by Greg Sestero
Bored already, Shelton scratched her nose. “What are you doing for us, Tommy?”
“The Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.”
I heard someone mutter, “Oh no, not this again.”
I was watching Shelton very closely now. We all were. “Proceed,” she said.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” he began, “admit impediments.” He bludgeoned his way through the rest, each line a mortal enemy. Where the sonnet demanded clear speech, he mumbled; when it asked for music, he went singsong. Everything he said was obviously the product of diligent mismemorization, totally divorced from the emotion the words were trying to communicate. He was terrible, reckless, and mesmerizing.
Once again we waited, frozen within a dreadful glacier of Sheltonian silence.
“What is it exactly,” Shelton finally said, “that you’re trying to do here?”
The guy drew his head back and flipped his hair over his shoulder. “Sonnet,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But what are you trying to do?”
His bearing tensed up. “Send the message,” he said. “Express emotion of Shakespeare.”
That accent, I thought. It sounded almost French, but not quite. Was there some Austrian buried in it?
“It’s a sonnet,” he continued. “You know, sonnet?”
“Oh, God,” someone said next to me, her hand clamped over her mouth.
“Yes,” Shelton said, which she followed with a quick, huffy laugh. “I know what a sonnet is. What I don’t know is what you are trying to do.”
The guy was silent. His face was getting red, rapidly.
Shelton noticed this and went into salvage mode. “Look,” she said. “The chair is not helping you. It’s distracting. Maybe you should do it . . . standing up.”
His face was now a tomato with orifices. But he didn’t budge. “I disagree with that,” he said, now barely keeping control of himself. Everyone in that class was at least a little afraid of Shelton. No one ever got mad at her for expressing her opinion, certainly. But this guy wasn’t afraid of her. It felt oddly liberating to watch someone confront her.
“I see, then.” Shelton lifted herself from her chair and turned to the rest of us. “You’re all free to go.”
What I had just seen almost never happened in acting classes. The pirate was not only confrontational but fearless, a trait I wanted better acquaintance with. Of anyone in our class, this guy had the least cause to be so outspoken, so confident, yet he was. I was intrigued.
My mother, who was meeting me for dinner that evening, was waiting outside the studio. Just as I was describing to her the interesting French guy I’d seen in class, the sonneteer himself passed by us. “There he is,” I said.
My mother enthusiastically marched over to him to say hi, just as any French person outside of France does when informed that a fellow native is within two kilometers. “Excusez-moi? Mon fils me dit que vous êtes Français. C’est vrai?”
The guy whirled around as though he’d been pickpocketed. “Non, merci,” he said quietly.
My mother didn’t give up. “D’où venez-vous?” she asked pleasantly.
“I have to go,” the guy said with a sick, half-secretive smile.
My mother and I watched as he slithered away into the night. “I thought he was French,” I told her.
“That guy is not French,” she said. “Whatever he is, I think he’s been put through the wringer.”
• • •
“Something big” was how my agent described it to me, and the more I learned the bigger it sounded. A film called Wildflowers, starring Daryl Hannah, Eric Roberts, and Clea DuVall, was going to be shooting in the Bay Area. I saw this as my chance to land something that would pluck me out of obscurity and plant me in Hollywood.
I ended up getting called back several times. Then my agent called. “Everything was right,” she said, “but someone else fit the part better.” When she saw how upset I was, my mother said, in so many words, “I told you so.” When the person you’re closest to is telling you to quit, it’s not easy to go on. Her voice was still in my head. An acting career? A pipe dream. Agents? Evil with a Rolodex.
I was feeling defeated and almost didn’t bother going to acting class that night. Any momentum I’d thought I’d gathered had vanished. Classes, it was becoming obvious, didn’t guarantee anything. The only thing that made me consider going to class that night was the prospect of watching the unpredictable pirate go bananas onstage again. During the previous week’s class, in the middle of his scene, he had grabbed a glass full of water from a prop table and thrown it against the wall. Then he kept going with his scene as though nothing had happened. When Shelton asked why he had done this, he answered, “I was in zone.” In fact, whenever Shelton questioned his creative choices, he answered as though he had as much right to expound on craft as she did.
That night would be the pirate’s final performance with his current scene partner. They’d decided to do a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. I had no doubt which scene they’d chosen.
