I believe that we as human beings are infinitely valuable, and entirely unimportant. We are infinitely small specks of sand in an infinitely large mosaic of infinitely small specks of sand. If you can grasp that, then your ego can let go of your pride, your hubris, and your fear. You will be ready to say, “It’s not about me. The world’s not about me. But my world is about me. I am about me, and I will love me.”
• • •
The ego is a fascinating thing, and it has one prime function: survival. It’s tied directly to our sympathetic nervous system, which is what kicks on when we feel threatened; our modes of fight, flight, or freeze. Its goal is to protect you at all costs. It will do anything it has to do to get you safely into bed each night. A healthy ego, responding to everyday challenges, does so in a perfectly normal way. You encounter a setback or challenge in life, and a mature ego helps you assert yourself calmly and confidently in order to solve the problem. But an immature ego falls back into the most extreme versions of survival. Every “threat” is met with a response similar to that of our most primitive selves. A simple daily challenge could be seen and felt like a lion stalking you on the savanna. Your ego kicks into fight-or-flight, and you do everything you can to avoid confronting the lion because the lion is going to eat you.
For a child, still developing and still unformed, an abusive mother is a lion on the savanna. Only you can’t run away from her. She’s your mother. So what your ego does is it creates all manner of defense mechanisms that allow you to evade and deflect and absorb the fear and the pain that you feel. I think of the ego as being like your armor, or an exoskeleton. It’s shielding us. When trauma comes along and smacks you, your ego takes the blows. It may teach you to repress negative feelings and memories. It may teach you to take the anger you feel toward your abusive parent and displace it by bullying yourself or others. These coping mechanisms are unhealthy and bad, but our ego is doing them for the right reason: to protect us. In the short term, they help us. In the long run, not so much.
As my ego grew, it built up an elaborate system of defenses to protect me from the trauma I was suffering at home. It wrote scripts for me to follow every time I found myself in trouble. My ego taught me to self-medicate my pain with sex and drugs and alcohol, for example. But far and away, the single biggest defense mechanism my ego created for me was in my work. I found entertainment as a way of survival. As an adolescent, throwing myself into high school and community theater gave me a place where I felt safe and protected and appreciated. I could go out onstage every night and create joy in a hundred smiling faces. Then, after the curtain fell, I got to go out and party surrounded my friends who loved me and supported me. It was great. It protected me. It worked. Every time I felt pain, or was even afraid that I might feel pain, my body knew what to do: Get onstage. Create joy. Call a bunch of friends. Throw a party. Self-medicate. Rinse. Repeat.
I learned to follow that script to the letter. It became so ingrained in who I was that I forgot it was something I had learned—and could therefore unlearn. And you have to unlearn it at some point, because at some point it stops working. The ego, for all it does to protect you, can also be insanely crippling. Because every blow to your armor leaves a mark, a dent here and a crinkle there. As the years pass, you’re walking around thinking that you’re still pretty smooth and intact, but you’re not. You’re relying more and more on this armor that’s completely cracked and warped and misshapen. Inside of that armor, you’re not standing tall and hale and healthy. You’re all bent and warped and misshapen too.
The hard truth that I’ve learned is that your ego can only protect you for so long, and it can never actually heal you. Indeed, it becomes an impediment to the healing you need. The only way to get where you ultimately need to go is to not rely on your ego anymore. You have to shed your armor and stand naked and exposed and confront the pain and the trauma that you’ve been running from. Only then will you find healing and enlightenment and peace.
The stronger your ego is, the harder it is to let it go. I had, and still have, one hell of an ego. That fucker is strong. To endure all the childhood abuse that I did and still make it all the way to my late thirties without the slightest awareness of how damaged I was? That’s some industrial-grade armor plating right there. But ultimately, in the end, it failed me, particularly when it came to the one area where it had given me the most support: my work.
Hollywood is not community theater, not by a long shot. The scripts that I learned to follow in my youth didn’t necessarily translate when I moved from one to the other. Arriving in Los Angeles and seeing so much inefficiency and inhumanity on display, I couldn’t believe the way that the system worked—or, rather, didn’t work. Maybe it’s because of the environment I was raised in, but ever since I was a kid, born with this particular head and this particular heart, I have been constantly driven to evaluate systems and institutions, to deconstruct them, to figure out what works and what doesn’t and why it works or doesn’t work. It’s why I was so obsessed with that book, The Way Things Work, which broke down different machines to show how they functioned inside. Which can be maddening, to be honest, because you aren’t satisfied a lot of the time with how and why things are done.
