Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One

by Terry Crews

  “Terry, these people are cracking up,” Rebecca said during the premiere.

  “I know,” I said.

  This is powerful. This is a very powerful place.

  And then, at the after-party, Rebecca rushed up to me, so excited.

  “Ice Cube came up to me,” she said. “He was like, man, the first two acts, it’s me and Mike Epps, and the whole third act is Terry and Katt. They stole the movie.”

  Ice Cube wasn’t the only one who had good things to say. People kept approaching me at the premiere. They were excited. I could feel it coming off them.

  NOW THAT THINGS WERE GETTING BACK ON TRACK, Rebecca and I could concentrate on the excitement and joy of the new baby she was carrying. I thought back to my dream about watching my son play football, and I was sure this baby was the boy I had envisioned. But, again, Rebecca told me this baby was a girl, too. Having just come out of the horror of the miscarriage and the loss of our house, and with four girls already at home, I was sure this was it for me, and our family was now complete. I wanted to concentrate on getting back in sound financial shape with the family we already had. My dream had been so vivid that a part of me was disappointed that I would never have a son. But Rebecca assured me that God had promised to send her someone special, and she was absolutely right.

  Our little baby Wynfrey was born in 2003, and after such sadness just one year before, she was an absolute treasure. I turned my attention to the newest addition to our family and began to make peace with the fact that the boy I had dreamed about was probably my grandchild. I figured we would be much older when Rebecca held our grandson on the staircase she had envisioned, but I knew we’d be just as happy with the boy in our family’s next generation.

  I did some other smaller parts in 2003, including a role in Jamie Kennedy’s film Malibu’s Most Wanted, where I played a gang member alongside Damien Dante Wayans. Because of my performance, Damien recommended me to his nephews for a new project they were writing called White Chicks, for which they needed an athletic kind of guy. At the same time, Damon Wayans also had a show, My Wife and Kids, which was looking for a new regular.

  So it worked out that in the morning, I had an audition for My Wife and Kids, and in the afternoon, I had an audition for White Chicks. Well, let me tell you, I have never bombed during an audition like I bombed that morning. My hands were shaking while I held the paper with my lines on it. Damon and the other producers were looking at one another like they couldn’t believe I’d been recommended so highly for the job. Afterward, I got in my car, and I called my agent, even though I almost didn’t want to know what they’d said to him.

  “How did I do?” I asked.

  “Well, we’re not hearing anything yet, but go on over to the other audition with Keenen,” he said.

  I did not want to go. All I could think was how, sometimes, when things start off bad, they tend to go worse. But as I drove across town to the west side of LA, I tried to psych myself up: Man, I’ve got nothing to lose. I already stunk up the first deal so bad. I might as well just go for it.

  It was like the exact opposite of what had happened in the morning. I was reading the lines without even looking at the pages. I was doing the part like I was that guy, and it was just coming out of me. Keenen Ivory Wayans was cracking up. It was the best audition I’ve ever done, even to this day. I had that same feeling I’d had trying out for Battle Dome. I waited a day and a half, and then my agent called me.

  “Good news and bad news,” he said. “Bad news, they’re going in another direction on My Wife and Kids.”

  “I knew it because I stunk it up so bad,” I said.

  “But the good news is you got White Chicks.”

  Rebecca and I just screamed.

  THAT WAS ONE OF THE BEST PERIODS IN MY LIFE. I WAS actually making money. We were still renting, but the house was great, and we could afford it. I was paying my friend back. The kids were getting older and more acclimated to where they were. Rebecca had totally rebounded, and it felt like we were finally on our way.

  But now that I wasn’t just in survival mode, I had the chance to take inventory of the many mistakes I’d made along the way, and how close I’d come to ruining everything, especially with what I’d done in Vancouver. Not only were we still standing, but also, we were actually thriving. I was full of hope for what was to come. I vowed never to mess up again, and never to let Rebecca know what I’d done. Now that I understood how close I’d come to losing everything, I was going to hold on tighter than ever.

