by Rainn Wilson
We imagined the clowns waking up, cooking breakfast (Jell-O sandwiches, of course), going to their various workplaces (a restaurant, an operating room, and an office filled with pencils), and then auditioning for and eventually performing in a community theater production of the Albanian masterpiece Winter Is the Coldest Season (in the original Albanian language). I played the offstage voice of the arrogant theater director putting them through their paces in the audition process on a “god mic.” There were also interstitial sketches about giant talking birds, Doug and Eric, one of whom began a love affair with their roommate, a human boy, played by Kevin.
It was a strange mélange of angst-ridden existential clowning, absurd dance routines, and sketch comedy, and it absolutely killed. The audiences at NYU went nuts for the piece in ways I’d never seen in the theater before. The students and their friends were literally cheering, shouting, and jumping up and down in their seats like it was a WWE wrestling match, admittedly a slightly less homoerotic one.
We knew we were onto something.
Some folks from a now-defunct Off-Off-Broadway theater had seen the play and invited us to be a part of their season that summer. We improved on the show and put it up again with the same result. Crazed audiences and a clamor for more Bozena.
Onward and upward. After securing some financing and collaborating with producer extraordinaire Michael Winter, we put on an expanded, brighter, and slicker version of our show Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village.
This is when the reality of New York theater hit us like the 6 train. In order to make money you need to charge a ton for tickets. The weekly “nut”—that is to say, the amount you spend each week on union dues, newspaper ads, cast and crew salaries, equipment, and theater rental—is pretty darn high. To make a PROFIT, you have to get butts in seats. Butts that can afford seats. Week after week after week. Our key audience of young folks, students, downtown artists, and wackadoodle nut jobs had perfectly acceptable butts—very nice butts, in some cases—but butts that couldn’t afford the show. And the richer folks over fifty (with their saggy butts), who really didn’t respond to demented clowns juggling Jell-O and head-butting hams, were just not buying those tickets.
Then the New York Times came to town. We got rave reviews literally everywhere else, including Time magazine, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal, but because we got a mediocre review in the “Gray Lady,” we were sunk. That’s the only paper folks in NYC read. They didn’t care if the Daily News, the Post, and the Newark Star-Ledger loved our show. Audiences only listen to the (extremely conservative and occasionally snobby and Anglophilic) Times for some reason. Probably because ticket prices are so high, they want to have insurance that the show they’re investing so heavily in will be worth their very expensive evening. I hope all those audience members enjoyed Dennis Franz in Rutherford B. Hayes: A One-Man Show or whatever the Times recommended instead of us.
Anyhoo. We closed after three amazing but difficult months.
But to go from a rehearsal room in NYU to rave reviews Off-Broadway was a miracle. We made a great piece of daring theater that people who saw it still talk about to this day. That’s worth something.
Plus, making audiences laugh and gasp night after night in ridiculous ways was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Especially doing it with some of my bestest friends.
And it was The New Bozena that brought us to Los Angeles.
Our producer, Michael Winter, moved to California a few years after the show closed and kept coaxing us to come. His plan? To have us perform it in LA and try to find a way to turn all that clowny insanity into a TV show. We had some money to do this from our investors and finally the timing became perfect.
Holiday and I were bought out of our incredible Brooklyn apartment, as I mentioned before. We packed up an old SUV with most of our books and knickknacks and a wok and a cow’s skull, as well as our pit bulls, Edison and Harper Lee, and we drove across the USA to make a new home for ourselves in Los Angeles. All thanks to some “clowns at home.”
Los Angeles lay before us like a sparkly tortilla baked in the cinnamon farts of starlets.
The various clowns plus Holiday and our pit bulls all moved into a grotesque abomination of an apartment building in Koreatown that smelled like cat pee, chlorine, and kimchi. It was peopled with the lowest dregs of show business: broke actors in town for pilot season, unemployed writers, and exiled Korean grandparents. (In all fairness, the Korean grandparents did have a first-look deal with CBS.)
We began rehearsals to put a slightly stripped-down version of our show up at the Hudson Guild theater in Hollywood.
Hollywood, for the seven of you who don’t know, is not anything like you think it is from the association with that famous, grandiose name. There’s nothing tinselly or fabulous or razzle-dazzle-y about the place. This was especially true in 1999. Busy and yet somehow completely destitute, it was populated with drug addicts, strippers, schizophrenics, and Scientologists. Besides a wax museum, some sickly palm trees, an occasional confused Dutch tourist, and the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, there was nothing there to let you know that there was a show-business industry in its history or in the vicinity. But if you wanted marijuana, wigs, or a taco, it was definitely the place to be.
As we were getting ready to launch the show I had a crazy showbiz misadventure that points out both the absurdity of the entertainment business and the mystery of the great universal ebb and flow of life.
After a lovely year being a signed client with a bicoastal, midsize talent agency in New York, I kept trying to connect with its LA office. No one would return my call. Literally. Silence. I kept pestering my New York contacts to try to get me in to see or even speak to the agency where I WAS A SIGNED CLIENT. It was impossible. I was, after all, hoping to audition for some of those things called TV SHOWS that they supposedly had so many of in Los Angeles.
