Chapter 4 Quit #4
It was a weird little school. There were only about thirty of us in the student body at any one time.
I went to school with people like Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, and Milla Jovovich, as well as a bunch of kids who had to work for their parents in the afternoons in stores, restaurants, and other family businesses.
Originally, I had tried going to Taft High School out in Woodland Hills because my manager lived there and all the high schools down in Hollywood sucked—Hollywood High and Fairfax were scary places to go in the early eighties.
I lasted at Taft for one week, and every day I was there I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I’d never seen so many cheerleaders and what the character John Bender in The Breakfast Club describes as “Sportos” in my life.
I was horrified by these people. I would wear pillowcases as skirts with fishnets and Doc Martens.
I was a messy, weird, punk chick who, when I started on Married…
with Children, was making $20,000 a week.
Normal high school culture was not for me.
I made the switch to Excelsior, which was more my people, and anyway, it was also the kind of place where you didn’t have to go every day if you had a job—they would send you home with the schoolwork, which you’d then just hand in to a tutor, if you did it at all.
A typical month for me would consist of three weeks on an acting job, and then during the week that we had hiatus I’d go back to Excelsior. That was my routine right through eleventh grade.
All I wanted was to get my GED.
Alas, all I ended up with was a high school equivalency.
To complete my high school education, I drove myself to a test center in my white Honda Accord.
It was a piece of shit car, but I’d named her Pearl after Janis Joplin.
The day of the test was one of those fall days, the leaves starting to come down, the air crisp and bright.
I was so excited. I still get butterflies when I think about that moment, the drive there and the way the sun was hitting the leaves and reflecting on the ground, the rest of my life just waiting on the edge of this feeling.
Though I probably couldn’t have expressed it then, I knew something big, life-changing, was on the horizon—I could feel it in the way the weather was filled with possibility and spark.
I went into the test center and found myself surrounded by a bunch of pregnant girls.
We were taking a test that some of us would never need—I sure as shit knew I didn’t need it, even though I was a straight A student—and a lot of those young women were about to have something way more important to deal with.
As for me, I was already a full-time actor.
All I had to really do was sign my name, sit there for a couple of hours, get my certificate, and then… what, exactly?
Oh, I also remember that they asked me if I had any income.
By the end of high school, I sure did.
Oh, and I wasn’t pregnant. In fact, I was a virgin.
I’d come to find out that comedy is one of the hardest types, if not the hardest type, of acting.
For it to be effective, you have to perform as though you’re working on the biggest drama in the world, but then you’ve got to twinkle above it, turning up the volume into another realm.
It’s crucial to find the right level for that twinkle dial: if you turn the dial too high, then you veer off into camp.
Certain movies call for camp, like Anchorman, but for subtle humor, the dial’s got to be at a two, not a ten.
You have to work comedy the same way you would anything else.
It takes taste, and skill, and care, and a kind of reserve so you don’t descend into something garish.
I’d turned down Married…, so the pilot featured another kid in the role of Kelly, but it just didn’t work, so they came back to me.
The casting director sent me a VHS of the pilot, and my mom and I reluctantly watched it one evening.
I’m not sure what we thought we’d see, or why we even watched it in the first place, as I was dead set against it.
Boy, how much we wanted to hate it… We sat there like two little snotty actory assholes who’d spent their lives doing Shakespeare.
And then, as the show played, we realized we could not stop laughing.
I looked at my mom. She looked at me.
“Fuck!” I said. “It’s funny. It’s good. It’s really dirty and good.” Mom just nodded; I think she knew we’d been given a gift.
I came down from my high horse and accepted the part.
The producers had me come to a studio in Burbank to do a “chemistry read.” I hate that phrase; it makes me want to throw up when someone uses it, including me.
Whoever is the best person for the job is the right person for the role—you can hate someone and still do a great job.
Debra Winger and Richard Gere famously didn’t like each other when they made An Officer and a Gentleman, but they fucked like two rabbits in heat (in the movie, that is).
But there, acting opposite me, was David Faustino.
David and I hit it off so well in that read, and that was that.
They had hoped that David and I were the team.
It was almost like they knew it all along.
Now I knew it, too.