Because of my engineer’s mind and my empathetic heart, I’ve always bucked when I feel like something is broken to the point where it’s inhumane, or inefficient, which are often one and the same. The engineer in me associates inefficiency with inhumanity, because anything that’s inefficient wastes people’s time and energy, two of the most finite and precious resources we have in this world. Therefore, to waste someone’s time, to steal someone’s time, is also inhumane.
Words like inhumane may seem strong when talking about something like the business of Hollywood, but there are differing levels of inhumanity. The fact is that anything that treats people as a means to an end and not as an end in and of themselves is, to some degree or other, devaluing and dehumanizing to them. It is another form of abuse.
Because I felt so little love at home growing up, and because I had no love for myself, I’d found it in high school drama and in community theater. Those environments were genuinely supportive and rewarding. When you’re a student, your education and development are the point of the whole endeavor. You are treated as the end and not merely as the means. In Hollywood, the opposite is true most of the time.
Being a professional actor is like being a door-to-door salesman, only instead of a vacuum cleaner, the product you’re selling is yourself. Imagine going door to door and trying to convince every person you meet to like you, and 99 percent of the people say, “No, I don’t like you.” Now, put a rational, healthy person in that circumstance and they will understand that it isn’t personal. The casting director who doesn’t want to hire you, they’re not trying to hurt you as a person. They’re just trying to make their movie, and you’re not right for the role. But good luck trying to convince a twenty-one-year-old man-child with massive mommy issues that it isn’t personal.
The way the audition process works today is that everyone tapes themselves on their phones. But back in the day, what they’d do is they’d take a pack of hungry actors and they’d cram them into a waiting room. Then, one by one, they’d call you into a little sterile room and the camera would roll and they’d give you a nod and you’d “act.” It was basically like somebody saying, “Dance, monkey!” and then yanking your chain and watching you dance.
For an actor, every time you go through one of these cold auditions, it’s like jumping out of an airplane. It’s that pit-of-your-stomach feeling you get with the tick-tick-tick-tick of the roller coaster that’s about to go over the first big drop. You’re standing up there, naked, and saying, “Judge me! Tell me if I’m good enough! Tell me if you like me!” For me, it’s far more intense, far more nerve-racking than actually being on a film or TV set. And let’s not forget that we’re talking about actors here. Ours is an industry made up almost exclusively of people who for whatever reason need to go out and get emotional validation from strangers. Yet we’ve taken these extremely vulnerable people and put them through a system designed to inflict the maximum amount of anxiety and abuse. When you start out, everyone tells you, “We think you’re going to be the next Tom Hanks” and “We’re going to make you a star” and blah blah blah. They’ll sign you up on the off chance you might be valuable someday. If you are, great, and if not, whatever. Then they’ll hand you off to some junior agent while they focus on their bigger talent, and all the while they’re hunting for a younger, hotter monkey who’ll be happy to replace you at a moment’s notice.
My mom was deceptive and manipulative, to the degree where it was insane to watch. She would charm people. As an actor, I was learning at the master’s feet, because she was such a chameleon.
That’s often the way Hollywood works. You are almost always the means to another person’s end. It’s a system designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the “wheat” sometimes isn’t the people who have the most talent. It’s the people who have the most emotional capacity and wherewithal to survive the gauntlet of navigating the troubled waters of the entertainment industry.
Getting cast in Less Than Perfect when I was twenty-one was a godsend. I was now consistently working in Hollywood. No more need for bussing tables or washing cars. I was making good money, and because it was a comedy, I got to make people laugh on a regular basis. Most of those four years felt happy, but unbeknownst to me my unresolved trauma was still guiding my ego in unhealthy ways. Booze, cigarettes, and girls started to creep back into my life after I was pretty straight edge for a few years. Because twenty-one-year-old me was completely unaware that even landing your dream job of being on television doesn’t actually substitute for true self-worth. But hey, I was having fun and bringing joy and had no elder to guide me, so my ego was having a blast.
