly instilled confidence, I pulled open the glass door and acted. Those big eyes that were the foundation of my entire career did their job as I looked at the pretend gun and I pretended to be scared. When the director called cut, there were high fives all around—we got the shot.
It was at that moment that it became clear that my peers were no longer those kids wielding the willow tree branch—my peers were teamsters and John Malkovich. This was where I belonged. This was where I felt safe. And there was nothing more satisfying than getting the shot.
At least—that’s where I belonged for the next few days. Because then we would wrap the movie, and everyone scattered, off to start pre-production on some new project. My little community was ripped apart. The post-wrap crash was always devastating and I would still be navigating the pain of that loss as I was plunged back into school. Back to being the weirdo and back to feeling desperate to return to set. My addiction to working was firmly implanted and I’d be on a hunt for the next fix. The next chance to get the shot.
At the age of seven, it was time to expand my range. I ventured into the world of voice-over acting. It was new territory for me, as it was a dramatically different kind of performance than the kind to which I had become accustomed. There was no sound stage and no fifty-person crew. No craps games. No trailers or generators or lighting trucks strewn about. No wardrobe calls or hair stylists.
This type of work involved going into a little soundproof box all alone and speaking into a huge microphone. On the other side of a thick pane of glass, the adjacent room was filled with reel-to-reel sound tapes and a big board with a sea of buttons. I would perch up on a stool, my feet intertwining with the chair’s legs to keep me stable, while the director would lower the metal music stand down as low as it would go. Then, he would leave, sealing the soundproof egg crate-lined studio so securely that when the door closed my ears would pop. For a moment, it would feel like a coffin; small, padded, deathly quiet and deeply lonely. I would readjust the too-large headphones that would always slip backwards off my head and wait. Finally, the director, my lifeline, appeared in the glass window and I would get a silent point to say the lines that were printed out in front of me. Giant doe eyes could not help with this job; it was a new kind of acting. It might not have had my beloved on-set ambiance, but this particular gig was still incredibly exciting. I was going to be on The Care Bears.
Now, just to clarify, I was not a Bear. That would have been too good to handle. I played the role of a little girl who was so afraid of bugs that the Bears flew down from their cozy clouds just to lend a hand. They came to teach me about all the wonderful things that creepy-crawlies could do and showed me that there was nothing to fear. I learned how to enunciate clearly and use my voice instead of my eyes. I learned that voice-overs always need to be “bigger” than film, where you can use your whole body to portray a feeling. It all felt a little over-the-top, but the fact that a cartoon Care Bear hugged a cartoon me was the stuff of dreams.
I continued to do some other types of voice-over work, more cartoons, and commercials. I was hired to re-do another girl’s dialogue because the producers hadn’t been satisfied with her work and they wanted me to “clean it up.” I sat in that same little box of a room and dubbed her lines, matching them to her moving mouth. I have no recollection of what the project was, but I do remember having a line about Brian Boitano. When it was done, it looked pretty cohesive. The producers had accomplished their goal, which was to get rid of the original actress’s stilted delivery and make it sound more natural.
While it was nice to have a gig, I felt awful for that little girl. She was about seven years old, just like me, and I wondered how she would feel when her family and friends gathered around the TV to watch her big performance. Would she be confused or embarrassed when she saw herself open her mouth and heard my voice came out? Would her family comfort her? Would they make up a story about why the producers had to re-do her lines? Would her friends ask why she sounded different and would she have to explain why I was brought in? Would she want to act again or would she feel so humiliated that she would just quit?
Until that moment it had all just been playing Barbie dolls and dice games. Now, I had taken something away from someone. I was a traitor. A little bit deeper than that was another thorny feeling: if she was a bad actor and I was brought in to fix her work, what did that make me? I must be good. I swelled a little, feeling like I could be relied on to sweep in and make it all better. It made me wonder if this was how the world worked—were accomplishments so limited that I could only have something because someone else didn’t have it? Did success always depend on my ability to grab it out of someone else’s hands? Was victory always going to feel so dirty? It was my first adrenaline hit from the entertainment industry and it felt like a double-edged sword. That sword and I would get to know each other quite well.
It was a common occurrence for working kids to receive little treats after they behaved well for the casting directors, much like performing seals being thrown dead fish. For many young actors, auditions were followed by trips to the mall where candy and stuffed animals were tossed at them as rewards for well-memorized lines and professional chit-chat with producers. Even at the time, the blatant bartering between parent and child seemed creepy. This was different territory than getting a gold star sticker for making your bed. With money at stake, the focus shifts and that tension was obvious.
Bribery was not necessary for me because I really liked auditions. They were fun chances to go new places, learn new things, and get out of school. I loved reading scripts and learning how writers created story arc and character development. I liked memorizing lines, pulling them apart, reordering them and putting them back together. I played with words like some kids played with Legos. Milkshake rewards were superfluous.
