Early on, after an audition, I’d wait by the phone, wringing my hands. And then when I heard I didn’t get the part, I’d marinate in disappointment and introspection. Could I have done something differently?
But about twenty years ago something changed. I’d gotten to a place where I didn’t feel any of that negativity. No more post-audition self-laceration, no more competition, no ill will toward anyone else. I made a switch in the way I approached the process. The switch seemed simple enough once I understood it, but it took me years to achieve that understanding.
Early in my career, I was always hustling. Doing commercials, guest-starring, auditioning like crazy. I was making a decent living, but I confided to Robin that I felt I was stuck in junior varsity. I wondered if I had plateaued. Ever thoughtful, my wife gave me the gift of private sessions with a self-help guy named Breck Costin, who was really wonderful with actors and other creative people.
Breck suggested that I focus on process rather than outcome. I wasn’t going to the audition to get anything: a job or money or validation. I wasn’t going to compete with the other guys.
I was going to give something.
I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance. If I attached to the outcome, I was setting myself up to expect, and thus to fail. My job was to focus on character. My job was to be interesting. My job was to be compelling. Take some chances. Serve the text. Enjoy the process.
And this wasn’t some semantic sleight of hand, it wasn’t some subtle form of barter or gamesmanship. There was to be no predicting or manipulating, no thinking of the outcome. Outcome was irrelevant. I couldn’t afford any longer to approach my work as a means to an end.
Once I made the switch, I was no longer a supplicant. I had power in any room I walked into. Which meant I could relax. I was free.
In advance of an audition, I’d read the script, suss out what was expected. The character is going to murder his coworker, so there’s probably some rage and frustration and fear of getting caught. My job is not just to deliver those expected feelings, but to find something interesting and unexpected, maybe some barely contained glee or mania or righteousness.
I learned to take control of the room. If I felt the scene called for the two characters to be standing, I might ask the casting director to please get up. “What? Get out of my seat? Oh, uh, okay.” The casting director gets up, and now we’re at eye level. Or if the objective was intimidation, I’d get close. That shift in physicality is visceral. It changes the power dynamic. We are accustomed to keeping a certain distance in professional settings. Cheating that, even if it’s just by a few inches, provokes a reaction.
Of course I didn’t always get the job, but that wasn’t my intent anymore. What was important was I always left that room knowing I did everything I could do.
I had a basket at home. I’d audition and then toss the script in the basket. I’d forget about it. I’d let it go. You can’t fake letting it go. You have to really genuinely detach from it.
If I’d get a callback, I’d fish out the script and say, “Oh, yeah. I remember this guy.”
In 1999, I tested for another pilot at Fox, and my friend Corbin Bernsen got the part. I was able to say: “Congratulations, Corbin. I hope the show makes it.” And I meant it.
Another pilot. It was at NBC. It came down to me and two other guys. I walked into a room of twenty-five people. I did the scene twice. We all did. We waited the wait. In the end the casting director came out and said to us: “We hate to do this . . . but we have to tell you now. We start to shoot on Monday.” One of the other guys got it.
I said: Good for him. And I meant it.
Four days after that NBC test, I got a call about Malcolm in the Middle. They were looking for someone to play the dad. I read the script and it was excellent, really funny, really smart, but all you knew about the father was that he had a lot of body hair. I’m not hairless, but I’m not hirsute. There wasn’t a lot more to go on with Hal. I read it again to see if I could find another way in.
The mother was more fully written. She was an alpha, a sergeant of arms, a lioness. She was fearless, strong, sharp, bombastic. I wrote all those things down. And then, on a whim, I wrote the opposite of all those qualities. Fearful. Weak. Obtuse. Reserved. I started to realize I was building a character. I was supplying what she didn’t have, which was good for a marriage. Good for a comedy, too. I realized there was a lot of potential for humor in this character. It could be really funny.
I’d learned that if a character wasn’t in the script, I had to infer it or imagine it. I had to take it on myself to build it. I came to the audition ready with ideas.
The writer gave me the template in the script, and I expanded that into a multidimensional person. Even in the half dozen lines Hal had in the pilot, I was able to find something. He was distracted by his family—not disinterested. When he was overwhelmed, he took a vacation in his mind. No one wanted to see someone who didn’t love his family. But a man who is exhausted by his family? Almost everyone can relate to that.
They auditioned me last-minute; they were already building the sets for the pilot. Because Hal was underdeveloped in the script, they were having a hard time casting him. All of which played to my advantage. But I wasn’t thinking of my advantage. I was thinking of giving them Hal. I remember sitting in the office on a folding chair with set construction going on just outside, and Linwood Boomer, the creator of Malcolm, falling out of his seat laughing at what I did. I got the part.
After we shot the pilot, I got a call from Linwood. He told me that Fox picked up the show and it was moving forward. What he didn’t tell me was that Fox wanted to reshoot the pilot and replace me. The network wanted to go in a different direction with Hal. They wanted to go away from me. I found out years later that Linwood told Fox—emphatically—no. He told the network I was Hal. Linwood fought for me. He believed in me. Everyone needs a champion, and Linwood Boomer was mine.
