At which point you think, Heeeere we go.
From night to night Anne refuses to do the show the same way twice. You’ve worked with several great actors, like Denis O’Hare, who choose to perform their roles slightly differently each time. But they always do so within the constraints of their character, and with a clear understanding of what the pace and rhythm of any given scene should be.
That is not Anne Heche. Anne Heche is the kind of actress who asks the wardrobe department to make her a whole bunch of different outfits so she can choose which one to wear during any particular performance. She is also the kind of actress who, when the wardrobe department refuses her request, starts doodling in permanent marker on her outfits, forcing them to get her different ones. Anne Heche is the kind of costar who decides one night, for no reason whatsoever, to shout all her lines. And on another night not to pause for the entire performance. One night you watch as she delivers all her lines as single rapid-fire eruptions as if every monologue is a single unimaginably long German compound word. But of course, unlike the audience, you can’t just watch her doing this; you have to act alongside her. Fall in love with her, in fact. What is she doing? Is she mad at you? Is this some kind of passive-aggressive attack? “No,” she tells you afterward, “it wasn’t about you at all. I just wanted to see what that would feel like.”
To be clear: She isn’t mean. She’s … volatile. And given the mental and emotional volatility of her character Catherine, she is in many ways perfectly cast. No doubt much of the audience considers her performance galvanizing and spontaneous. And it is spontaneous, insofar as she is genuinely doing things she’s never done before. But in your mind it’s a little unfair to the author. And the director. And the rest of the cast. And the crew. And the wardrobe.
There’s a scene in the play where your character runs down the stairs, opens the screen door and finds Catherine fighting with her older sister, played by the luminous Kate Jennings Grant. You interrupt them, at which point Kate angrily goes upstairs and you continue the scene with Catherine. One night you come running down the stairs, open the screen door and see only Kate. Anne’s not there. Where is she? Then you hear her voice and turn your eyes to the wing, past the corner of the stage, almost in the front row, where Anne, hands over her head, spins in a circle singing her lines. In complete darkness. ’Cause there’s no lights on her. ’Cause that’s not where’s she’s supposed to be.
And at that moment, Kate leaves, and with a shudder you think to yourself, Oh, good, she’s all mine now.
After a while, sustaining the illusion of being in love with her becomes difficult, and making out with her (which you must do several times a show) feels kind of icky … and not because you’re kissing a chick. It feels kind of icky because, during one show early on, she makes the conscious decision to act as if kissing you is disgusting. Not because of anything you did offstage, mind you. Just because Anne Heche feels her character would consider kissing you disgusting on that particular night. Which, in the world of the play, is the same night it always is.
On the plus side, the two of you share several pleasant dinners.
* * *
If you need a drink to calm down, go HERE.
If you need to wake your brain back up, go HERE.
To continue your stage career, willkommen/bienvenue/welcome im/au/to HERE.
To attempt to relaunch your movie career, go HERE.
* * *
1You can imagine the kind of joke that goes here.
And now a word from your friend …
AMY SEDARIS
Neil, you and I met—as of course you know, so why am I saying it, it’s as if I need to create context for some imaginary third party who might be reading this, which, why would I do that?—on the set of that small little movie we did, The Best and the Brightest. We were introduced the same day Michael Jackson died. I’ll never forget the day I first shook your hand, because I’ll always associate it with tragedy.
You’re a great performer whom I have long admired, plus a genuinely nice person whose friendship I treasure, but probably everybody is writing sappy stuff like that. So here are some more specific things I associate with you:
1. You consume an astonishing amount of Red Bull. It’s … amazing. I once saw you do a back flip in a hotel room. (Or was that David?) I don’t remember the context, but I do remember being impressed, and I remember thinking such a display of reckless acrobatics could only be driven by a large amount of a certain color combined with a certain male farm animal.
2. You love performing magic, and you also love propagating it. I recall that time you gave me a generous supply of magician’s flash paper and a device that secretly ignites it. You carefully instructed me never to ignite more paper at a time than the amount you used to show me how to do the trick. Of course that only encouraged me to use more paper, and I ended up severely burning my hand and very nearly lighting my rabbit ablaze. As it turns out, you are not only a talented magician, but also a responsible one.
3. You are a great friend. And a unique one. I still have that taxidermy beaver you and David got me. I mean, of course I still have it. As far as dead animals go, it’s beautiful. Did you get it from a museum of natural history or something? I don’t know, but I know it came in a box the size of a chest freezer, and that as I struggled to open it the first thing to emerge was a root-beer-brown-colored beaver-flap, not unlike a canoe paddle. It’s not every day you open a gift and an animal tail flops out. And until the day I received it, I never would have guessed that the one item needed to tie my apartment décor together was a large taxidermy beaver.
So to sum up: You are a multitalented performer continually hopped up on questionable beverages meant to improve stamina, a sensible magician who has a childlike wonderment for sleight of hand, and a good friend who sends me odd yet thoughtful gifts.
