The Dangerous Animals Club Read online

  Another common reason for actors having no idea what they are doing is secrecy. Producers are afraid that if a script of a particular project gets out it will either be stolen by another producer or auctioned on eBay. As a result the actors only get to see snippets before the audition. These little pages are called “sides.” Sometimes the sides are enough to glean who you are and what you are talking about. Other times, it’s hopeless.

  I got an audition with one of my favorite directors of all time, Michael Mann, for the film that became The Insider. When I auditioned, the movie had no title and no available script. They sent me sides for a part named “Clerk.” Already a bad sign—no first or last name. The page of dialogue was incomprehensible. I had no idea what I was clerk of, what I was talking about, why I was talking about it, or to whom I was speaking. I might as well have been saying “Oh my God” to the Vortex.

  I debated long and hard as to what I should do. I asked my agent for a script. “No one is getting a script,” he told me. I asked for more information. That was a nonstarter. No one knew anything.

  I sat in the waiting room for two hours trying to manage some sort of performance out of my lines. It was like trying to walk in an earthquake. When the rumbling starts and your house shakes and the floor buckles, you want to run to safety. But you can’t. You can’t move. It is the cruelty of physics. You realize the only reason you are able to walk is that your feet are in contact with the ground. Remove that contact and you don’t go anywhere. When you try to act without knowing who you are or what you want, you go nowhere.

  I got called in to meet Michael. He asked me to have a seat. He turned on a camera to record the audition. He said, “Let’s read the scene, shall we?” I paused and said, “Let’s not.” He looked at me with a bit of a smile and asked, “Why not?” I said, “Because I don’t have a clue what’s going on. It would be a huge waste of both of our time.” He chuckled and said, “Should I explain what’s happening?” I said, “I have a better idea. Let me read a script.” He said, “No one has a script.” I said, “I understand. Let me explain it this way. How would you feel, Michael, if someone said they wanted you to direct a suspense movie and wanted to know how you would do it, but they refused to tell you who the main actors were, what era the movie took place, and what your budget was. You would probably say, ‘No can do.’ The only thing I have to offer as an actor is my point of view. Without a script, I have no point and no view.”

  Michael pulled out a script and a contract from a drawer in his desk. The contract stipulated that if I told anyone the contents, the character, the story of the movie, I would be murdered and then sued. I signed it.

  I went home and read the script and came back the next day. Michael asked what I thought. I said, “It could be the best script I have ever read. Who wrote it?” Michael smiled and said, “Me and Eric Roth.”

  “So I guess it’s good I said it was a great script.”

  Michael laughed. “Let’s read.”

  I read three different parts. It was easy to do because I knew who all the people were and what they wanted. I handed the script back to Michael with a sigh of relief. I got cast in the movie.

  That was a happy story. There are many, many unhappy ones, too, that all revolve around the actor not having a clue as to what to do. I have not done “on camera” commercials since I started doing movies. I got a phone call from my commercial agent. She said, “Stephen, I know you don’t do commercials but this one is big, you have to do it. It is on-the-air and in-print for Universal Theme Park, Orlando. It could be multiple spots. This could be a seven-figure job.” Seven-figure meant over a million dollars. I hung a U-turn over my convictions and headed for the casting office.

  When I got there, I saw every bald-headed, middle-aged man I ever knew in Hollywood. There had to be fifty guys waiting. And they had to have been waiting forever. Most of them were asleep or nodding off. One guy in the corner was snoring. The casting director ran up to me and said, “Stephen, I’m so glad you decided to come.”

  I said, “My pleasure. Is there a script or sides?”

  “No,” she said. “We do have a storyboard on the wall. We’ll want you to improvise.”

  “Absolutely.” I gestured to all of the guys sleeping in folding chairs around me and whispered, “Now, I don’t want to be a pain but I just found out about this audition, and I do have another meeting in a couple of hours, is there any way I could get in sooner rather than later?”