But then fast-forward four years. I had lost the woman I thought was destined to be my wife, Less Than Perfect had ended, and as much as I wish that it would have been a platform to attract more work, the show didn’t really do that for me. I found myself once again at sea in the endless door-to-door rejection that was the audition circuit. This would have been a great time for me to go to therapy. This would have been a great time for someone who loved me and knew more about mental health than I did to grab me by the scruff of the neck and throw me into a therapist’s office and say, “I’m doing this for your own good.” But unfortunately, I didn’t have that person in my life. So: more self-medication, more anxiety, more depression.
For the longest time, I couldn’t see the wounds that my parents had inflicted on me. I couldn’t see that my relationship to work was slowly killing me. I was blind to those things.
You might think that landing the lead role in a network television show, as I did with Chuck, would have mitigated all those recurring fears and anxieties. It didn’t. Chuck, while never a huge hit, always had a dedicated and loyal fan base, which was wonderful. I loved that I got to bring people joy. The feedback I needed was never just the love from the fans. It wasn’t just from the roar and the laughter of the crowd.
FANS
The danger of externalizing one’s self-worth is that you’ve given over control of how you feel about yourself to forces beyond your control. It’s like pegging your emotions on the weather: it’s hot or it’s cold, it’s rainy or it’s dry, and your feelings fluctuate accordingly; you have no internal thermostat to maintain a constant temperature. It’s an unhealthy behavior that can take on many forms.
A lot of actors find the love and admiration they need from their fans, from the roar of a crowd and the waves of laughter they get from a live audience. I do too. It feels good. But fans were never my drug of choice. The first people I would call Zac Levi “fans” were people I met after shows up in Ojai, kids and even adults who’d come to repeat showings of Godspell or Big River, people who saw talent in me and believed in me. When Less Than Perfect launched, we had people who loved the show so much they’d come to multiple tapings. This was in 2002, before social media blew up, but IMDb had these message boards where fans would gather to talk, and nobody from ABC or our show was going on and using them in any kind of official way. So I started going on, chatting with people, answering their questions, and that started an interesting back-and-forth cyber relationship with fans.
As the age of social media has ramped up and taken over, I still do the same. Like almost everyone, I struggle to have a healthy relationship with the online world and the compulsions it brings out in us. Luckily, however, I haven’t become someone who’s on Instagram every minute like a lab rat, clicking the lever to try to get a little pellet of attention to make me feel better. Which has been good for me, because fame is fickle. It will wax and wane, and at some point, it will go away forever, and if you’re relying on it as an emotional crutch, you’re in for a major letdown.
So despite all my insecurities, I’ve always felt like I managed to keep my relationship with the audience in perspective. One reason for that is because my relationship with an audience has always been more about giving joy than receiving it. I love to entertain, to give laughter to people. If they want to express their appreciation for my work in return, that’s wonderful, but the truth is (a) my enjoyment was seeing their enjoyment, and (b) when you don’t love yourself, being on the receiving end of someone’s compliments can actually make you feel a hell of a lot worse, because you don’t believe what they’re telling you.
The real satisfaction I got from my work was when I’d get a call from my agent saying, “Hey, they’re interested in you for this job.” That would give me a big dopamine boost: ping! It meant that my hard work and my talent were being recognized. Then the call after that would be, ‘“Hey, they want you for this job.” Another dopamine boost: ping! Then the call after that would be, “Hey, look at this great deal that they’re offering you, which means they value you and we are good to go.” Ping! Ping! Then the call after would be, “Hey, we’ve heard from set that you’re crushing it and everyone’s happy with your performance.” Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!
I loved that shit. I fed off it, because it was love from the decision-makers and authority figures in the industry. In other words: from the parents. I was still subconsciously looking for love and approval and protection from grown-ups, the same love and approval and protection I never really got from my parents. Receiving that approval at all those steps along the way meant that I was accomplishing what I had set out to do. And if I wasn’t getting those signals of approval, then that meant I was screwing up somehow. I was failing.
Show business has always been a business. In any business the bottom line is the bottom line, and in Hollywood people have been exploited and chewed up and spit out for the sake of the bottom line since the days of the silver screen. But being on a network show at that point in time was precarious, as network television was starting to die on the vine. TiVo was allowing viewers to fast-forward right through the commercials that paid for everything, premium cable shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men were stealing the prestige and the eyeballs, reality TV was clogging up the airwaves at a tenth of the cost of scripted shows, and the streaming revolution was waiting just over the horizon, ready to clobber the medium with a final death blow.
