It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.
• • •
By the time I left Connecticut, I thought I was good. I had gone through this therapy, done this deep dive, and was earnestly on the road to finally loving myself. I felt like that was God telling me I was back on me feet. I knew I wasn’t out of the woods entirely, but I felt like I had a compass and a map and I knew where I was going. I felt like I could look forward to some smooth sailing, at least for a little while. Maybe some future trauma would come along and fuck with me, but as far as the past was concerned, I thought I was good to go.
I was wrong.
Maintaining your mental health is a lifelong process. It’s not a one-and-done. It’s not “I got sick. I took antibiotics. Now it’s gone and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.” Or, to compare it to caring for your teeth, if you don’t brush and floss and stay vigilant, you’re going to continue to have problems. Even if you go and get a root canal, if you don’t start practicing proper care and maintenance of your teeth, you’re just gonna keep needing more root canals.
I think part of the reason I was in denial about the never-ending aspect of coping with mental health was that, at the time, it felt like such a downer. It was depressing to think that I’d never put it behind me, that I would always be wrestling with these demons. I don’t think that way anymore. Learning to deal with our trauma and learning how to love ourselves is simply the business of life. It is part of what it means to be a life-form on this little blue dot. It is neither good nor bad—it simply is.
More than that, however, seeing mental health as a never-ending struggle actually helps you. Once you see this as a journey with peaks and valleys, once you understand that the good times won’t necessarily last forever, that gives you the perspective to finally understand that the bad times won’t last forever either. There is always a dawn that follows the darkness.
The morning after my breakthrough with Beth, I woke up to an email from one of my agents. Since everyone on my team knew not to bother me unless it was absolutely necessary, I was curious what was so urgent that this email had to be sent. So I clicked it open. “Hey, Zac,” it said. “So, we know you’re on a retreat and we don’t mean to bug you, but there’s another role in Shazam! they’d like you to read for. It’s a supporting role. The scene is attached. If you want to do it, you can put yourself on tape. If not, no worries. There’s no pressure. We’re just throwing this out there.”
Reading it, my initial reaction was to laugh, to be honest. The irony that Hollywood wanted to have me back to potentially smack me around even more while I’m literally still in therapy working out the initial beatings—it’s pretty funny when you think about it. Twisted, but funny. And it wasn’t my agency’s fault. I hadn’t told them the extent of how bad things had gotten, only that I needed some time away. Plus I was only just coming to understand the role that work had played in my poor mental health myself, so I couldn’t expect them to know. Still, it wasn’t an email I was ready to receive. I was still so unsure about my state of mind, about everything. I wrote back and said, “Hey, I need some time to process this. When does this need to be submitted by?
“No problem,” they wrote back. “End of day Friday would be great.”
For the next two days, I went about my regular appointments, mulling over what I should do. For so long I’d had so much of my self-worth wrapped up in what Hollywood thought of me, in thinking I was a failure because I hadn’t achieved everything I thought I was supposed to achieve. And I’d barely reached a point where I could acknowledge that that wasn’t true, that I hadn’t wasted my life, that I was where I was, and that was okay. But then I remembered that in life God is always using us for a greater purpose, for other people’s lives and the benefit of the world. We don’t get to dictate how that’s going to go, and maybe this email, this opportunity, was God reminding me that we always have to give our best to whatever is right in front of us.
So as Friday rolled around, all of that was sinking in, and I had the teeniest little pep in my step from the breakthrough I’d had with Beth. And the material was funny too. I liked it. It had a bit of back-and-forth dialogue at the beginning, but it was basically a monologue, so I could read it on camera by myself. Eventually, I decided to do it. I told myself that it wouldn’t affect me if they didn’t like me or if it didn’t go anywhere, because I wasn’t going to let my self-esteem get wrapped up in the answer. So that afternoon, I finished up my workout at the gym, headed back to my room, and, still wearing my sweaty workout clothes, I took my phone and propped it up precariously on the dresser, using two books to pin it at the right angle. Then I hit record and did the scene. I did the first take and liked it. Then I started to do a second take, and I kind of flubbed it halfway through, so I stopped. Then I thought, “Well, I liked the first one, so whatever, I’ll send that one.” I attached the file to an email and sent it off into the ether.