By the way, Neil, my bathroom’s looking a little sparse, and I really love otters …
* * *
Amy is so awesome. It’s too bad you won’t get to work with her on any of the very special TV guest spots you are now going to do HERE.
Or in any of the kids’ movies HERE.
You and your boyfriend, David, are in the middle of a Costa Rican vacation. You spend the first few days in an honest- to-God tree house—a fifty-foot-high hotel room in a tree, with its own plumbing and everything. To order room service you have to call the front desk and lower a Swiss Family Robinson–style basket, which they fill with either beer or rum, depending on … you’re not sure, exactly. Then they ring the bell and you pull it up and slide off the retractable roof and sleep under the stars and man, is it nice.
One day you decide to leave your little jungle paradise and head off on a two-day white-water rafting adventure. You spend the day navigating some surprisingly hard rapids in an incredible tropical setting. Then you and the rest of the group prepare to spend the night in little jungle cabins, under a billion stars, with no streets or cars or lights or any other sign of civilization except guaro, a drink made from fermented sugarcane that is approximately 175 percent alcohol.
You and David are both good and guaroed when two of the guides, both darkly attractive, offer to take you to some nearby zip lines that are scheduled to be part of tomorrow’s platforms.
* * *
If you decide not to go, turn HERE.
If you decide to go, keep reading HERE.
You and David are both very excited to climb up to the zip-line platforms. One or both of you may or may not also be excited about the possibility that one or both of the darkly handsome guides could take things all crazy junglesexual.
The four of you head off into the moonlit night and, after about an hour, find yourself standing on a small but sturdy zip-line platform about twenty feet off the ground. A two-hundred-foot-high cliff juts out just below you.
The guides have brought blankets, pillows, and candles. They proceed to get the platform very cozy. You’re drinking guaro when the guides both pu
ll out joints, both light them up, both inhale, and both pass them to you and David. After ten minutes, you are both as messed up as you’ve ever been in your life.
You’re all mellowly hanging out, telling stories, having a grand old time, when David stands up and says, “I’m going to go take a leak.” He turns, takes a casual step off the twenty-foot platform, drops into the Costa Rican darkness, and vanishes.
Disappears. Like a cartoon. Step; vanish.
If squiggle lines indicating rapid downward motion appeared where he had just been standing, it would not surprise you.
David is gone. Judge Crater gone, Amelia Earhart gone. Neither the guides nor you hear any sound of landing, soft or hard. It seems as though he must have plummeted not only the twenty feet to the ground, but the two hundred feet off the cliff. You are sure he is dead. The guides are sure he is dead. You are also pretty sure that the guides are pretty sure they’re both in deep shit.
You run down the steps calling for him. And miraculously, against all laws of motion and thermodynamics, you find him on the railroad tracks at the edge of the cliff. He lies there and goes through a bodily checklist and is delighted to learn he still has exactly as many of everything as he is supposed to. It seems impossible given the (literal) gravity of the situation, but the worst thing that’s happened to him is he’s lost a flip-flop, the lucky son of a bitch.
In later years the two of you will recollect this moment often, and the primal fear (in your case) and the horrible vertiginous feeling of falling through the air in the darkness from the canopy of a Central American jungle (in David’s) will return. You both agree it belongs solidly in the moments-that-brought-you-closer-as-a-couple file.
You also both agree the human body is better able to withstand twenty-foot plummets onto railroad ties when that body is drunk and stoned out of its mind.
* * *
To go on another vacation with David, go HERE.
To experience the coolest vacation/birthday present in the history of mankind, courtesy of David, go HERE.
It’s been nearly ten years since you appeared on the big screen in Purple People Eater, the movie that was incredibly successful and made you a mega-superstar in an alternate universe. In the interim you’ve become a very successful TV actor, but in the eyes of Hollywood directors there’s an enormous gap between “TV actor” and “movie star,” and crossing that gap proves difficult. You audition for dozens of film roles and come up pretty much empty. You keep hearing the same feedback through your agent: you’re (a) too Doogie, (b) too white and all-American, and (c) still too Doogie. But you keep at it, and your persistence pays off when Paul Verhoeven casts you in the sci-fi adventure Starship Troopers. He’s looking for a master-race vibe, so the eerie Aryanness of your appearance plays to your advantage.
The filming will be at a beautiful place in Wyoming called Hell’s Half Acre, which looks like a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Carlsbad Caverns. As someone who’s come to love the process of bonding with your theater cast-mates you look forward to the same thing happening here. But it’s not to be. Your character, Carl Jenkins, is the smart one who doesn’t get involved in the exciting man-on-alien fight action, so the director deliberately excludes you from the three-week paramilitary training session the rest of the cast has to go through. While they train for their roles by wearing armor and fighting till they pass out in 100-degree heat, you are forbidden from taking part, because your role in the movie is essentially to show up, look at all the dead bodies, cry, “This is an outrage! Carry on,” and walk out. Oh, and to talk to your pet ferret.1
Starship Troopers turns out to be a really good movie, but its massive $105 million budget makes it a bit of a financial flop in theaters. It is Exhibit A in a pattern from which your film career will only occasionally deviate: every time you’re cast in a movie that’s sure to be a hit, it isn’t. Exhibit B is your next major screen role, alongside Rupert Everett and Madonna in The Next Best Thing. Rupert Everett has just scored a giant success in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Madonna is Madonna. What can go wrong?