  She was apologetic and said, “Yes, we’ll get you right in. Just let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll get you in to meet Nigel, our director.”

  “Great. Thank you.” I walked over to the storyboard on the wall. A storyboard is a sort of comic-book-style, frame-by-frame description of the commercial. This hieroglyph showed a family flying to Universal Orlando with a little boy looking out of the airplane window. His mother and his bald-headed father sat next to him, both asleep. Asleep! I looked back at the waiting room and I realized that all the guys there had not been waiting forever to go in. They were practicing!

  I told the casting director I was definitely ready to see Nigel. She took me in. The room was empty except for a first-class airplane seat, a video camera, and Nigel. Nigel was about thirty, English with dirty Keith Richards hair, a skintight, torn T-shirt, and leopard-print tights. He got up grandly from his desk. “Hellllooo, Stephen. I absolutely loved you in Groundhog Day. One of my favorite films as a child. And your character was outrageous. Out-ra-geous! Shall we have a bit of fun?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “All right. Strap yourself into the hot seat.”

  I did. I sat in the airplane seat. I buckled my seat belt.

  Nigel walked back and forth in front of me in director mode. “Here’s the backstory. You are on a family trip to Orlando. You are a businessman and saved up for business-class seats for the family, maybe even first class. Your little boy is so excited he is about to pee his pants. You have just had your meal and the movie is starting, you have your headphones on and you decided to take, say, forty winks.”

  Pause.

  “I’m asleep?”

  “Right. Asleep. Shall we have a go at it?”

  “Right. Now, Nigel, question. I’m totally asleep?”

  “Yes. Dead out. Ready?”

  I assumed an unconscious posture as Nigel called out, “Action!” I stayed unconscious for a few seconds before I felt inadequate and wondered if I should snore or drool. Or worse. Should I steal some of the stuff I saw the other guys practicing in the waiting room?

  Nigel called, “Cut!” I opened my eyes. He was clearly disappointed that I didn’t offer up some sort of comic gem. He said, “Shall we try another? Do something different this time.”

  I swallowed and said, “I’m still unconscious?”

  “Right.”

  I nodded and wondered why I had not gone to law school like Mom wanted. He called out, “Action.”

  The only thing I could think to do was twitch or snore like Shemp in The Three Stooges. I did not get the part, nor was I ever invited back to that casting office. The experience reinforced what I always suspected: that in Hollywood, consciousness was a matter of perspective.

  IF YOU TAKE sci-fi, secrecy, and calculated confusion to their furthest intersection on the horizon, you end up with the television series Heroes. I played a major role on the show throughout season two. I was Bob Bishop, the man who could turn things to gold, but for the life of me, I still have no idea what I was doing.

  And I don’t think anyone else had more of a clue than I did. Madness was the method. Being on Heroes was like being in one of those comedies where the leading man wakes up hungover with a woman in his bed and a walrus in his bathtub and he shakes his head and says, “What happened?”

  It was the biggest production I have ever been a part of. The show took over a good portion of an entire studio in Hollywood. We used seven different soundstages. On any given day we would be working on three scripts
at once with three full-time crews and directors. Two directors would be shooting different episodes and another director would be shooting special effects for past, present, or future episodes. Sometimes we would get a massive rewrite for an episode we thought we had finished a month ago, and we would reshoot that while shooting the current episode that may also have just been rewritten to contradict everything we were reshooting in the previous episode. Got that?

  I concluded that it was all right that I didn’t know what I was doing. I decided the show required a “young brain” to absorb the rapid plot twists and liquid mythology. Its strength rested in the fact that it was incomprehensible.

  I still have dreams, years later, like victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, that even though the show has been cancelled, they have just churned out another rewrite and they want to reshoot my death one more time. But just like a story line from Heroes, I have gotten ahead of myself. Let’s go back in time.

  In the beginning, there was the audition. I had three scenes to read for the producers. I couldn’t get a script in advance because the show was such a phenomenon, the executives feared a future episode would end up in the hands of a “spoiler.” Spoilers are people whose sole mission in life is to gain notoriety by revealing the punch line of someone else’s joke.