That was around 5:30 p.m. Connecticut time, which means it was around 2:30 in the afternoon in LA. I didn’t think I’d hear anything back until the middle of the next week, at the earliest. Then, about an hour later, my phone started blowing up. It was my agent.
“Hey,” he said. “So, uh . . . everybody saw your tape, and not only did they love your read, but they think that you could be their Shazam.”
“Wait, what?” I said, completely in shock. “That’s crazy. I thought they cast it a month ago.”
“Nope,” he said. “That didn’t go through. They’ve been camera-testing different people, but they haven’t nailed the role down yet, and they think you could be their guy. They want to know if you can put yourself on tape for the part. It’s three scenes.”
Unlike the monologue I’d done, all of them required a significant scene partner to act opposite, and I didn’t have anybody I could read with because I was in this house in the middle of a tiny New England town excavating thirty-seven years of emotional and psychological trauma. I couldn’t exactly go to my psychiatrist and say, “Hey, would you mind running some scenes with me?”
“Well,” I replied, “I’m in the middle of deep therapy in Connecticut, and I don’t have anybody to run these lines with.”
“Can you fly in?”
He wanted me to leave? Leaving meant missing out on my last week of wrap-up sessions with my doctors. “No,” I said. “No can do.”
He told me to stand by, and after some back-and-forth with the film’s producers, it was decided that I would audition via Skype the following Monday for the director, David F. Sandberg.
Monday afternoon David called, and we chatted a bit. I told him I was sorry I couldn’t be there in person because I was away at this healing retreat, and he was cool with it. Then I took my iPad and he took his iPad and he hit record on his end and, with his casting director reading the lines through the screen to me in this house in Connecticut, we ran through the scenes. We did it twice, maybe three times. It was pretty quick and easy. I said, “Cool, thank you very much. Have a good day,” shut down my iPad, and went back to my journey of healing. I felt good about it, to be honest. I didn’t want to go getting my hopes up, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, I wonder how this is going to play out.
I didn’t have to wonder long. Maybe a half-hour later, my agent was blowing me up again.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” he said. “You gotta come to LA. Warner Brothers says they want to fly you in for a proper camera test, not you on an iPad. They need that. It’s between you and one other guy. If you don’t come in, they’re going to give it to him. If you do come in, the tide is shifting in your favor, and there’s a strong possibility you’ll get this job.”
At that point, my head practically exploded. I started pacing around my room. My mind was racing. What the fuck is going on here? Part of what had put me in this place, after all, on top of my mom and everything else, was that I’d been so needy for approval that I’d allowed myself to suffer so much getting chewed up in the Hollywood machine. I’d taken my entire sense of self-worth and handed it over to some people who didn’t really value me as a human being. Now, it felt like Hollywood was saying, “Hey, leave the place you’re at—the place we helped put you—and come back. We have this shiny new thing for you. It’s your wildest dreams come true. You’ll be a superhero! Finally!” I felt like Michael Corleone from The Godfather Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
The whole thing felt strange. I was obviously skeptical. All these alarm bells were going off. Was this God testing me? Was this the darkness tricking me? Because I knew it had to be something. This wasn’t normal. Either this call was the culmination of the work I’d been doing in this place, God opening a door for me because I was ready to handle it, or it was a lure of the flesh trying to take me away from finishing the work and getting in a truly healthy frame of mind. I’d only completed three weeks of therapy, and I still had six days left. And while by that point I was actually feeling much better and stronger, how was I to know how ready and healed I was? I didn’t even know if I was healthy enough to go back to my regular life, let alone go and carry a major Hollywood superhero movie with thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars depending on me. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, and I was still struggling with being responsible for myself.
