by Rainn Wilson
The idea of working in this manner was absolutely terrifying to me.
The next scene I performed was from Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. I truly dared to be boring. I just sat there and listened to my scene partner, without self-consciousness, worry, or any forced indication of listening.
To me, I felt naked, bereft, unadorned, afraid. But I could tell I was onto something. Surprise, surprise, I was far more interesting to watch when I didn’t try to be interesting! Simply being and listening can be riveting if the internal life is fully fleshed out.
My classmates were extremely kind and supportive, as was the entire faculty.
To me the key to acting is listening. You can’t believe how many actors “fake listen” when onstage or on camera. We all certainly know what it’s like when someone is not truly listening to us in everyday conversation, how strained and hollow the conversation can feel. A great deal of the time, when we’re watching actors and not responding to their performances, it’s because of this specific issue.
Most of my favorite acting moments of all time are not showy moments of bravado but simple ones, when the actor’s body, mind, and heart are filled with truth and a deep reservoir of emotion.
—
Not long after, Ron, in his office, told me those prescient words of wisdom about my acting that proved ridiculously true. He said, “You know, Rainn, you have an affinity for playing alienated outsiders. You will have great success playing comedy, and it’s through that milieu that doors will open for you. Only after you’re established as a comic actor, playing eccentric misfits, will people let you take on more serious, dramatic roles.”
He was like an oracle.
All this would come into play again during my third year at NYU. I had been cast as Hamlet in Hamlet. That’s right, folks, THE DANE! The Prince of Denmark. The Hambone. Hamalama-Ding-Dong. Moons over My Hamlet. Wham, Bam, Thank You, Hamlet . . . Okay, I’ll stop now.
Nothing is more bowel-churning and intimidating to a twenty-three-year-old actor than to be charged with playing perhaps the most legendary and complex role of all time.
Our director for the production was a fascinating playwright who was a former Jesuit priest who had fallen in love with the theater and had entire Shakespeare plays memorized in his brilliant mind.
The only problem? He didn’t know much about working with student actors and every day after rehearsal he would give us all grades. Literally. I got a report card after every rehearsal with a giant B+ or C− on it and detailed notes on what aspects of the role I needed to improve on.
The rehearsal period for an actor is a very delicate process. One is exploring, making mistakes, trying things out, spitting a lot, bumping into furniture, and falling flat on one’s face. Fortunately in the theater you have about a month of rehearsals to reach the point where you’re ready for an audience. Grading an actor in the first week of rehearsals, especially a young student tackling one of the world’s toughest roles, can have a deleterious effect.
I felt completely stifled from all the grading and stylized theater shenanigans going on around me. I swiftly went back into my old patterns of pushing and indicating, disconnected from any internal truth of the character. (Especially with the 29,551 words of dialogue to memorize.) I started to suck. Big-time. I just knew I was going to be a complete and total lost failure in my performance in the role of a lifetime.
Once again, I had some dark nights of the soul where, instead of sleeping, I prayed on my knees on my futon in the middle of a quiet New York night, weeping for some kind of divine intervention. I was terrified, lost. Like most moments of intense personal tragedy, it was both heartbreaking and a little bit ridiculous. (Note: Curiously enough it was right before this experience that I had left everything having to do with God and religion behind. But you know what they say: “There are no atheists in rehearsals for Hamlet.”)
Thankfully, after one of these sleepless, terrified nights, some faculty members came to an early run-through of the first half of the play, saw all the weird, bad acting and bizarre stage direction going on, and pulled the plug on the entire production.
I had a reprieve!
Ron Van Lieu decided to take the reins and direct the play, and I got an impossibly rare chance to play Hamlet a second time.
Needless to say, the next version was far better than the first. Ron made the production extremely stripped down, bare, and focused on the acting. It was every actor’s dream and the pinnacle of my time at NYU to sit on a chair in front of an audience and do the “To be, or not to be” monologue (as well as so many others) with as much simple truth as I could muster. I wasn’t great, but I was good enough and learned a ton about my craft through that experience. I can always say that I played the Dane twice before the age of twenty-four. And sucked only once.