  I went in and read the three “Bob” scenes for the seven executive producers. I thought it went fine. The producers nodded and looked at one another and then one of the executives, Jeph Loeb, asked me if I could do it “funny.” I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing or to whom I was speaking. I was trying to walk in an earthquake once again. The scene started. I just talked faster and ad-libbed that the person reading with me looked like he had food on his jacket. I brushed it off with my hand and examined it and said, “Just as I thought, gorgonzola.” The producers smiled and nodded in confusion.

  They asked me to be threatening. I threw a chair. That threatened them for sure. They asked me to be “mysterious,” whatever that is. Try being “mysterious” sometime on your own and see what you end up with. At best you will look like a bad guy on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. If you do it at work, your boss will think you’re stealing office supplies.

  Two days later I got the news that I didn’t get the part. I was depressed. But the next day I got the news that I may get the part after all. I was thrilled. And the next day I got the news that they were unsure as to whether the part would be “Robert Bishop” or “Roberta Bishop.” They were looking at women for the role. Now I was depressed and had an identity crisis. It never changed, even after the next day when they told me I got the part.

  When I arrived for my first day of work, I met several cast members in the makeup trailer. I had never seen so many attractive people in one place in my life. I was in a sort of sugar shock. If the Heroes cast were a vegetable garden, I was the potato. And this was before Kristen Bell was brought into the cast to play my daughter.

  I met Sendhil Ramamurthy, who played Dr. Suresh. I was so happy to meet him. His last name was harder to spell than mine. Everyone in the cast was very warm. They asked me what I was doing on the show, and I answered I had no idea. One of the stars of the show, Greg Grunberg, laughed and said, “Get used to it.”

  Next, I stopped by Wardrobe for a costume fitting. The costumers also had no idea what my part was. They hadn’t seen a script yet. They needed to know who my scenes were with so they could pick the right sports jacket for me to wear. I didn’t follow the logic. The costume designer explained the color of my clothing was dependent on the hair color of the person in the scene with me. I was still lost.

  I got a brief tutorial. Modern special effects are usually composite shots where they add something in the foreground or background of a frame in postproduction. For the wide shots in Deadwood, they erected a giant green screen five stories high and three hundred yards long at the end of Main Street. In postproduction they added South Dakota on that screen so you would see the Old West instead of the 14 Freeway.

  The reason special-effects experts choose blue and green as the colors of their background screens is because these are the two colors not usually found in human skin tone. When they make a composite shot, anything with that color becomes invisible, leaving the added effect of a Vortex, or a spaceship, or a city you are flying over, wherever the green or blue screen was.

  In Heroes, almost all of my scenes had special effects. That meant that the backdrop would be a blue screen—unless the person in the scene with me was blond, then they would use a green screen as a backdrop. The cinematographer determined that a green screen worked better for blondes after adding the special effects. Consequently, my clothes would have to avoid shades of blue or green accordingly, or I would be in danger of vanishing.

  After my costume fitting I ran into one of our director-producers, Allan Arkush, and asked him who Bob was in the show. Allan smiled wickedly and said, “Think of Bob as a good guy, who may actually be a bad guy, who is pretending to be a good guy, who in essence is a bad guy who makes a turn on the show to be a good guy.” Allan laughed, but I knew he wasn’t kidding.

  My first day shooting I had to use my superpower of turning something into gold for the first time. Greg Beeman, another executive producer and extraordinarily fun director, asked me, “Have you ever had superpowers in a movie?”

  I thought back through my résumé. “I’ve been a ghost before,” I told him.

  He shook his head and said, “Different thing. On the show we have evolved that a ‘hero’ has to show a bit of exertion to use their power. The only way I can describe it is that it’s more than a burp but less than a crap.”

  “Okay,” I said. Again, this was something I never learned in acting class.