The only way to squeeze more profit out of a scripted network show was to jam in more and more ads, to the point where shows were breaking for commercial so frequently they were less and less enjoyable to watch. Any and all aspirations about artistic quality had to be regularly hurled overboard in a frantic and futile effort to stay afloat. It was all about wringing every last drop of value out of this rapidly depreciating asset before it died for good. The bottom line was the only line that mattered anymore.
Because of that, Chuck was perhaps the most bittersweet experience of my life, one of the greatest blessings I’ve ever been given and also one of the most difficult trials I’ve ever endured. In the “count your blessings” column: I was the lead in a prime-time TV show. I was making good money. I got to work with an incredible cast and crew. They truly were like a surrogate family, and I love them like family to this day.
But the trials of Chuck were many. One was that the show was not a hit but it was also not not a hit. We always did just okay, and that meant we were always on the bubble. Every year, the executives at NBC would say, “Okay, Chuck is not performing the way we want it to. Tell Warner Brothers we don’t know if we’re bringing it back or not.” Then they’d put a pin in us and go and develop all these other pilots for all these other shows that they hoped would be amazing enough to potentially replace us. Every year, miraculously, most of those wouldn’t test well enough, and then they’d come back to Warner Brothers at the last minute and say, “Alright, we’ll bring back Chuck, but we’re going to pay less for it this time.” So then Warner Brothers would come to the producers and say, “You’ve gotta cut your budget.”
So every year our execution was stayed and every year we were forced to come back and do more and more with less and less. Chuck would have been a difficult show even in the best of circumstances. It was an hour-long, single-camera action dramedy with a ton of fight scenes, car chases, and explosions. Our first season, we averaged sixteen-hour days. If we ever got a fourteen-hour day we were thrilled—a fourteen-hour day was like a blessing from heaven—and we were shooting like that five days a week. But Fridays always bled into Saturday—which we called Fraturdays—and almost every Fraturday we were walking off the stage to go home around seven in the morning. And because Chuck Bartowski was in virtually every scene on the show, I got a day off once in the bluest of moons. To say it was detrimental to my overall well being would be a gross understatement.
I was losing my mind, but I was 100 percent committed to doing whatever it took for the show to succeed. For years, I told the producers and executives, “Whatever you need me to do. If it helps the show, I will go and do it.” If they said, “Jump,” I said, “How high?”
I did every marketing stunt they ever asked for. I turned myself into a human billboard for the show. At the same time, the show itself was becoming a sort of billboard for all manner of products inside the show. As each season passed and the tighter the budgets got, the more we came to rely on product placement inside the episodes. The product placement got so heavy-handed at times that Chuck became kind of infamous for it. The number of Subway sandwiches we highlighted in that show could have fed a small nation.
In one episode we were on a spy mission, staking out the bad guy’s house in a Toyota van. One of the other characters asked what we were doing in this van, and my line was something like, “Well, my car is getting fixed, so Ellie and Devon lent me their van. Did you know it has nine-point surround-sound Dolby digital speakers and a full flat third row?” This was the dialogue we were being asked to perform in the middle of a dangerous spy mission. I don’t blame the writers for these ridiculous moments, but I sure wish we hadn’t had to do them. The truth is it was demoralizing. We weren’t bringing the audience joy. We were selling them cars. It was no way to value people, no way to value the show, no way to value the audience. In the end, I would say that as the practice spread across network TV it was even bad for the bottom line, because it compromised the quality of the programming and only drove people to run to streaming and cable that much faster in search of something better to watch.
I would have done anything to make Chuck work. I would have driven Toyota minivans from coast to coast if I’d been asked and it would have actually helped. I was driven by my desire to bring joy to the fans who loved the show. I was driven by my love for my fellow cast and crew and my desire to protect them. But I was also being driven by my own insecurities, by my need to be perfect to avoid feeling like a failure, by my need for approval and acknowledgment from the decision-makers and my peers in the industry. Not only was I not getting it, I felt like I was getting the opposite of it.