Composer
I’d been on the show for a year when I got a call from our music clearance office. “Hey, how you doing? Are you a member of BMI or ASCAP?”
“That’s music, right?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s for composers. Anyone who writes music for film or TV.”
“No. Why?”
“Well, my job is to write down every second or half second of music. And every episode, I turn that list over to Fox to make sure we get clearance. “Happy Birthday to You”? Two ladies got very rich off that song.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, “but, uh, why are you calling me?”
“Well, see, your character hums and whistles a lot. That’s technically music, and I have to put it down as music. You might as well get paid for it as the author and performer, because someone else will get paid if you don’t claim it. The money will just go to the studio.”
“How much does it cost to join BMI or ASCAP?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
I called BMI and filled out the application, became a member, and after a few months I received a check for $242. I looked at the stapled connectors. Over the course of two years, it listed all the times I whistled and hummed. In the episode “Reese Joins the Army Part One,” I whistled for a few seconds. I read across the page and there was the dollar amount. And then there were dollar amounts from all the countries the episode aired in. I made 49 cents in Bulgaria. For whistling.
Every quarter I would get a check for a couple hundred bucks.
One day, I’d whistled in an episode, and I told the crew, “Hey, you know what? I just made some money. Any time I whistle or hum they pay me.”
“Get out of here,” they said.
“I’m serious. They pay me.” I brought in a check stub and showed them. I said, “Every time I get a check, I’m going to throw a party. Open bar, poker, strippers.” All true. Except for the strippers. It was a family show.
The producers said to me: “Yo
u’re not humming anything we have to pay for? Are you whistling a specific song?”
“Please,” I said indignantly. “You think I’d plagiarize? I create my own songs. All original.”
A camera assistant friend looked over the scene one day and he approached me and said, “Before Lois comes in the front door, you’re under the sink fixing the garbage disposal, and . . . I was thinking. Maybe that’s a good time for you to be whistling?”
“Great idea, Jim.”
I think he just wanted a party.
Hal
It became a running joke among the Malcolm in the Middle writing staff: What won’t Bryan do? We already know Bryan will run up and down the street in his floppy tighty-whities. Will he drink a morning shake that consists of raw eggs, raw ground meat, soy powder, and juice? Sure. Will he wear a coat of live bees? Not just a bee here and there, mind you. We’re talking a second skin of bees. They didn’t want to write it if I wouldn’t do it.
So they asked me: are you allergic to bees?
Nope.
Will you do it?
Absolutely I’ll do it.
Then the writers worked backward. They reverse engineered the story. How could Hal get himself into that position?
Malcolm and his Krelboyne classmates are entering a battling robot competition. The boys are arguing about what type of robot to build as Hal passes by. His interest is piqued. “Go ahead and play, and I’ll get you started here,” he says.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
Hal has a lightbulb moment: “We’ve already had bots with chains. We have never had an empty-cavity robot. We’ve never had a robot with . . . bees!”
Hal is up all night with his creation, tinkering, testing, trying to figure it out. Suddenly he notices a laser pointer on him. Oh no. An army of bees swarms out of the machine and blankets him.
I’ve always liked bees. My grandfather had bees on his farm. And from that experience I knew that bees are quite docile. Bees will only land on you for two reasons. One: to rest. Two: they mistake you for a flower. So even though I’d have fifty to seventy-five thousand bees on my body, I wasn’t scared.
Still, we had to prepare carefully to get the shot. The bee experts made sure that my long-sleeved shirt was tucked in. They duct-taped it at my wrists and then taped my pant waist and cuffs. They taped down my collar from the inside. They put cotton in my ears, so the bees couldn’t crawl in.
The queen bee emits pheromones, chemical messages, to her drones, her worker bees. Pheromones bond the drones to the queen; they give the colony a sense of being “queenright.” So now with a little eyedropper the beekeeper doused my arms and torso with pheromones, my hair and my ears and my chest. I was a bee magnet. I was their queen.
Once I set a position I wasn’t going to be able to change it. Seventy-five thousand bees don’t give you a lot of mobility. I picked a comfortable position. Standing. Knees loose. I was ready. The beekeepers were ready. Cameras ready. The beekeeper used a nontoxic smoke to make them mellow. Smoke relaxes bees. He opened the boxes and took out a screen full of bees, and then with a big scooper he gently lifted the bees off the screen and placed them on my waist. The beekeeper instructed me to let them maneuver. Let them find their own route. They did. They crawled up. I was soon covered in bees. The beekeeper warned me to keep my breathing steady, remain calm. It turned out there was no need. I discovered that being covered in bees was like sitting in a vibrating chair at a Brookstone store, warm and rather soothing. I completely let go. I closed my eyes.
In the scene, I had to turn around. As I moved, a bee crawled between my legs. I said, “I think I got stung.”
The beekeeper was at the ready, waiting to flick the bee away. “Where did you get stung?”
“In my nuts.”
He paused. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help you there.”
We got the shot. Everything good. People applauded. The bee expert explained that to get the bees off me they’d reload the pheromones onto the screens, and I was to squat as low as I could and then jump up. When I landed, half the bees would fall off and then follow the pheromones onto the screens and into the boxes. The beekeepers would gently whisk off the rest with a broom. They’d lose a few, but it would be fractional.