It was getting near the end of my time at NYU and I was about ready to enter the outside world, become a professional actor, and have reality pick me up, turn me upside down, and shake me like a snow globe.
SHITTY JOBS
—
I have always worked. I haven’t always worked hard. But I’ve had a LOT of jobs. Some of them okay, most of them simply awful. It’s not like I had any great work ethic, it’s just that 1) when I was younger, I was mostly bored and needed something to do other than sit around my sad house and read science fiction, 2) we didn’t have any money, so if I ever wanted to buy something, like a membership to the Columbia Record and Tape Club, or a KISW T-shirt, or D&D figurines, I needed to get my own cash, and 3) as an adult, I had to pay the R-E-N-T!
(Note: When I saw the musical Rent and all those quirky bohemians were singing about how they were going to “pay the reeeeennnnnt!!!!” I just kept thinking about my life and wanting them to shut up and get actual jobs. I wanted to do a sequel called Jobs! Where all those perky, tortured artists were all waiters and janitors and pizza delivery guys and receptionists. You know, like everyone else in New York trying to have a career as an artist. If they would have put half the energy they exerted in their singing and dancing into getting real jobs, they really would not have had to worry so much about how they were gonna pay the rent!)
I’m grateful to all these shitty jobs, because when I graduated from acting school my sole goal was to work as an actor and not have to work any more of the horrible, degrading, monotonous, crappy, soul-sucking jobs that had gotten me to that point.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
BERRY PICKER
In Washington State, child slave labor was alive and well in the late seventies and early eighties. You see, farms could get around labor laws by having very loose boundaries concerning what an employee was or wasn’t. Every summer, busloads of witting and (mostly) unwitting teenagers would be picked up at local street corners and shopping malls and trucked out to a berry farm. You would work for six hours or so in the hot sun, in endless rows of berry bushes, and you’d get paid not by the hour but by the basket of berries you picked. At Bahnmiller Berry Farm of Monroe, Washington, you got $1.25 per FLAT of berries you picked and you’d be lucky if you picked one flat per hour. DO THE MATH, FOLKS! Also, you didn’t get paid until the very end of the season.
I worked there for three summers. I started in strawberries but that sucked big-time. They grow on the ground, you see, and you have to squat, crawl, bend, and waddle your way down the aisles of strawberry plants. It was truly backbreaking work, and whenever I pass laborers in the strawberry fields of the San Joaquin Valley, my heart (and knees) goes out to them.
Raspberries were way easier because you could stand and reach into the thick bushes and grasp around for those pulpy little sons of bitches and drop them into the little box you wore around your waist like a fanny pack. The bushes were even high enough to provide shade a good deal of the time.
Some people were innately genius berry pickers and could fly down the aisles, leaving the bushes b
are and their flats piled high with berries, racking up $1.25 after $1.25. Others were dawdlers and ate as many as they picked, chatting the whole time.
The girls at the berry fields didn’t know that I was a total loser at Shorecrest, so they would occasionally talk to me and joke around. That always makes a job easier.
The whole thing was a racket, like I said, but on the bright side, it was a little like a berry-themed summer camp, and in August you’d get a big fat check (well, if you call $379 a big fat check).
NEWSPAPER BOY
I delivered papers for a few months in Seattle as a young teen. I had to fold the papers as well and pedal them around the neighborhood on my Schwinn ten-speed. That was the suckiest part. I would also have to collect subscriptions, and one time a guy with a biker ’stache answered the door buck naked. You just can’t unsee that.
ASSISTANT TO THE APARTMENT MANAGER
As a teen in Wilmette, I worked as a kind of super at an apartment building and would empty the garbage and mop stairways and change lightbulbs and tar roofs. And the endless poo-brown garage doors at the apartment building, on Linden and Fifth? Yeah, I painted those in 1983 while listening almost exclusively to Eurythmics and U2.