I went downstairs and found Beth. Given how much I needed her on this journey, I have no doubt God was responsible for putting her on duty that afternoon. I pulled her aside, laid out the whole situation for her, and explained my dilemma. I went through all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but then there were also all the reasons why I felt like I should. In some ways, it just felt right. I’d always dreamed of playing a role like Tom Hanks in Big, being a kid who magically becomes a grown-up, and here was that same story only with superpowers, which was such a fun idea to play with. On top of that, the story of Shazam has a Biblical connection as well—albeit a subtle, yet still profound, connection. It’s a story set in a world of gods and demigods, and the main enemy is the Seven Deadly Sins. I’d be playing a superhero whose name is an acronym that starts with “S”—“S” for Solomon, the wisdom of Solomon. Movies about mutants and radioactive spiders are cool, but this was about a godly/godlike man fighting literal sin incarnate. I mean, c’mon!
Then there was the character of Billy Batson himself: an orphan, abandoned and rejected by his own mother. I wasn’t an actual orphan, but I might as well have been in some ways. I kind of had parents growing up, but I kind of didn’t. And I certainly didn’t have any parents after I was twenty-one. I looked at this character and saw so much of myself on the page, this kid who wants to find acceptance and family. I suppose you can find correlations in anything if you’re looking hard enough, but I felt so many connections to the story and the character that I had to believe it was more than mere coincidence.
“Beth,” I said, “I honestly don’t know what to do.”
“Well,” she said, “let’s pray about it. Maybe we’ll hear something or feel something.”
So we did. We sat down on the living room sofa and prayed. After a few moments, we both looked at each other, and we both agreed: This wasn’t some trick. It was the fruit of my coming to Connecticut and doing the work that I’d been doing. And the reason I knew that was true was because when I prayed I felt . . . nothing. I didn’t feel the crippling anxiety or the jittery nerves that I’d felt, you know, for most of my life. But I also didn’t feel giddy about it. I wasn’t getting that sugar rush of approval I’d become addicted to, the thing that kept me going every time I performed or landed a gig. What I felt was the absence of those things, a lack of that anxiety and neediness and fear. I felt at peace. Which felt incredible. I knew that I could go to LA and audition for the job and, if I got it, that would be cool. And if I didn’t, that’d be cool too. It wouldn’t be the end of me. My sense of self-worth wouldn’t hinge on this.
We will be known by our fruits. And if one’s fruits aren’t those of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, then there’s a good chance they are the false prophets we’ve all been warned of.
Even as my faith has evolved over the years, one thing I have always held on to is the power of prayer and its ability to bring peace. And if prayer has real power behind it, Beth was absolute proof of that power. Faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain; I think Jesus talked about ideas like that for a reason. Ultimately, I’m not sure any of us can say who God is in all their facets and capacities. But it’s people like Beth who genuinely believe in the power of prayer, and her faith was bigger than a mustard seed, I can attest to that. It is said that wherever two or more are gathered in God’s name, God is there. And on that day, with Beth and I praying together as two, I found the peace I’d been searching for. I’d started this journey with Beth, and I ended this journey with Beth. She helped pray me back to life, and now she was praying me into the next part of my life. It felt genuinely, perfectly, poetic.
I went straight to my room, called the administrator, and explained the situation, saying that I thought I was in a good place, but I needed her to confer with my therapists to vouch for that fact, because I didn’t want to make that call on my own. She did, and a few hours later she emailed me to tell me everyone was confident that I was good to go. I went up to my room and started packing.
The next morning, I came downstairs to find Beth. I took her aside, and we shared a brief moment. We exchanged a few tears and some very honest words. “Zac,” she said, “it’s been a privilege to be God’s vessel of a momma’s love for you.” “You literally helped save my life,” I told her, “and you will always be in my life, whether you like it or not.” We both shared a laugh, said our goodbyes, and I was driven to the airport where I caught the first connecting flight to take me out to Los Angeles.