A lot. The movie gets killed both critically and commercially. For starters it’s rewritten to death. Rewritten from death, more accurately. In the original script your character (Rupert’s best friend) ends up dying of AIDS in a hospital, but not before setting Rupert straight about life from his deathbed. But a few days before shooting the producers tell you, “We’re going to have you come film in the final courtroom scene. We’ll see you briefly in it and you’ll give a thumbs-up.”
“But I thought I was dead from that dying scene. You know, the one where I died,” you note astutely.
“Yeah, but we’re considering an option where we don’t really do that scene and you’re fine.”
“But the entire arc of my character is that he starts out healthy and his sickness is what jars Rupert’s character into making the decision he makes.”
“Yeah, but the whole AIDS thing, we’re not sure that’s going to test super well, so we’ll maybe have a version where you’re in the courtroom.”
And sure enough, in the final cut there’s you in the climactic courtroom scene giving Rupert Everett a thumbs-up, very much alive, and for very much no reason whatsoever. Committee filmmaking at its finest.
Madonna is … Madonna. She’s perfectly nice to you, but she’s always so surrounded by her retinue it’s hard to get to know her. Her team worries way too much about how she looks on camera. After lots of screen tests they conclude she looks best when she has shadows over her forehead and her chin is lit diagonally across a certain part of her face. So in every scene in the movie she is lit exactly like that, and she’s either sitting or standing perfectly still. Does it make for the most dynamic performance? Only true cinéastes know for sure.
As for Rupert Everett, you are surprised at how blatantly disrespectful he is to your director, John Schlesinger, a perfectly lovely guy and prolific filmmaker responsible for classics like Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man. You’re not sure why he’s so contemptuous, but as years go by you will see Rupert Everett be equally contemptuous to a variety of different people, the LGBT community included. A shame, that. But he was friendly to you, so here’s hoping he cheers up soon.
Next up, Exhibit C in your catalog of surefire-hits-that-aren’t: Undercover Brother, based on an animated web series. It’s sort of an urban James Bond meets Austin Powers. Playing to type, you’re cast as the white guy. Your costars are Dave Chappelle, who is as hilarious as he is nice to work with, and Denise Richards, with whom you’re already friendly from Doogie Howser and Starship Troopers. But Eddie Griffin plays the Undercover Brother himself. Eddie, as they say in Hollywood, is “having a moment,” and he seems to be … enjoying it. A lot of time is spent waiting for him to come out from his trailer. On one occasion he refuses to emerge until the studio gives him a motorcycle. On another occasion he demands a giant-screen TV for his trailer. In his defense, he gets ’em both.
On a side note, you learn a valuable lesson about the limitations of verisimilitude in performance. There’s a scene where you get out of a van filled with pot smoke. Your character is supposed to be really high in the next scene. So you have the brilliant idea, “Hey, I’ve never done this before, but since I’m supposed to be stoned, why don’t I just actually get stoned?” Worst acting idea ever. Part of filming a comedy is being sharp and spontaneous and quick on your feet, especially when you’re working opposite a master of improv like Dave Chappelle. But you spend the next ninety minutes unfunny and hyperparanoid. Your only thought is that everyone knows you’re high and is laughing at you.
You learn your lesson: you, movies, and drug use should never mix.
Then you forget that lesson and salvage your film career.
* * *
To learn how your hard-core drug use affected two cheeseburger-seeking New Jerseyites, go HERE.
To go back to a simpler, happier, drug-freer time, go HERE.
To be the biggest movie star in the wo
rld, go HERE.
* * *
1Acting with ferrets is far more tedious than you imagined. You have to take your place in the shot, then literally stand still and wait for the ferret handler standing behind you to yell “Skipper! Up Skipper!” You have to wait until it stands up to say your line. And you have to film each scene countless times. It is hilariously frustrating. By the end of the movie you and Skipper are no longer on speaking terms.
In 1997 your life changes forever when you, Neil Patrick Harris, are cast as Jack Dawson in Titanic.
Looking back it’s hard to believe, but at the time some people in show biz are actually skeptical. “Neil Patrick Harris?!?” they say. “He’s going to star in Titanic?!?” An Academy Award for Best Actor and $1.8 billion later, those critics are silenced. You are, truly, the king of the world.
You follow up Titanic with a riveting star turn as Captain John Miller in Steven Spielberg’s WWII drama Saving Private Ryan. The role earns you your second consecutive Best Actor Oscar, along with the first-ever Nobel Prize for Acting—a category specially created to honor your brilliance. It also raises your asking price to $50 million a picture, and cements your status as the number-one leading man in Hollywood.
Neil Patrick Harris Page 10