The New Bozena was opening, so I called yet again to reach the agent who was supposed to be representing me and finally got him on the phone. He promised repeatedly that he would come to our small LA premiere.
The night of the big opening. Huge success. Afterward, I looked all over the crowded lobby for someone who looked like they might be an agent. Nothing. Then a slight twenty-two-year-old dweeby guy came up to me and said: “Hi. My name is Michael. Robby the agent couldn’t make it tonight. He sends his apologies and I’m his assistant and he sent me instead! It was a great show! I brought my friend Vanessa!”
I was stunned and pissed.
Then little Vanessa, standing by his side, piped up. “Hey, I’m assisting some producers on a pilot over at NBC called The Expendables and you guys were all so funny I’m going to call and get you all in for auditions!”
I was politely dismissive. “Okay, great. Thanks, Vanessa. Yeah, yeah, sounds amazing. Thanks so much for coming, you guys.” I was secretly fuming.
Sure enough, the next day I FINALLY got a call from my LA agent, who told me in a chain-smokery voice, “We got you an audition for this pilot on NBC. I’ll fax you the pages and the information.” I bit my tongue about the fact that it was actually little Vanessa from the lobby of the Hudson Guild who got me the audition, not any agent.
All of us clowns auditioned that same week. We all got called back several times and eventually the producers wanted to “test”* me for the pilot.
After five auditions, I booked my first lead television part in what is perhaps the most gloriously awful half-hour “comedy” pilot ever made. Apparently America was not ready for a not-funny, single-camera comedy featuring television-obsessed indestructible androids who spend most of their time fighting crime naked.
It was a great experience, I earned my Screen Actors Guild card, and finally my agents started returning my calls.
Soon thereafter I got a call to meet one of the most talented and nicest human beings on the planet, Cameron
Crowe. I had put an audition on tape in New York a few months before moving to LA. I had never been to an audition before where the director ushered me to a chair in his office and then promptly sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me as I prepared to read.
In the original script of the “Untitled Cameron Crowe Project” (aka Almost Famous), the small part I would end up playing, Dave Felton, a real boss of Cameron’s at Rolling Stone in the seventies, tracks down the young hero, William Miller, to the airport and gives him a wise and valuable lecture on the meaning of art and life. This scene was eventually, heartbreakingly, cut before we started shooting. I know this because after I was cast I was allowed to come into the office’s conference room, sign a nondisclosure agreement, and read the full script, which was almost two hundred pages long.
I had never read anything like it before or since. Perhaps the greatest work of screenwriting ever. It was gorgeous and funny and complicated. Bursting with emotion and, of course, music. The final movie is a classic of the cinema, but the script was an even more incredible work of art that stands on its own.
Immediately after getting cast in Almost Famous I got an audition for and was cast in Galaxy Quest, another classic comedy of that year. The alien I played, Lahnk, was supposed to be a much larger part, but because NBC was still deciding whether or not to pick up that piece of TV doo-doo The Expendables, I was only able to be in a handful of scenes.
That movie provided me with a tormented initiation into the world of Hollywood.
In a now-deleted scene, my weird little Thermian character gives Tony Shalhoub a tour of the beryllium sphere in the engine room. The dialogue I had was chock-full of techno-speak, and try as I might I simply could not get the language to stick in my head. It didn’t help that I was nervous as hell and sweating up a storm in my tinfoil alien unitard. On various breaks, I called Holiday to interrupt her writing and have her run the endless nonsensical lines with me over the phone as my breathing got shallower and shallower and my head spun more and more.
Then it was time. We started to shoot. Standing right behind me were Alan Rickman, Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Sam Rockwell. Sweat started to roll down my face and head. My knees were shaking. Take after take after take, the technobabble monologue just would not come out right. It was an actor’s nightmare come to life; I was stuttering and floundering and sweating my way through an impossible little monologue with half of my acting heroes behind me.
Finally, on the fifth take, I was able to get through the lines. Although when you look at the deleted scene you can see the tense struggle to remember lines behind my beady, panicked alien eyes. My only solace is the thought that someone, somewhere, has done a “Lahnk the Alien from Galaxy Quest” cosplay at a nerd convention.
Suddenly I thought I had this whole LA thing figured out. I had rolled into town and gotten a pilot and a couple of film roles without a single hitch. We set up The New Bozena at Fox to do a pilot presentation, and I had made more money in a couple of months than in all the previous years combined. I was “in” and feeling like a made man. Holiday and I decided to really settle down in LA and make a go of it; she would finish her book of short stories and I would be an actor who could actually pay his bills.
Then, within a few months, The New Bozena got rejected by Fox and I was unemployed for a full year. Showbiz!
Eventually, after doing House of 1000 Corpses for Rob Zombie, I started getting some momentum as a journeyman actor in Hollywood. That job was one of the most fun things ever and I had an absolute blast doing it. It’s every actor’s dream to get clubbed in the mud by a scarecrow who has come to life, then get sawed in half and have your lower torso attached to a giant fish’s tail, and then be placed still-life style on a table surrounded by a cornucopia of fruit, and then be revealed to your bound and gagged girlfriend with a sheet being pulled off of you and the words “BEHOLD! FISHBOY!” and then be sketched by the crazed, homicidal villain as she screams horrifically. I guess dreams really do come true! Now whenever someone passes me on the street and calls me Fishboy, I smile politely and think, That’s an extremely sick person.