In five years on Chuck, I gave every ounce of who I was to that show. I jumped through every hoop. On top of the eighty-hour weeks, I made every public appearance, tap-danced and schmoozed through every industry dinner, whatever I needed to do to help the show survive. They took every ounce that I gave them. But if I went back and asked for any kind of consideration in return—say a lighter shooting schedule, or a raise—the studio head at the time told me flat out, “You know, you’re lucky to have a job.” He told me, in essence, that ultimately I wasn’t worth very much to them, and because deep down I already believed I was worthless, it was a debilitating cycle in which to be stuck. It was terrible for my physical, emotional, and mental health. And because I didn’t understand my true motivations for doing it—in other words, that I was looking for love and approval from people who would never give it to me to try to fill this bottomless well of need inside of myself—I just kept doing it, even though it was slowly killing me. I’d fought so hard to escape my mom and put up boundaries between myself and my mom. And now: I’d gone to work for my mom.
By this point in human history and modern society we have constructed such a massive system of pressure that comes at us from all sides.
By any objective standard of “success” I had done well. Anyone who looked at me would have seen a TV star with fame and money. But given the nature of my job, being beholden to parental surrogates and authority figures who could seemingly never be pleased, what looked to the whole world like a “successful” acting job was in fact pouring salt in the wounds I’d endured all through my childhood. I had invested my entire sense of self-worth in a system that is not geared at all to care about my actual well-being as a person.
And yet: I never broke down. Never once in those five years did I experience the kind of mental collapse that would come later in Austin. Starting from childhood, my ego had built up all these defense mechanisms to protect me from my mom’s abuse, and my defenses held. All my tricks and tools and schemes of self-medicating and propping myself up, they kept me going. And therein lies the irony of what the ego does. It creates this armor to protect you from abuse, but the armor that protects you from abuse is the very thing that allows you to continue abusing yourself. You keep going and rationalizing your abusive reality more and more, wholly unconscious of the fact that your armor is taking a beating and that eventually, inevitably, it’s going to crack.
By the time I landed in Austin in 2017, I was ready to crack. All of my traumas had started playing themselves out day after day. I was becoming, in the parlance of the industry, “difficult.” I had lost faith in the entire system, and in turn I’d lost my faith in nearly everyone in it. There’s a reason that actors, often more than those in other artistic disciplines, get pinned with being “difficult.” It’s because our names and faces are always the ones on the line. If a movie succeeds, we’re probably given too much of the credit, but when a movie sucks, we’re the first ones people blame. But filmmaking is an extremely collaborative medium. What you see on the screen is the result of the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, everyone from the set designers to the score composers.
And of all of those people, despite all the credit and blame we’re assigned, actors by and large, have very little power over the finished product. The writers, directors, and producers control most of what you say and do. The director and editor make all their cuts, and then, the executives have the final say on what the movie will ultimately be. They have total control over what parts of your performance they want the public to see, and in the wrong hands that can be a career killer. An astute critic or viewer will watch a film and recognize what’s the fault of the actor and what’s not, but for the average moviegoer, the movie’s success or failure is often inseparably attached to the faces that carry you through the story. Any time you make a film or a TV show, you carry a disproportionate amount of the liability for the finished product, but you have practically zero agency or power or control over how that product is ultimately made, other than just showing up and playing your individual role as best you can. For a class of people who are prone to anxiety and problems of self-image to begin with, it’s practically designed to engineer a mental breakdown. Add to that the modern pressure of social media, where everyone is judging you and giving you instant feedback on everything you do 24/7, and it’s a wonder people can even function.
All of that drama you see played out for public consumption in the tabloids, actors being difficult to work with or having temper tantrums or being divas, those are all manifestations of poor mental health. That person is scared inside. That person is being ripped apart by anxiety and fear. If you help them to be less scared, you will make better movies and everyone will be happier and wiser, not to mention wealthier, because you’ve made a better movie. But that’s not how Hollywood normally operates. It normally just milks people for as long as it can and then casts them aside when they’re deemed no longer milky enough.
From film to TV to music, the entertainment industry has given us countless examples of immensely talented people who are crippled by poor mental health and who have nobody around them capable or caring enough to shepherd them through the darkness. Yes, you have some agents and managers who try their best, but by and large nobody wants to upset the gravy train. Everybody’s happy to keep making money as long as they can still get the monkey to dance. But then once the monkey starts pulling on its rope and refusing to clang its cymbals, then all of a sudden it’s like, “Wow, this is a difficult monkey. Isn’t it strange that the monkey’s throwing shit on the walls after we locked it in a cage and made it dance for fifteen years? But hey, fuck that monkey. Let’s go get the hot, young monkey who doesn’t know any better.”
