30 Off to a Rocky Start
THIRTY
Off to a Rocky Start
The Nashville set wasn’t what I expected. Far from it.
“I guess I thought we’d all be friends,” I said to Allie one day when we were sitting by the pool at the house I was renting. “You know, cast, crew, directors, all one big happy family. But it’s not like that at all.”
“Well, that’s why you have me,” Allie answered.
When my Nashville castmates and I finished filming at the end of the week, I assumed we’d all decompress over drinks or dinner.
This had been my experience when I was on Heroes.
Instead, the opposite happened: the entire cast and crew scattered.
For example, Connie went home to her son, and Charles Esten—who played country musician Deacon Claybourne—drove away to spend the weekend with his wife and three kids.
The exception was Jonathan Jackson, who played singer-songwriter Avery Barkley.
He lived with his wife, Lisa, and their kids about twenty miles south of Nashville in Franklin—a town that’s home to dozens of country music stars—and they sometimes invited me over for dinner.
Not wanting to make the long drive home, I often crashed in their guest room, grateful for a warm bed and a good friend who’d offered it to me.
But other than Jonathan, I wasn’t close to anyone on set. I couldn’t figure it out. We were all new faces in a strange town, yet we weren’t growing into friends.
“That’s why I’m thankful for you every day,” I said to Allie. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Allie wasn’t tied to the set like me, so she got to explore town and meet people for both of us.
In Nashville, a lot of people work in entertainment, but a lot of others don’t, so Allie started to collect a random assortment of friends.
There were hairdressers and bartenders and young lawyers, most of whom were single and all of whom were looking for a good time.
I’d broken up with Scotty, so I was right there with them.
We had pool parties and nights out drinking and dancing, with an emphasis on the drinking part.
Nashville was a drink all night, crash into bed, then take a nip of the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you in the morning kind of place.
I was twenty-three, and I could roll with it.
I also have the tolerance level of an elephant, so hard partying didn’t hurt me.
Alcohol didn’t become my enemy till after Kaya was born.
But when the weekend was over, it was back to the lonely set, where I’d started to feel that the writers’ priorities were just a little bit off.
I remember the first time I saw John Q, a 2002 film starring Denzel Washington, about a man who takes an emergency room hostage when he learns that insurance has denied his young son’s heart transplant.
I couldn’t believe how well he projected pure, unadulterated emotion, as if he was experiencing his character’s feelings.
“Oh my God,” I said to Mom, who was watching it with me. “He’s crying like it’s his own son dying, in real life. Denzel is about to rip my heart out.”
Mom nodded. “That’s it right there,” she answered. “It’s what I’ve always told you about getting your emotions on the table in a scene. That man is not phoning it in.”
In my mind, Denzel Washington’s performance in John Q set the bar for male actors mustering up those trigger tears Mom always talked about.
Most actresses have no problem breaking down and producing emotions, but male actors seem to struggle with it.
Denzel most certainly did not, and after his John Q performance, an actor just couldn’t fake tears and get away with it.
Not everyone can be Denzel, but with a lot of training, I believe that any actor can learn to connect with their emotions and project them into a scene.
Mom was right—phoning it in should never be on the table.
There’s only one catch: to bring emotion to a scene, the script has to be good, like John Q was. A lousy script can rip the heart, soul, and guts right out of a scene.
Not long into the first season of Nashville, I watched as the writers pulled back their scripts and rewrote them to make certain characters more likable.
Connie had built her reputation as the tough but fun wife and mom on Friday Night Lights, but Rayna Jaymes had more of an edge.
For example, she wasn’t always nice to her husband or father, and sometimes she got a little controlling around her daughters.
She also wasn’t the best influence on Deacon, her ex-boyfriend and songwriting partner, and some fans wondered if Rayna was one of the reasons Deacon struggled with his sobriety.
In my mind, the fact that she wasn’t perfect and could be kind of a pain in the ass made Rayna human.
If you didn’t like her, so be it. She’d been through a lot in life, and she was who she was.
But the writers often seemed dead set on making Rayna likable. More than once, I read a script the night before, then discovered the next day that someone had rewritten it. On the cutting room floor lay all the emotion that make a character and a story real.
It was the first beef I had with Nashville’s writers, but it wouldn’t be my last. That would happen soon, when I realized they were modeling the script after my life.