After a long day of airports and taxis, I checked into my hotel in Hollywood and got a good night’s sleep. The next morning, a production assistant arrived to take me to the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, rolling up in this little white Honda Civic. I remember how small it was because it was not designed for a person of my size; not many cars are, I suppose. I folded myself into the front seat next to him, and off we went, chatting along the way. He was this eager, earnest, affable kid—he honestly reminded me of myself when I was starting in the business. It was sweet to look over and be reminded of the way I used to be and to think about all the miles I’d traveled and everything I’d been through in the years since, all of which had led me to this moment.
Once we arrived at Warner Brothers, we went up to the New Line Cinema offices, and I was escorted into the room where David and his casting team were waiting. Before we ran the scenes, we talked for a bit about the character and the story. The whole time I felt the same peace I’d felt while praying in Connecticut. We ran the scenes a couple of times, with David stopping to give me direction here and there between the takes. The whole meeting took, I don’t know, maybe half an hour, start to finish. Finally, he said, “Okay, I think I got what I need.”
“Cool,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
Then I walked out, folded myself back into this guy’s little Civic, rode back to the hotel, and that was that.
That afternoon I checked out and called my buddy Eric to see if I could stay at his place for a couple of days while I waited for the news. He said I could crash on his futon, which wasn’t even a futon but one of those miniature foam couches that kind of pulls out into something like a mattress on the ground. But I tell you what, even on that thing, I didn’t toss and turn one bit. Everything was cool.
The next morning, I got up and went to the gym to work out. I was on the bench press in the middle of a set when my phone rang. It was David.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s David Sandberg, and I’m calling to let you know that you’re my Shazam.”
And even then, in that moment, I was at peace. I didn’t rocket to the moon or feel some sense of validation filling an empty chasm inside me. It just felt right. I told David how grateful and excited I was. Then I said, “Well, thank you very much, sir. I’m going to get back to the bench press now, as it seems I’ll need to be doing this a lot. We’ll talk soon.”
Moving forward from that day, I actually let myself think, Okay, marathon finished. Finish line reached. I’m okay. And for the next couple of years, my mental health was pretty solid. Prior to Austin and Connecticut, I had a therapist in LA I saw during my divorce. I went back to him and I was talking to him every other week or so, and he helped a lot. I still had some rough moments here and there, for sure, but for the most part I was okay.
I wrapped up filming Shazam! and then flew to New York to do The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and that felt great because not only was I working with all these incredible people, I was finally getting to be a part of an award-winning show that got all the respect I always wished Chuck had received.
The only real problem during that time was that I still had all these digestive issues that were (theoretically) somehow linked to whatever I’d picked up in the Philippines. I’m still convinced that problem has been and continues to be a huge factor in my body chemistry being jacked up. It’s scary to have some undiagnosable, undiscoverable, very real problem inside of you. The hypochondriac in me was like, Is this cancer? Am I dying? It also breeds a great deal of distrust in the whole medical system, making you feel helpless and defeated and alone; I’ve since learned lot of the issues people have with parasites go hand in hand with anxiety and mental health. Finally my doctors discovered this amoeba in my body and prescribed me medication for that, and once I took it, I felt considerably better and my mind felt considerably better as well.
Once we share some vulnerable moment about ourselves, it’s insane how many people go, “Oh my God, me too!” So I don’t ever want to hide and not talk about the struggles that I’ve had.
Once Shazam! came out, I found myself with the biggest media platform I’d ever had. I was flying around the world on press junkets from Beijing to Mexico City, and I told my publicist from the beginning, “Hey, the only reason I’m even here to publicize this movie is because I went and did all that work on myself. So I think it’s my responsibility to use this opportunity of promoting the movie to talk about my mental health journey to getting this role, as much as I possibly can. It will be an incredible way to normalize and destigmatize mental health issues in general.”