  All of this was very much on my mind because we filmed White Chicks in Vancouver, and so I was on location where the stress of my first acting experience had made me go off the rails. I never did so again, but my secret was very present for me while we were there. I thought about how I should really tell Rebecca, but I just couldn’t. Things were going too well after they had been so bad for so long. Luckily, my experience on White Chicks was so positive that it reversed my first Vancouver nightmare. In fact, filming White Chicks was the best experience of my professional life, ever. All of the Wayanses—Keenen, Marlon, Shawn—and producer Rick Alvarez and all of those other guys were so great. And I’ve never been in the zone quite like that, before or after. I was firing on all cylinders.

  I shot my scenes for the film maybe three times a week, and so I had a day or two off between my days on the set. I wanted to be excellent, so I practiced, practiced, practiced. One morning I was working on my dance moves in my room, and the maid walked in on me. I froze, mid-glide.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her face said: Okay, what’s going on here? She laughed and closed the door.

  When I had ideas for jokes, I brought them to Keenen.

  “Go for it,” he said. “Do it.”

  And so I went for it, again and again, and it all worked. We did the scene where I was singing in the car in one take. And then, it seemed like everything I did was one take. I didn’t even have to look at the lines.

  “Do you have any notes for me?” I asked.

  “Brother,” Keenen said. “Just do what you do. No notes. Let’s go. Don’t stop.”

  I was almost on a constant high. Here I was, working with my hero, one of the most accomplished comic actors, writers, producers, and directors of all time, the guy who gave us In Living Color, Jamie Foxx, J. Lo, and Jim Carrey, and he loved everything I did. “You’re killing it,” he said. “Man, just go. Just keep going.”

  When he did give me notes, he shared tips with me about how to do comedy and what it’s all about, and where the jokes really hit. I just soaked it all up. And then, Shawn and Marlon were always around, telling me what we were going to do, and it was so smooth, it felt like a family. I felt like a member of the Wayanses.

  Everybody kept telling me the same thing: “Terry, this is something special.”

  After three months of filming in Vancouver, we wrapped. I felt tremendous sadness. I was beginning to understand the problem with being a performer, always chasing the high of performing, and then struggling with the extreme depression that hits after projects are done. When I got home, it was back to reality in a big way.

  “The trash is loaded up over there,” Rebecca said, pointing.

  I looked at her and sighed. I’d just come from nailing every take and being extolled for my talents, to taking out the trash, and it was humbling. It hurt. Honestly, I was mean to my family because I felt like my life had been better in Vancouver when I was filming than it was at home with them. Obviously, looking back, I can see that my perspective was clouded by my depression. But at the time, I was just in it, and I was a jerk.

  “You’re nicer when you’ve got a job,” my family said.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  Rebecca was not about to let me get full of myself, and so she loved to tease me about how it was when I was on location, versus how it was at home.

  “I know when you’re on the set, it’s all, ‘Here’s your chicken breast, Mr. Crews,�
� ” she said. “ ‘Here’s your smoothie, Mr. Crews.’ But, here, it ain’t gonna be like that.”

  But do you have to say it? I know it’s not like that at home, but don’t say it.

  I couldn’t wait for the movie to come out. I knew everything was going to be different for me once people got a chance to see it. In the meantime, I lay in bed for hours, and I couldn’t make myself get up and do anything.

  “Babe, I’ve got to get back to doing something,” I said. “I can’t not work.”

  It was almost like I was addicted to the high of landing my next project and then going on set and achieving that feeling of just nailing it. I was always wondering: Where’s my next job? What’s it going to be?

  It was impossible for me to just sit still and feel whatever it was I was going through. As a football player, and the alpha male, I’d adopted this mind-set that was all about blinking through anything bad that happened, and avoiding all negativity at any cost. This rule applied to me, and also to my family: Don’t do anything that will take me down. If you’re feeling bad, do something to make yourself feel good.