SECURITY GUARD
Picture a 158-pound version of me in a blue polyester security outfit. Intimidating, right?
I worked as a security guard at two locations in the eighties.
In the summer of 1984, I was “securing” the grounds of the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois.
(If you haven’t seen this majestic domed temple, it is simply incredible. Built by the American Baha’i community, and completed in 1953, the Taj Mahal–esque architecture is stunning and the whole edifice vibrates with a solemn beauty. It was created for people of all faiths to come to and meditate and/or worship and is one of the seven wonders of Illinois, along with Wrigley Field, the Sears Tower, the Great River Road National Scenic Byway, the Cinnabon Express at O’Hare airport, wheat, and Mike Ditka’s mustache.)
Being a security guard at the Baha’i House of Worship was very mellow. The only time I had to police any actual law breaking was when I had to grab a little suburban skate punk by the elbow and ask him to leave. I mostly just drank a lot of Mountain Dew and walked around the beautiful gardens thinking about girls.
Being a security guard at the NYU student center in 1986 was not as fun. This was a work-study job, and I mostly checked IDs at the front door. When drunk students would roll up wanting to use the bathroom and not have their IDs, I would point to the big sign that said NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT STUDENT IDS and they would curse me out and call me names and I would just sigh and continue to read whatever Shakespeare play I was focusing on at the time.
SHIPPING AND RECEIVING/DELIVERY TRUCK DRIVER
I worked for nine months as a shipping and delivery guy at Ballard Marine Supply in Seattle. For $3.75 an hour, I would put pallets of merchandise on shelves with the forklift, mail out boxes of gear to fishermen in Alaska, and drive around Seattle in a HUGE box truck, picking up enormous orders of anchors and propellers and gaskets and marine paint. It was lonely work. A man and his truck.
The guys I worked with were hard-drinking, beefy, sailor-y types who couldn’t understand my odd sensitivity and social awkwardness one single bit. Here was this pencil-necked artíste hauling around boxes of paint, propellers, metal screws, and wet rope.
We were all let go one day when it was discovered that the owner of the company was hundreds of thousands in debt and had drained all the accounts and fled the country in his sailboat, Aperitif.
COOKIE CHEF
Okay, I just lied. I was never a cookie chef. Like in the movie Sliding Doors, I often wonder what would have happened HAD I gotten the job at the Mrs. Fields cookie store on “the Ave” in Seattle in 1985.
I applied one day, desperate for a job, and was met by a real-life Dwight Schrute. He took his job as cookie store manager VERY seriously. He told me that the pay was minimum wage and that I would have to get there at five a.m. to start the baking process. It was a hard, hot, lonely job, he said, and was obviously trying to gauge my commitment. Cookie Dwight told me delightful stories of the real Mrs. Fields, Debbi, who was a former Utah housewife, model, and cheerleader who would often visit the various stores and make sure they were running up to her exacting standards. And when he spoke of her, his eyes filled with the same empty joy that cult members get when thinking of their beloved cult leader.
I laughed heartily at his stories of the cookie trade and solemnly told him of my commitment to getting there ON TIME to get Mrs. Fields cookies into the hands of hungry college students. I told him I thought it would be “fun” to work in such an “amazing” work environment and what a “huge” fan I was of the cookies, because that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it, the cookies? We shook hands and laughed and he told me he would get back to me soon. I waved good-bye with a cheery flick of the hand and was off.
As soon as I left, I groaned audibly. The job sounded horrific, but I had to do it. I was broke. I have never not wanted a job so much. I was already feeling sick from the odor of cloyingly sweet butterscotch that had filled his cookie office. I was forlorn, despondent, resigned as I walked away.
And the call? I never got it. I didn’t pass the interview. I was shot down. And somehow, in some strange way, that was worse. Rejected from a job that a chimp with an apron and a spatula could do.
I was a Mrs. Fields reject.