They were receptive to the idea and, in addition to the usual late-night talk shows, I went and talked on a number of podcasts focusing on mental health and wellness and spirituality, shows like Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum and On Purpose with Jay Shetty. It was a lovely, groovy experience. The conversations were engaging and inspiring, and even after Shazam! had its moment and moved on, those conversations kept going on Twitter and Instagram. People were responding to the messages I was putting out about the need for self-love and self-worth, and among those doing the responding were some folks from the publishing industry who thought my story might make for a compelling book.
I’d been asked about writing a book on previous occasions, and my response was always the same: I’m not famous enough or important enough to merit an autobiography. I haven’t even lived enough life to fill all those pages. But HarperCollins, after hearing my Jay Shetty interview, was convinced that I had a book in me specifically about this. Not an autobiography, per se, but a book about my journey to better mental health. I still wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle it, but it had felt rewarding to share my stories through podcasts and social media, so I decided to give it a try. I sat down back in Austin and I started working with an editor. We were cranking out pages, and meanwhile my film career was enjoying a nice post-Shazam! bounce. I popped down to South Africa to work on The Mauritanian with Benedict Cumberbatch for a bit. I had a movie lined up to start filming in Cleveland, and then the Shazam! sequel was all lined up to film in Atlanta after that.
And then: Covid-19.
In those first early weeks after the Covid-19 lockdowns started in March 2020, I was—believe it or not—filled with optimism and hope. Not that the pandemic was good or exciting, mind you, but because times of crisis in history have so often worked to bring people together with a sense of community and common purpose: The whole nation rallying together after Pearl Harbor. People climbing in boats to rescue their neighbors during a flood. Like a lot of people, I initially thought the pandemic could be that sort of catalyst. On top of which, my engineer’s mind loves problem-solving and finding solutions, and here was one very big problem in need of many different solutions. Hollywood was shut down, meaning all of my friends in Hollywood were unemployed. Somehow the industry was going to have to figure this out, and maybe I could help by getting a bunch of people to quarantine together in this big, open space I have in Austin and we could keep working, helping each other and doing what we love. This is going to humble us as a species and galvanize us as a nation, I hoped.
Well, I was wrong. That didn’t happen. Instead, the opposite happened. Everything about the response to the pandemic became polarized and politicized almost instantly—it was just another thing for people to fight about on social media. Then, the plans I had to get some work kickstarted down in Austin didn’t materialize, on top of which a couple of my friends who were there working with me had to leave. So nothing was moving forward at all. Then George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and the whole country blew up in a fit of anxiety and anger and fear, far worse than anything I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Because of the way we’re all connected to each other now, those tragedies are that much more damaging to everyone’s mental and emotional well-being. And with my empath’s heart, I couldn’t take it.
My breakthrough in Connecticut had been a genuine turnaround. It had pulled me back from the brink and stabilized me when I desperately needed it; I couldn’t have shouldered the responsibilities of Shazam! if it hadn’t. But what was also true, and what I only realized in hindsight, was how much my work was still buoying me, how much I was still relying on external supports to give me those little dopamine hits to tell me I was doing okay and give me feelings of self-worth. The truth is that my life was going well because my life was going well, and the minute it stopped going well, I would spiral back down again. I thought I had been doing everything I could to mitigate the issues I’ve always struggled with, but I wasn’t doing enough, clearly, and I hadn’t healed enough not to fall apart.
The pandemic was another perfect storm, the same as my first Austin breakdown, a confluence of events that conspired to obliterate me. It clipped my wings and put me in this freefall.
One thing about working, aside from the little dopamine hits of self-worth it gives you every day, is that you don’t have a lot of downtime to sit around and beat yourself up. Under a quarantine, you’ve got nothing but time to beat yourself up. A lot of people did find a way to use the crisis to find and build a positive purpose. Some people did band together in a positive sense of community, bringing meals and medical supplies to isolated people in need. Others used the enforced isolation and downtime to take on whatever projects they’d never been able to make time for, like painting the house or arranging all their digital photo albums. A healthy person is capable of doing that. They get up every morning and say, “Oh my God, I have all this free time to invest in myself, I’ll finally learn how to play guitar. I’ll get to work and write that screenplay!” Then, once you do that, you’ve got the positive feedback loop going. Every day you’ve got a few more pages of screenplay or you’ve learned a new chord on the guitar and you feel like you’re accomplishing something. I couldn’t do any of that. I was back to hating myself, not loving myself enough to want to invest in myself at all. I was waking up in the mornings with major panic attacks. I was utterly depressed, crying and shot through with anxiety and fear for myself and for the world.