  Now I know that’s the wrong way to be, but at the time, I was acting almost like this horrible, domineering trainer to my wife and kids. And after a while, they didn’t want to hear it anymore. Even if they knew I was right, they wouldn’t do what I said because of my delivery. My attitude created tension, especially with Azi, who was a teenager. Even when Azi was a youngster, we’d butted heads. One time when she was eight, she did something wrong, and I let her know she was about to get spanked as punishment. She looked at me with this complete and utter calm.

  “Dad, you don’t ever have to spank me,” she said. “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  I was really struck by that moment, but at the time, I was too wrapped up in my own vision of how things needed to be to alter my attitude or approach in any way. Azi was very sensitive, and she was often troubled by the ways of the world. I wasn’t sympathetic at all. I didn’t want her bringing me down.

  “If you’re feeling bad, just go play with your toys,” I said.

  Looking back now, I can see that she was really just looking for somebody to listen to her. Sometimes we have to make the time to sit with the people who are important to us in our lives and feel their pain, open ourselves up enough to acknowledge what feels bad in their lives. Often, that’s all people need, is to have their feelings validated, and they’ll feel better. But I was a long way from being able to do that at the time. I would not validate anyone’s feelings or emotions, especially not my first two kids’, because I was the most stunted back then.

  I was the super-driven, superstar, alpha male. You can’t be manlier than I was. It’s just true. I was in the NFL. For my first job in Hollywood, they put me in a cage, and I had to fight other men. I was that guy. And as far as I was concerned, the only emotions people should feel were positive. Anything negative, get it out of here.

  Next up, I auditioned for the part of the President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I knew this was the follow-up to White Chicks that would make me a household name, and I really wanted that part. But it was callback after callback, and my agent wouldn’t even tell me who I was up against because he was afraid if I knew my competition, I’d get too psyched out. When I finally got the part, I was overjoyed. Except for one little thing. We were filming in Austin, Texas, during the time when the White Chicks premiere happened, and so I wasn’t able to attend. Rebecca and the kids went, and I couldn’t wait until they got home to give me a report. I called Rebecca while I knew she was still there.

  “Terry, the theater is erupting,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Everybody’s coming up to me, like: ‘Yo, your husband. Your husband.’ Everybody is freaking out. The moment when the scene in the car happened, Terry, they wouldn’t stop laughing. The room burst into pandemonium. It was awesome.”

  “Oh, I wish I was there,” I said.

  And then the producer, Rick Alvarez, called me, also from the premiere.

  “Your life will never be the same,” he said. “Everybody is on the floor at everything you’re doing. People are going crazy. Get ready, man. This is huge.”

  Even though I was far away, sitting in my hotel room in Austin, I was so high with endorphins from all of that praise. Also while there, I got a call I’d been waiting on for years. When I’d first moved to Los Angeles, I’d combed the Wilshire Corridor with my head shot and résumé, from one big talent agency to another, only to be told I needed a referral in order to have a meeting. I’d made a promise to myself that I’d be back at one of the premier agencies someday. Meanwhile, around the time I’d done Malibu’s Most Wanted, a top talent manager, Brad Slater, contacted me to tell me that he saw something special in my performances. He also told me that he couldn’t sign me because I was not quite there yet, and I needed to do more first. Honestly, I agreed, but I told him when the time was right, I wanted to be his client. Our positive interaction had always reminded me of Coach Lee’s good word that I’d taken all the way to the NFL. Here was a top talent manager telling me he was impressed by my work, and it was a word I’d held on to for years. Now he’d just landed as an agent at William Morris, and he’d immediately gotten me on the phone.

  “Hey, TC!” he exclaimed. “It’s Brad. Remember when I told you we had to wait until you were ready? I think you’re ready!”