Cut to: Pirate Guy in a white tank top, his wild hair in a ponytail, wandering around stage left, crying out, “Stella!” many more times than the script called for and occasionally breaking into exaggerated sobs. He wasn’t even bothering to direct his agony toward his partner, the intended focus of the scene. He was just launching his performance out into space. Two girls in the first row were squeezing each other’s hands in an effort to contain their laughter. The actor sitting next to me—an older guy who was normally subdued to a fault—actually began laughing so hard he had to bunch his sweater up around his mouth. The pirate’s scene partner valiantly tried to bring him around with the smelling salts of actual lines from the script, but he kept yelling over her, “Stella! Stella!” until he went to his knees, covered his face with his hands, cried for a moment, and finished with a final and piercingly wrong “Stella!”
Most bad performances are met with silence. This was something else. There were murmurs. There were giggles. Everyone in that basement studio knew they had just witnessed one of the most beautifully, chaotically wrong performances they would ever see.
As for me, I felt resuscitated. I’d never been so happy to be in a classroom.
Jean Shelton did not wait to address the lunatic who lay prostrate before her. “Thomas, or Tommy—I’m sorry—I must ask you—again—what you are trying to accomplish?”
He was rising from the floor now. His face was flushed, his eyes intense little blurs of exhaustion. “I am performing the Tennessee Williams scene,” he said. At this, his scene partner—an older woman—shook her head hopelessly.
“No, Tommy,” Shelton said. “I don’t think that’s what you were doing.” I sensed Shelton’s brain trying to plan its attack in a distractingly target-rich environment. “First, you did nothing to demonstrate Stanley’s objective in the scene.” She stopped, shifted, reversed. “What is Stanley’s objective in this scene?”
“Stanley is hysterical,” he said.
“No, that’s . . . not an objective. Stanley loves Stella. He’s trying to reach Stella. And if he’s trying to reach Stella, to speak to her, he is not going to shout at the stagehands or audience members. He’s going to address her. But you hardly noticed Stella. As far as your performance was concerned, she wasn’t even on the same stage.”
That’s when I realized what he’d been doing up there: He was looking for the camera. He wasn’t thinking about Stanley. He was thinking about Brando. For him, there was no stage. There was only an appeal to a camera that didn’t exist.
“You’re wrong,” he said to Shelton.
I don’t think she heard him, because she kept going: “Also, Stanley is a very strong man. A strong character and a strong man. He’s pursuing Stella. He’s not screaming because he’s in pain. Stella is right in front of you, and you’re yelling in the opposite direction. And so I ask again: What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” the pirate said. “
May I correct you?”
“No!” Shelton cried out, pointing at him. “No, you may not!”
No one was laughing now. But I had a thought, a thought I can’t fully explain, even today: He should be my next scene partner. I have to do a scene with this guy.
Maybe he’d cheer me up. Maybe I’d learn some of his fearlessness. What made him so confident? I was desperately curious to discover that. It wasn’t his acting, obviously, which was extraordinarily bad. He was simply magically uninhibited; the only person in our class—or any class I’d ever taken, for that matter—whom I actually looked forward to watching perform. The rest of us were toying with chemistry sets and he was lighting the lab on fire.
After Shelton dismissed us, I made a beeline for the guy. He was getting his stuff together, putting on his jacket, the adrenaline still draining from his face. I knew he probably didn’t feel like talking, so I got right to it: “You want to do a scene together?”
He looked at me, his eyes narrowed, his mouth partly open. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or offended or pleased. “You and me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why you ask me?” he asked, irritably.
The directness of this question caught me off guard.
“I just thought that since you don’t have a partner anymore—”
He stopped me and reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a business card for something called Street Fashions USA. “Well,” he said, “pick a play and call me on this number. Only this number. We see. I think about it.”
On the card below the Street Fashions logo: THOMAS P. WISEAU.
“Call me Tommy,” he said, as I read the card. “Not Thomas.”
His was an odd last name. It sounded sort of like oiseau, the French word for “bird.” But French names don’t begin with W.
“I’m Greg, by the way.”
To this he said nothing. Then he walked away.
• • •
I called him a day later. Again he sounded irritated and asked me what play I’d picked out.
“I couldn’t find one,” I said. “Walnut Creek doesn’t have too many places where you can buy plays.”
“Ah,” he said. “You live in suburban area. Come to city, San Francisco, and we pick one. I see you Thursday at three p.m. in front of Bank of America. Van Ness and the Market. Don’t be late, okay?”