I got stung again when they were whisking the bees off. It wasn’t too bad. But I knew from the horror on everyone’s face how monstrous I looked. After all the bees were back in their boxes, Linwood walked over. “Remember when I said I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do?” he said. “I wouldn’t do this.”
As Hal, I was strapped to the front of a city bus like a bicycle. I spent a hell of a lot of time dancing around in my tighty-whities, including one episode where I sang a song and danced a dance in praise of bacon and its effect on my body. I was doused with water balloons. Fake bird shit plopped on my head. I was covered in blue paint head to toe—everything but my eyeholes. Hal is depressed in that episode, so he takes a painting class, and he paints himself blue—his “blue period”—and splats his body against the canvas. Except for a modesty patch, I was entirely nude, so they turned up the heat onstage. The human body regulates heat through pores. If you close off the pores, you cut off the ability to regulate. Covered in paint in a hot room, I slowly started to overheat and become disoriented. Before we finished shooting everything our director wanted, our producer, Jimmy Simons, called it off and rushed me into a shower to scrub off the paint so my body could regulate temperature again. It turns out painting yourself head to toe is dangerous. Live and learn.
I did roller-skate dancing. I trained for two straight weeks on roller skates—hours upon hours. I could shoot the duck, spin, balance on one leg, all kinds of things. The only thing I couldn’t do was leave my feet. I tried a cartwheel once on my own, and my expert skating coach Greg Tallaksen said: “Don’t do that again.”
I loved Malcolm. I loved it. It was always: What’s the next script? What do I get to do with this one? It was so much fun. We did 151 episodes over seven years—so much time to explore, to build a character, to develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with the writers. Once, after something happened to Hal, some big achievement, I said Hot-cha! Soon I saw it written in a script. Next thing you knew, the writers were making it a signature expression, a Hal-ism. And then I riffed on what they did. The relationship between actors and writers on a television show can really be a beautiful creative partnership.
Jane Kaczmarek, who played my wife, Lois, was also a creative partner. We had a wonderful TV marriage, a genuine intimacy. When we were in a scene, kissing or cuddling, we could hang out in bed and talk between takes, completely at ease. If you’re going to work together over 151 episodes, it’s nice to have a connection, a comfort, and Jane and I did. We were lucky.
And my boys were just that—my boys: Chris Masterson, Justin Berfield, Erik Per Sullivan, and of course Frankie Muniz. I shared a significant part of their lives growing up, and they were good kids one and all. And they made it through the gauntlet of life as child actors and became decent young men.
In the last episode of the series, Malcolm goes off to college. The shooting schedule called for filming the last scene last. (It’s customary to shoot out of sequence.) When we finished that last take, not one member of the cast or crew had a dry eye. Seven years. We had become a family. And we didn’t want to let it go.
Son
My mother was on her fourth marriage. The sequence of husbands was Easy, Joe, Peter, and then George. George was a lifelong smoker, thin as a rail, convivial, but not very bright. After my dad, my mother always chose men who made her feel better about herself. It was as if she wanted to play tennis with someone who wasn’t as good as she was. She knew she’d always win if she were playing against a beginner. But in this context, what was winning?
Even decades after my dad split, my mother’s anger always felt newly minted. She was angry over being left, angry over losing the love of her life. As a young child, I’d known her as a loving
, fun parent; then, without warning, she became a bitter alcoholic stuck in the past.
As an adult I tried to have as much of a relationship with her as I could, but it wasn’t easy. My mom dwelled endlessly on the ways she’d been mistreated by life. As for love, she was more about the men in her life than her children. Consequently, I saw her less and less.
George and my mom were living in Hemet, a town in Riverside County, way out in the desert, and they’d decided to move to Saint Louis because George’s sister lived there. My sister, Amy, and I went to see them before they left. (My brother was living in New York by then.) We drove out to spend a couple of days and help them pack up their mobile home. We walked in and immediately knew something was wrong with George. His color was bad. He was gray. He said he had a chest cold. My sister, a nurse, shook her head and said, “George, you need to go to the doctor. When’s the last time you went to the doctor to check on this cold?”
At the hotel later on, Amy told me. “He’s dying.”
Meanwhile my mother had severe sciatica. When she was driving, every so often her leg went numb and her foot got heavy on the gas pedal, flooring it. You crossed your fingers no one was in front of her at such moments.
So we convinced them to ship their car and take the bus to St. Louis. We said, “It will be much more enjoyable.” They agreed, and we made all the arrangements and put up the money.
George and my mother set up house in Missouri. They were there not three months before he was diagnosed.
“It turns out he has lung cancer,” my mother said, shocked. We were shaking our heads and thinking: YEAH, he has lung cancer. He’s a chimney!
He died almost immediately, and she moved back to California. She needed more care and a place to live. I found an adult retirement community and moved her into a one-bedroom apartment. We started to notice she’d forget why she was in a room. Everyone does that from time to time, but she started to do it a lot. She was cooking something and forgot about it. She started a fire on her stove. We knew something wasn’t right.
A Life in Parts Page 17