By 2017, closing in on thirty-seven-years old, I was no longer the hot, young monkey. Having failed in marriage and failed to fix my family or start a new family of my own, the only scrap of self-worth I had left was my career as an actor—or, more specifically, what the grown-ups and decision-makers in Hollywood thought of me as an actor. That was the last piece of the emotional scaffolding holding me up, and it was starting to buckle and fold.
My brief forays outside of TV into motion pictures had yielded me roles in Big Momma’s House 2, Thor: The Dark World, and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, but that was as far as I’d gone. I was becoming this guy who only did sequels, which made me always feel like the runner-up.
My whole career, even with Chuck, I thought I was failing because nothing I did ever put me into the next echelon where I was with all the cool kids doing all the cool kid movies and being a part of those conversations. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in, and that wrecked me on a regular basis. I always felt like I wasn’t doing something right or I wasn’t good enough, and when Chuck ended that feeling only multiplied.
The closest thing I had to real success in movies was voicing Flynn Rider in Tangled, Disney’s take on the Rapunzel fable. It was such an incredible experience and I’m so proud of it, and I think Disney absolutely crushed it. I still meet people all the time who saw and loved the movie, and that’s everything for me. But voice-over work isn’t accorded the same kind of respect as live action, so it did nothing to move me up to that next echelon.
One of the few developments that pulled me out of my funk, at least temporarily, was getting a call from James Gunn, who was directing the new Guardians of the Galaxy film for Marvel. He wanted me to come in and audition for the lead role of Star-Lord. I went in and auditioned. They liked me. Then I got a callback. I got a screen test. This was the actual lead in the next big Marvel franchise. I felt like I was soooo close. I even started to let myself think, Oh my God, this might actually happen . . .
But it didn’t happen. Chris Pratt, who was everyone’s first choice but who’d been saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it, finally agreed to do it, and that was that. In the moment, it sucked, obviously, because I had wanted it so much, not fully realizing the reasons why I felt I needed it. The psychological ramifications were only beginning, and over the course of the next few years, losing out on that part really started to wreck me.
Chris is a great guy and is super talented, and he deserves every bit of success he’s achieved, but for me, in that moment, it was soul crushing seeing his face plastered all over the world. His handsome mug was on every newsstand, every airport kiosk, one after another after another. It was this constant reminder: You blew it, Zac. You’re not good enough. You could have done it. It was so close, but you fucked it up. You just fucked it up. Chris was off on this incredible trajectory, and I wasn’t. At the time, it felt like one of those Sliding Doors moments, where you see how your whole life could have changed in an instant and gone a completely different and amazing direction. It was such a bitter pill to swallow.
Of course, that’s how it felt at the time. In hindsight, I know that I wasn’t ready for the responsibilities that would have come with that blessing. In the emotionally fragile state I was in, if I’d shot to the A-list like Chris had with Guardians, I might have crashed and burned in an even more grisly way than I eventually did. In hindsight, I know God was telling me that I needed to prepare myself for His blessings before He could give them to me. But boy, it didn’t feel that way at the time. At the time, it felt like nearly all the grown-ups and parents in the industry were united in a chorus of disapproval, telling me I was pathetic and worthless. The only offers I was getting were for more network television shows, which, given my experience with network television, was the last thing I wanted to do.
The only healthy comparison you can make is with your own self: to be a little stronger, wiser, and healthier than you were the day before.
There was only one place where my career had an actual pulse. While I’d been shooting Heroes Reborn up in Toronto I’d hosted this game show for Syfy called Geeks Who Drink. It was basically a televised version of the trivia night they hold down at your local bar or pub, a fun but admittedly lower-brow take on Jeopardy! That led to a relationship with the folks over at Syfy, and that led to a lot of other cool possibilities, like more game shows or maybe a late-night talk show for their network.
I was deeply ambivalent about it. I was sure if I went down that road, if I became a “TV personality,” that would be the end of me as an actor. Goodbye, blockbuster movies. So long, prestige television. I had a hard time coming to terms with the idea, to be honest. Had I built my whole career just to . . . host game shows? But on the other hand, I thought, when I managed to take my own hang-ups out of it, I still felt like my purpose in life was to entertain. And people like game shows. They bring a lot of joy to people, and if that’s how God wanted me to bring joy to people, then maybe that was the best thing for me after all. Either way, I desperately needed it to happen because my ego had hung my whole sense of self-worth on my career, at that moment it seemed like Syfy was the last, best, and only chance I had to stay afloat.