TRAFFIC-COUNTER GUY
Perhaps the oddest job of my entire life (other than pretending to be a dorky paper salesman to a weekly audience of millions) was counting traffic in a carpool lane from a freeway overpass as part of a Department of Urban Studies study at the University of Washington for $6 an hour.
For a couple of weeks from three to six p.m. myself and another UW student would sit over the lanes of the 520 freeway with little metal counter/clicker thingies and click each time a car went down a certain lane. We also had clipboards and pencils, as well as coats and umbrellas, since it was cold and raining most of the time up on that forlorn bridge.
The other student was a very pretty girl and I was weirdly infatuated. It was a very strange situation to have to count all those damn cars, all the while having a crush on the girl counting cars next to you, umbrellas raised and clipboards on laps, traffic roaring around everywhere. I would try to tell some lame jokes or make halting, fitful conversation, to no avail. It felt like a deleted scene from a Woody Allen movie, and I kept hoping that it would turn cute and romantic, but no dice. At six p.m. she would grab her soggy clipboard and hightail it out of there, the dim Northwest sun sinking below the foggy horizon, cars zooming along below.
DISHWASHER
There is simply no suckier job in the universe than being a dishwasher. You spend hours on your feet in a loud, wet, steamy corner of a stinky, hot kitchen. No matter how many dishes you do, more keep rolling in. ENDLESS plates covered in gravy and oil and piles of uneaten foody chunks. If God were going to design a modern version of hell, dishwashing would be way more degrading and torturous than mining in phosphorous pits and being stabbed by dudes with tridents. You are also treated like crap by the rest of the kitchen staff, being the low man on the totem pole. I believe that people think there must be something wrong with you in order for you to be a dishwasher in the first place. In fact, when I was washing dishes at a seafood place named Arnies in Edmonds, Washington, the other dishwasher, Erik, was actually developmentally disabled and was, actually, better at the job than I was. I was faster, sure, but his dishes were spotlessly bereft of all gravy and stacked like the gold bars in Fort Knox.
One time I asked a server for a Coke, as I wasn’t supposed to go into the bar area, and the charming young waiter thought it would be really funny to bring me back a Coke with some green beans in it. I got him back by getting depressed and eventually quitting. Be nice to the lowly dishwash
er, America!
BUSBOY
I spent a summer at the Lyceum restaurant in Salem, Massachusetts (where my mom, Shay, was living), bussing tables. The Lyceum was a famous old lecture hall where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau spoke. In the best American fashion, it was then converted into a bar and grill with a dinner theater upstairs, and on Friday nights after midnight it was a hangout for local transvestites and cross-dressers (who tip GREAT, FYI!).
It’s a big step up from dishwasher to busboy, let me tell you. You’re in the air-conditioning, for one thing, and people speak to you like you’re a human being (barely) and not a tongue-chewing automaton. I was an amazing busboy and the second a fork was set down, the offending Alfredo-splashed plate would be whisked away to the dishwasher (who I was always very nice to).
I was eventually allowed to wait tables in the dinner theater, where I would lay down prime rib in front of preppy yacht-owning drunks from Marblehead as they watched THE WORSTEST production of THE WORSTEST play, Last of the Red Hot Lovers by Neil Simon, on the dismal little stage.
I remember gazing up at the lead actor’s offensive mugging on the stage as he hammily pulled a pair of panties up from the couch cushion he was sitting on and made a big ol’ ham face to the audience, to a roar of drunken applause, and thinking to myself, Are you sure this is what you want to do professionally?
WAITER
I’m going to brag a little bit. I have waited thousands and thousands of tables. I was good. Very good. As an actor I am only okay, but as a waiter, I was masterful. To this day, I often feel like jumping up in restaurants and taking over the waiter’s job when the staff doesn’t know what it’s doing. It drives me crazy when drink orders aren’t taken in the first four minutes of sitting down. Or when waiters’ arms careen juttingly across your face as they’re setting something down on the middle of the table.