Selection from The Truth
p. viii–ix, published June 3, 2025
A friend of mine told me I should start this book in the middle.
At first, I resisted the suggestion.
I thought it’d be better to kick things off with a heartwarming story about overcoming stage fright while doing my first school play in small-town Georgia.
Or maybe I could tell you about the time I accidentally pantsed myself in front of Matt Damon while taking off a stunt harness.
But the more I sat with my friend’s advice, the more I realized the middle is what made me who I am.
The man you know as Roland Rogers wasn’t born.
Nor was he some untouchable action hero, projected out of thin air onto the silver screen.
Roland Rogers—the real Roland Rogers—is the server who got fired from Marie Callender’s for skipping a shift to audition for a Marie Callender’s commercial.
Roland Rogers is the man who played a doctor for ten years on TV but who still gets squeamish at the sight of blood.
And, yes, as you may have heard by now, Roland Rogers is the gay kid who ran from himself, who acted twice as hard in real life as he did in the movies, but who could never bring himself to be half as brave as Crag Dynamite.
Writing a book I’m getting paid a ridiculous amount of money for is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, which should tell you something about how cowardly I’ve been.
My entire adult life, I’ve been in your living room, and on your screens, but I’ve never told you who I am.
I have a lot of regrets about that.
I’ve often wondered how different my path would have been if I had told the truth sooner.
The illustrious career I’ve enjoyed would almost certainly have been out of reach.
Would I be happier? Probably.
Would I have hurt fewer people along the way? Definitely.
Secrets have a way of hollowing out your life; they need the space to fester.
But I didn’t come out sooner; I’m doing it now.
And as much as I can look back and mourn the past, I’ve learned that it’s more important to stop fearing the future.
I don’t know what will happen after this book hits shelves.
People I trust told me not to write it.
They were worried—like I used to be—that I’d lose fans, miss out on roles, and hurt my image.
At first, I simply wanted to correct the record—to let you know that you all were wrong about me, that I had depths you never saw onscreen.
But I realized that I was just trying to redirect your attention without revealing anything new.
I still wanted to be a product, not a person: the same airbrushed set of abs with a fresh coat of paint on top.
What my friend helped me realize is that life is the furthest thing from a Crash Street movie: the heroes don’t always win, sometimes there isn’t anyone to catch you when you fall, and deus ex machinas rarely comes along.
In reality, we fail all the time.
We make mistakes that cost us years.
We lie to ourselves as much as we lie to others, if not more.
And we don’t get to take any of it back.
There are no dress rehearsals or second takes.
But that’s why being alive is so beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
If we could edit it—if we could do it over and over again until we refined every single facet of our existence—it would be hopelessly boring.
Life is one long messy middle—and that’s precisely what makes it worth living.
So let me tell you about the real Roland Rogers.
Starting not at the beginning, not at the end, but in between, where all the good stuff happens.