  And so began a relationship that has only grown stronger over the last ten years. Agents get a bad rap in Hollywood because most artists feel it’s an agent’s job to get them work, and they’re disappointed when that doesn’t happen. I’ve never felt that way. I’ve always believed it’s our job to get the work, and then our agents take everything we’re already doing and launch it into the stratosphere. It constantly amazes me how one job I’m already doing so often turns into several new opportunities that presented themselves because my agent knows what he’s doing. Brad has always leveraged everything I do into something much bigger and greater, and I believe that’s the only way it should be. On top of amazing success, we’ve seen some crushing disappointments, of course, but stuck with each other the whole way.

  Acting is really a confidence game. The more confident you become, the better you are, and I became more and more sure of myself after White Chicks. It hit theaters in June 2004 and started doing really well. Not only that, but also, people were talking about my performance. I started getting recognized more and more. I finished Idiocracy that summer, and I was waiting for the buzz from White Chicks to hopefully bring me something big. I wanted no replay of my experience the year before in Starsky & Hutch, where I’d basically been a glorified background player with a name. After the rush of two parts in two major films, I wanted the big time.

  But as of Halloween, I was still in between jobs and more than a little unsure about what would happen next. That night was the Harvest Festival at Faith Community Church in West Covina, which Rebecca and I thought would be fun for the kids and a safe way for the little ones to get candy without going door to door. And it was. As we loaded everyone into the car at night’s end, Rebecca turned to me.

  “Can you help me get Wynfrey from her stroller into her seat?”

  This was an odd request since Wynfrey was less than a year old at the time and certainly not too big for Rebecca to carry, but I didn’t say anything about it. I snapped Wynfrey into her car seat, helped the other kids climb in, and then hopped into the driver’s seat. As I did, I said what came into my mind, almost as a joke.

  “Why can’t you put the kids in? What are you, pregnant?”

  Deafening silence.

  My head whipped around to look at Rebecca as a sweet smirk snuck onto her face. Whoa, I hadn’t been serious, but THIS was serious.

  “Becky, are you pregnant?”

  Staring out the front window, she nodded: YES.

  My mouth dropped open. My head filled with a million thoughts at once.

  “Really
?”

  As if the answer would change if I asked again. She looked at me and smiled.

  “Yes, I’m pregnant.”

  My mood was bittersweet. I was ecstatic that we were bringing another life into the world, but I was filled with dread at the prospect of trying to afford five kids in LA with the insecurity of an actor’s transient life and uncertain income. I knew we had faithfully used contraception every time. Even as I saw disappointment cross Rebecca’s face, I couldn’t hide my fear. I took a deep breath.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I took a pregnancy test twice because of how I’ve been feeling lately,” she said. “And they both came up positive.”

  Finally, I had worked my way through my shock and anxiety, and I was able to just be happy. I smiled at her and hugged her right there in the front seat. We grinned at each other: Here we go again!

  A few months later, I accompanied Rebecca to her ultrasound. After our second miscarriage, I was feeling extremely anxious. I wanted everything to go smoothly, and I felt my presence at the appointment would be good for both of us. The nurse rubbed the gel on Rebecca’s belly and began moving the instrument across her skin. It didn’t take long for her to turn to us and smile.

  “Do you want to know the sex of the baby?”

  I looked at Rebecca. Now, I was fairly certain we were going to have another girl, because it was said that fathers tend to have a run on the same sex in families of more than three children. Rebecca, however, had told me from the beginning that this baby was a boy. She could feel it. Rebecca and I smiled at each other.

  “Yes,” we both said.

  “You’ve got a boy,” the nurse said.

  She showed us a little mark on the ultrasound that let her know for sure, and with that, I knew my dream and Rebecca’s vision were no coincidence.

  I WAS GETTING SMALL JOBS HERE AND THERE, BUT NOTHING steady. Rebecca was always telling me that even though I thought I was a movie guy, I needed to do some TV, especially now that we had our fifth kid on the way.