I was praying and praying, trying to figure out what God wanted me to do, and part of me deep down felt that God wanted me to get out of Hollywood. Leaving the inhumanity of LA had been a vision in the back of my mind ever since I first started working in the business, when I looked at Hollywood as a whole and thought, This is broken. There has to be a better way. That’s when I started thinking more about the dream that would become my move to Texas. With digital cameras and the internet and smartphones and social media, all the technology exists to build a studio where people not only work, but also live and play—an intentional community of performers and artists free to do what God intended them to do: entertain, bring joy, and make incredible art. For twenty years, this idea had been percolating in my mind, and the more I grew disillusioned with Hollywood, the more consideration I gave it.
I got it into my head that I was never going to be happy if I stayed in LA. I needed to go and try to make my new United Artists–style studio dream a reality, because I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t at least try. I was at the point where I realized it was now or never, time to piss or get off the pot. I didn’t have anything left to lose. Having researched a number of locations, I prayed and prayed over it and ultimately decided that Austin was where God was telling me to be.
I flew down with a couple of buddies who were business associates at the time. We drove around the outskirts of town, looking at big parcels of land and scouting it all out. Then, about thirty minutes east from downtown, I found it: the Promised Land. “This is it,” I said. “I can feel it in my gut. I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta do this.” I flew back to LA, sold my house in record time, pulled the rip cord, and jumped, putting most of my stuff in storage and packing the few things I thought I’d need into a U-Haul that I hooked to the back of my truck. Then I drove for two days straight to Texas.
I still believe that getting out of LA and moving to Texas was absolutely the right decision to make, but with hindsight I can say that I probably didn’t make it in the right way. In my mind, I was going to fix everything with this one grand gesture, but that is not how something as complex as the human machine gets fixed. I was going to pack up and leave all my problems behind. But when your problems are inside your head and your heart, you always end up taking them with you. Shocker. You can’t run away from yourself, as the saying goes. But I tried. I didn’t know how sad and broken I really was, and I’d got it in my mind that all I needed was to make a clean break from LA and go create this new world—a thing that would give me the self-worth I was no longer getting from Hollywood. But in the process, I pushed away all of the people who cared about me, and as I sped east on I-10 as fast as my truck could go, the darkness I thought I could escape was following right behind me, its shadow looming like a storm cloud high above, ready to swallow me up at any moment. I showed up in Texas with no girlfriend, no family, no friends, determined to do whatever I needed to do to make this new dream a reality. I quit smoking, I quit drinking, and then I lost my mind.
Our ego is an incredible survival tool, but it also holds on to old, incorrect thinking as a bad side effect. Let it go, and we can be healed through a renewing of our minds.
One afternoon, only a few weeks after I arrived, my agent called: the people at Syfy had decided not to move forward with our deal. That was it. I was done. In that moment, the armor that had been protecting me my whole life finally cracked. Since the day I’d discovered acting, I’d been able to survive all manner of abuse and heartache because of the validation and purpose I found in this one thing. Now I’d lost that one thing. I had nothing protecting me anymore, nothing holding me up, and I collapsed. The next thing I knew I was in a small village in the Philippines, sobbing uncontrollably in the throes of a complete mental breakdown.
Not getting to host a game show on the Syfy network was the tiniest of defeats. It was nothing compared to the psychic wound of losing out on the Guardians of the Galaxy role or having my marriage fall apart. But it was precisely the fact that it was so insignificant that made it feel so enormous. Even this little, meaningless thing couldn’t go right for me. I had invested every ounce of my self-worth in my identity as an entertainer, and now even the thing that I didn’t want didn’t want me.
I had lost everything, ruined everything. I was a worthless human being. Chris Pratt’s happy face was still staring out at me from every magazine cover in the universe, and all I could do was shuffle around Austin like a zombie, thinking about all the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas of the things in life that had passed me by. I didn’t know how to love myself, and didn’t know how to stop beating the absolute shit out of myself. Luckily, through the grace of God, and help from family and friends, I managed to stumble my way to Connecticut where I fell through the door of a therapist’s office and said, “I don’t know who I am. I need to know who I am and how I got here, and I need to make sure that doesn’t happen again because I don’t want to die, but I don’t understand why I should keep living.”