  Greg said, “Give it a try. Show me.”

  I tried. Greg shook his head. “No. Too much effort. You just look constipated. Try a little less.”

  I focused on looking like I was about to hiccup but was able to hold it back. Greg said, “That’s better. Keep it around there.”

  I shot four scenes that first day. I decided that Bob Bishop was a moral relativist. That way I could justify anything they asked me to do. But it was never that easy.

  During the next episodes, I tried to find a cure for the deadly Shanti virus. Then the story revealed I was using the virus as a weapon. Then it was implied that I was trying to isolate the virus so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. Then it was discovered that I was developing new strains of the virus in a secret lab. I couldn’t keep up.

  Aristotle, one of the most influential people of the modern age, never gets the credit he’s due. His ideas have permeated the Western world. This is because he was Alexander the Great’s teacher. Everywhere Alexander conquered, the people adopted the ideas of Aristotle. Later, when the Romans conquered these lands, they took Aristotle’s ideas and spread them from Britain to North Africa. We inherited those ideas without really being aware of it.

  Aristotle’s big invention was that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Three acts: introduction—conflict—resolution. It seems like a no-brainer now, but if you look at literature written before Aristotle, it goes every which way.

  The writing for Heroes, as well as other programs with a supernatural bent, doesn’t follow Aristotle. Instead of true development, they redefine act one by introducing new characters, new rules to play by, new emotional geography, and new objectives. Even when they reach some sort of conclusion, like a secret code being discovered or a main character getting killed, we find out that the code didn’t work or the character wasn’t dead. Act one just extends further.

  My agent sent me an article from New York magazine. It had my picture and a caption: “Meet the New Face of Evil on Heroes.” It was news to me. I wasn’t sure what I had done that was evil yet. I was still lost in act one.

  As the episodes rolled on, I felt like my real job on the show was to create the illusion that there was a plot. My scenes usually revolved aro
und making an apology to various regular characters for my past deceptions. I tried to convince them to work with me on a vital new project. But as the scripts rolled through it became apparent that the projects never existed. By the time the audience started to wonder, we were on to the next.

  I knew my days on the show were numbered during episode nine. I asked for my chair. They still didn’t have a chair with my name on it. Instead they gave me a folding chair with a piece of duct tape on the back of it that had “Cast” written in magic marker. Tim Kring, the executive producer and creator, called me at home to tell me they were killing me off in the next script. It was embarrassing. When the word got out that I had become expendable, no one wanted to get near me. Death could be contagious.

  Zachary Quinto, who played Sylar, murdered me in my office. Before he killed me he paralyzed me with his mind and delivered a sarcastic speech. That seemed a little unnecessary, I must say. The whole time I was pretending to be paralyzed I was thinking that it looked like he got his clothes at Bloomingdale’s. As he continued to emote I imagined Sylar shopping for his jacket at the mall. I wondered if he was polite to the sales staff or sarcastic. I wondered if he paid in cash or credit, or just paralyzed them with his mind and shoplifted.

  After the speech he sent some sort of ray that cut off the top of my head. Then he ate my brains. The scene took half a day to film. Most of the time I was covered in Karo syrup and red food coloring. At the end Zach came up to me with enormous concern. He helped me out of my office chair saying, “Stephen, I’m sorry. Are you all right?” I said, “Zach, I’m fine. You didn’t really kill me. You just made me unemployed.”

  And that should have been the end of it, but true to Heroes, it wasn’t.

  I got a call four months later from the producers that they had another rewrite and wanted to reshoot my death. Normally it wouldn’t have been a problem, but this time it was. In the interim I had been in a terrible accident and had broken my neck. Yes. Thrown from a horse, I broke five vertebrae. I was wearing a hard brace on my neck 24/7. But never let it be said that a near-fatal injury stopped the production of a television show. The assistant director called me at home and said, “Stephen, that sounds pretty bad about the neck and all, but what do you think you could do on camera with the neck brace off?”