Casting session waiting rooms were usually filled with other little girls with their mothers (or the occasional dad) who accompanied them. It looked like the sidelines of a soccer game, except instead of cheering for goals, everyone was rooting for speaking parts. Some parents were pushy, obsessively brushing their prodigy’s hair and making them recite their lines just once more, and not so fast this time. It was cringe-worthy. The kids rolled their eyes and tried to push away the hands that were trying to smooth down their bangs or pinch their cheeks to cause a “natural” pink glow. Sometimes the moms themselves were done-up with fresh perms and elaborate eye-shadow, as if they were prepared to jump in front of the casting director themselves, should the need for a mother-type character suddenly arise.
In contrast, my mom attended my auditions in her standard outfit of jeans, a baggy t-shirt that was suitable for home renovation work, and no makeup. She would walk past the empty folding chairs, choosing instead to sit cross-legged on the floor, usually near a ficus plant, where she would flip through an old Reader’s Digest. At one audition filled with particularly fancy moms, I took notice of my mother’s hair. A few days earlier she had been tugging at it in the mirror, saying she needed a cut.
“But I just hate going to that haircut place. There are too many mirrors and it smells weird. Why don’t you just do it?” She suggested to me.
We dug through my plastic pencil case, dumping out chewed up erasers and leaking markers and found a pair of scissors with bright orange handles. And I cut her hair in the TV room. Clumps of curls fell to the floor and the cats batted them around. I squinted and looked at her from different angles, making minor adjustments like the hair stylists on set did. When it was done, it didn’t look terrible. Dark, curly hair is mercifully forgiving. It didn’t look like a nine-year-old had cut it. It looked more like a twelve-year-old had cut it.
It seemed unlikely that any of the pushy, primped moms asked their daughters to cut their hair with a pair of safety scissors. My mom was just different. There was no grasping, no pushing, no clamoring for attention. There was just the profound sense that this was simply what we did, because sitting at an audition for Sears was a totally normal thing to be doing on a Tuesday afternoon.
My mother seemed to live in a backwards world where unusual things, like collecting photos of my entirely alive father to be used in a shoot to represent “the dead dad,” put her in this state of confident ease. Anything mundane, like making me a dentist appointment or cooking dinner left her looking uncomfortable and uncertain. She was built for adventure and unusual circumstances, but nothing in her life before me would have indicated that. Mom lived most of her life in the town she was born in, down the street from the hospital where her father took his first and last breaths. There was no precedent for her endless capacity for the extraordinary. But if there were ever a crisis or strange goings-on, my mother was the one you wanted by your side, smoothing things over and enveloping you in her coolness. Her confidence led me to never question our life. I would have been more likely to wonder if clothing was really a public necessity.
One of my first starring roles was in a kids’ TV movie where I had to fight ghost pirates. I was nine years old and received sword fighting lessons on the deck of a pirate ship in the icy waters off the coast of Nova Scotia. We worked mostly nights; filming would begin at 10 p.m. and finish up well after sunrise. I liked feeling like a vampire, falling into bed at the hotel as regular people were just emerging from their rooms, in search of coffee and muffins.
The TV movie was called Trick or Treasure, and it received good reviews. I was praised for my performance, which the press called “beguiling,” and they threw around words like “genius.” They quoted my cast mates who reported that I was a “fantastic professional who never made an error,” and they told anecdotes about what I was like on set. They noted specific things that I had said or done and even though it was positive, it all felt like gossip. It was suddenly clear that I was constantly being watched. My behavior was being closely monitored so that it could be recorded for the world to read in the TV Guide.
By the way that other people reacted to the press, it seemed like I was supposed to feel something like pride. I didn’t. I wanted to hide. It was uncomfortable to have people looking at me or talking about me, even if they were saying nice things. In clichéd Canadian style, I had been raised to be humble. We considered birthday parties to be a little boastful and grandiose. In my family, pride was considered to be the greatest imaginable sin. I think my parents would have been okay with me being a drug dealer, just as long as I didn’t brag about how many clients I had. So, how was I supposed to react when my dad’s work colleagues had a t-shirt printed up for him with one of my glowing reviews on it?
I was confused about who I was supposed to be. My family always told me to just do my best, but my best seemed to be getting me the kind of attention that conflicted with the reserved values I had been raised with. Later in life, I was on an airplane and was dismayed to realize that the in-flight movie was one of mine, Beautician and the Beast. I was in a middle seat in coach on the red-eye flight and didn’t look anything like the actress on the screen. She had perfect hair and makeup and was even wearing a tiara in one scene. The real life sweatpants, puffy eyes, and frizzy hair didn’t correlate.
I put the blanket over my head and prayed that the people next to me would be more interested in the Sky Mall magazine than the movie. I tried to fall asleep in the scratchy wool tent I had made myself, but I ended up listening to people as they watched the movie. I hoped they were laughing at the right parts. I was invested and mortified, in equal measure. It was a dichotomy that became very familiar and impossible to reconcile. But maybe that was just the price of being in films. Wasn’t everyone’s life complicated and full of tradeoffs?
