FELICITY JONES

They think I lied. I didn’t lie! I had an active imagination but I didn’t lie about this. It was a brain tumor! Jesus Christ!

 

The deadline had come and gone. I had finished the script, I really had. But it still didn’t work. It needed tweaking. I told them down at Universal that it was almost ready. Give me a couple of weeks to tweak the stupid thing.

 

It was a genre picture. I had never done a genre picture before. New rules I had to learn. Very strict ones. Movie haiku. I held my breath and went for it. Stretched myself.

I always take my time. I’m slow. Sue me but everyone in the business knows that going into it and if you can’t deal with it, don’t fucking hire me!

 

So I missed the deadline. No one panics. Not yet. We agree on another deadline. That one comes and goes. Tempers under control, okay good. Another deadline. My manager is now starting to crack at the seams. Pieces of him are starting to fall off. The Universal people are getting ugly.

 

Look, I had a reputation for being excellent at my craft. Then I finished the thing and started having a brain tumor.

 

I called the studio. The script is close I said but I can’t finish it because I have a brain tumor. They thought I lied. I didn’t lie! I didn’t! I could feel it throbbing in my cranium. It was like I was having a baby in my head. Like Athena was pounding the inside of my face with her big Bronze Age spear and this tumor started assuming shapes.

 

The shapes of an ex-husband. Screaming at me for being lazy and indecisive. Leaving me for a younger, happier version of myself. It was taking on the shape of famous people. Joan of Arc was being burned at an imaginary stake in my mind every night. I could hear the fire in my sleep. I could smell the smoke. The doctor said phantom smells were the first sign of a brain tumor. But it was the screaming that convinced me.

 

It wasn’t my screaming. It was the screaming of the brain tumor that had assumed the shape of Sharon Tate in my brain, this blob of extra-busy brain cells that multiplied and conquered and assumed the shape of famous victims.

 

I had the operation. They took the tumor out of my head. I finished the script and the studio made the movie and I was nominated for my third Academy Award. Awesome dress.

I kept the tumor. I kept it in my house. It’s in the refrigerator in a Tupperware-like container. It’s now in the shape of, well, oddly enough, me. It’s a little miniature me that I talked to and got advice from and all the neighbors and agents in town and actors who owed their careers to me thought I was crazy. But I wasn’t. I didn’t lie.

 

My tumor got on the phone and lied for me.