I did the movie America’s Sweethearts, CSI, Law and Order, and a couple of pilots, commercials, and canceled shows that no one ever heard of to pay the bills and continue building my career and résumé.
As with most actors there were many close calls on projects that would have sent my life spiraling in an entirely different direction. I was one of the final three actors up for Gob in Arrested Development. I remember reading that pilot script and it was as if a golden glow emanated from the pages; it was so funny and original.
After several auditions I was once again being tested for the project. There were two final scenes that we Gobs would be doing alongside the rest of the family, who had already been cast. In one scene there were one or two lines and in the other scene there were a couple of pages of really funny dialogue and a great chance to show off what you could do with the character. We all filed in, one at a time, to show the head of Fox the first, short scene. Then the other Gobs went in to do the second, bigger scene. I waited, nervously going over my lines and bits in preparation. And waited. And waited. I was sitting all alone in the waiting room and after ten or fifteen minutes or so I wandered out into the hallway. Everyone had left. I mean everyone. Actors, casting agents, Fox executives, janitors, everyone. I finally saw a casting assistant cleaning up in a corner and asked what was going on. “I guess they saw all they needed to from you,” she chirped merrily, and I slunk away embarrassed and miserable, having only auditioned with two lines for the best comic role I had ever read.
Apparently they fell in love with Will Arnett right away, and in this case they absolutely made the right choice for Gob. He turned out to be hysterical in a star-making performance. The universe had other things in store for me.
The story of how I got the role of Arthur on Six Feet Under is a doozy. That role is what eventually landed me The Office and many other great jobs. It was the catalyst that put me on the radar of folks in the entertainment biz and truly launched the second half of my career.
I had auditioned for the terrific casting directors Junie Lowry-Johnson and Libby Goldstein on a couple of projects. Having done well at the auditions, they started calling me in for whatever they were working on.
They started casting Six Feet Under. I really loved the show and wanted desperately to get on it. In any capacity. Even if it was just a costar role with a handful of lines. Anything.
They kept calling me in for various parts. A priest. A dead guy. Several members of the gay chorus that Michael C. Hall’s character was singing with. And I kept not getting cast. Not even close. It was eating me up. I was exasperated beyond measure as I really wanted to be on the show.
One day I was going in to audition for them again as another one of the gay choir members, and on a table in the waiting room I saw the description for the character of Arthur. He was described as an innocent but strange Chauncey Gardiner type and was going to be doing several episodes in a character arc. I knew that he was right in my wheelhouse. So I went to Libby after my audition for the other role and bravely asked if I could try out for it. She consulted with the producer and said yes, giving me the several pages of scenes to work on. I spent about half an hour preparing in the waiting room, but I couldn’t wait to get in and show them. Some roles you play you need to work on very hard. Research. Explore. Excavate. And some roles you just instinctively know how to perform. Arthur, like Dwight, a character I will later describe in some detail, was in my bones. I knew his heart. I knew exactly how he should be played and I couldn’t wait to show everyone involved with the program exactly who this person was.
Sure enough, even though I’d only had a short time, the audition went great. The next week I was called in to read with the incredible Frances Conroy, my eventual love interest, and I got the part. It helped, I suppose, that I knew both Michael C. Hall a
nd Peter Krause from NYU and I had them put in a good word for me to Alan Ball.
I’ll never forget getting that phone call from my agent and manager. I was driving with Holiday to see one of those ridiculous Cirque du Soleil–esque shows, only with horses and unitards, Equinosity or Horse Majeure or something. I said to my great manager, Mark Schulman (who had been with me since the days of The New Bozena), “This is pretty big, right?”
And he simply said, “You have no idea. Your whole life is about to change.”
Holiday and I pulled over to the side of the freeway, put our foreheads together, and screamed with excitement.
What he said may sound a little pretentious, but it’s important to remember that at that point in time HBO was the bee’s knees. EVERYONE was watching The Sopranos. The Wire was in its heyday. Sex and the City was making women coo and boyfriends nauseated on a weekly basis. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage were just getting going. It was the beginning of the whole “Golden Age of Television” that everyone talks about. And Six Feet Under, although it had a small audience, was one of the most influential projects going.
Had I been cast in one of the other extremely small roles I auditioned for, I never would have booked Arthur and then subsequently Dwight (Greg Daniels, the creator of The Office, had watched every single episode of Six Feet Under) and all the other great roles I got to do after 2004. As frustrated as I was at the time that I didn’t get cast as Tommy, gay choir member number three, I now couldn’t be more grateful.
You never know what the cosmos has in store for you, and sometimes repeated rejection is simply the All-Encompassing Creative Life Force™ preparing you for something greater, a different and grander plan.
—
For me, that plan led to the defining role of my career, Dwight Kurt Schrute. I was about to receive the worst haircut of my entire life.