Meanwhile, my editor was sending me back pages on the manuscript for this book. By that point, it was practically done. All but finished. Polish up a few sections, clean up a few typos, and it’d be ready to go. Writing a book, unlike acting in a film, is largely a solo affair. It’s you and a laptop, and the collaboration that’s required between you and your editor happens mostly by phone and email anyway. It might be the most quarantine-friendly creative endeavor there is. When all my other projects dried up, in theory, I could have pivoted all my energies and all my time into this and kept working. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
During my first Austin breakdown, I couldn’t unpack a box of plates and put them in the cabinets for fear that I would screw it up, and if I screwed up my cabinets and my cabinets weren’t perfect, then that would mean I was a worthless failure who didn’t deserve to live. Which is a typical train of thought for an unhealthy mind. This time, it wasn’t a kitchen cabinet that maybe one or two other people might see and judge me for. It was a book that was going to go out into the world and get reviewed on websites and sit on bookstore shelves for everyone to see. If it wasn’t perfect, then everyone was going to shit all over it and me, and I’d be even more of a worthless failure who didn’t deserve to live. When I opened up the Word file from my editor, I was as paralyzed as I’d been by that box of plates. I couldn’t even read past the first page. Is this even any good? Why is that sentence like that? Should that comma be here or over there? This is shit. Why am I even writing this? Why did I think that a worthless fucking failure like me could even write a book in the first place?
Hoo boy. It was intense. On top of that was the fact that the story I’d told in the book wasn’t true anymore. The progress that I’d made in Connecticut was genuine, and the breakthrough I’d had with Beth had led me to a place where I truly felt I understood and had the answer to my problems: I’d been so focused on learning how to fix myself when what I needed to learn was that I had to love myself enough to believe that I deserve to get fixed. Beth’s love and prayers did that for me; they helped put me on the road to recovery. Now, either that wasn’t true, or it was partially true but still woefully incomplete. It couldn’t be the final stage of my journey, because here I was in August 2020, sobbing uncontrollably on my couch in the darkness, right back where I’d been when the story began in August 2017. How was I supposed to write a book helping other people with their mental health journeys when my mental health journey seemed to have taken me around in a fucking circle? In my mind, I’d written an incomplete book, poorly, and I was not in the right headspace or the right heartspace or the right spirit to fix it.
The manuscript file sat there on my laptop for over a month, with me unable to touch it for fear that I’d put a horrible book out into the world that would make everyone think I was an even bigger failure than I already thought I was. At some point I was going to have to call HarperCollins and admit to them what was going on. I was loathe to do that because it would mean I actually was a failure, because I had failed to finish the book. The last thing I wanted to do was disappoint anybody by not hitting a deadline and not keeping my professional commitments. I was scared and I was embarrassed. Despite my many struggles in life, all through my various professional endeavors, I was always afraid of disappointing the authority figures on my jobs because if I disappointed people, they would hate me and never want to work with me again.
Eventually, I screwed up some courage, called my editor and my agent, and laid it out for them. “I still want to do it,” I said, “but I can’t do it right now. I don’t know how to write a book about radically loving myself when I don’t, currently, radically love myself.” Fortunately, they were incredibly gracious, as I hoped that they would be. It was a healthy reminder that, no, not everyone in the world is my mother. Not everyone reacts to disappointing news with whiplash anger and emotional violence. The world is full of people who accept you as less than perfect and understand why you’re less than perfect. They agreed to put the book on pause and told me to go take as much time as I needed to put myself back together again.
So that’s what I did.