I didn’t know what to expect, or if he’d even show up, so I brought my soccer ball along, thinking that, if things went haywire, I could at least redeem the day by playing some pickup soccer in Golden Gate Park.
Tommy turned up twenty minutes late, driving a shiny new white 1998 Mercedes-Benz C280. I hadn’t been expecting that. What had I been expecting? A hearse. Maybe a decommissioned ice cream truck. I would have sooner expected him to land a crop-dusting biplane on Market Street than pull up alongside the Bank of America curb in an eye-searingly spotless white Benz. I popped the door and climbed inside.
“Nice car,” I said, unnecessarily.
Tommy was staring at me through his sunglasses. “Don’t talk about me, okay?”
“Don’t talk about you?”
“In the class. Don’t talk about me in the class.”
“Okay.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“We don’t talk about the car. What I drive, et cetera. Okay?”
“You mean now, or—?”
“We talk now. But in class we don’t talk.”
He took note of my soccer ball and his mouth did something quick and ghoulish, which was, I think, intended to resemble a smile. “So. You have ball.” He pointed at me. “I see the scheme you have in your forehead.”
Scheme? “I don’t have a scheme,” I said.
But he’d become serious again. “So. You bring play?”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, not quite getting his meaning. Ball, scheme, play: it was a little confusing, especially with his accent and tense-adrift syntax.
“Play,” he said again, more insistently. “For scene.”
“Oh. No. I thought you said—”
“So we go get play and we plan scene together. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. What had I gotten myself into?
I’d never been that interested in stage acting. I knew a few household-name playwrights, but beyond that my experience with theater was pathetically minimal. Compared to Tommy, though, I was a PhD candidate specializing in contemporary American drama. At the bookstore, I suggested a couple of big-name playwrights who wrote good male parts for us to take a look at (Mamet, Simon), but Tommy said no. He suggested The Glass Menagerie, claiming Tennessee Williams was his favorite playwright, but I suspect that was because he knew Williams had written A Streetcar Named Desire, a movie he obviously loved. The Glass Menagerie had enough scenes in which the play’s two male characters interacted without others present, but I wanted to see Tommy do something more modern. “Let’s try something different,” I said. “More contemporary.” I handed Tommy some plays that had been written within the last decade.
I’d annoyed him, it seemed. He didn’t accept the plays and removed his sunglasses. “Why do you have donut hairstyle?”
I looked back at him, confused. “What?”
“You have the donut hairstyle.”
Whatever he meant, I didn’t respond.
“Here,” Tommy said, holding a play out to me. “I like this. We do this one.”
It was an Australian play. I’d never heard of it before and I haven’t heard of it since. It was about dudes hanging out and talking about women and music and life and occasionally threatening to beat each other up. Before I could say yes or no, Tommy was heading to the register with the store’s only two copies.
Back in the car, Tommy seemed aloof and standoffish. “I have to eat now,” he said, “because I get cranky little bit when I don’t eat.” He rolled his eyes. “I pay. Don’t worry.”
His tone was so brusque, and his spontaneous offer to pay so passive-aggressively presumptuous, that I just nodded sullenly. Why had I thought that having Tommy as my scene partner would be fun?
Tommy noticed my sullenness. “Hey. Greg.”
He was tapping this Transformer-y robot thing he’d affixed to his dashboard. It looked a little bit like an armored crab—the cheap, Happy Meal–ish toy that a boy might stick to his bedroom windowsill.
“Be careful, Greg,” Tommy said, as he bobbled his dashboard toy. “Be careful or monster will get you.”
I think he was trying to break the ice, but typically you break the ice before venturing out into a frozen lake, not after you’ve gotten stuck in the middle of it.
How old was Tommy, anyway? He dressed like he was in his twenties. Some of his mannerisms and affectations did, occasionally, seem boyish—for example, the robot crab he’d stuck to the dash of his $60,000 car—but there was something about his face and eyes that appeared wrung out. If I’d had to bet, I would have guessed that Tommy was fortysomething. At least.
Tommy wanted to eat at Pasta Pomodoro on Irving Street, which was in the general area of Golden Gate Park. We sat down and ordered our food. Tommy asked for pesto pasta, minestrone soup, a Caesar salad, and a glass of hot water. After noticing the waitress’s surprised face, he said, “I’m demanding, I know. I eat like elephant.”
San Francisco, 1998. I had known Tommy for one month.
Moments after the waitress left us, Tommy whipped out both copies of our chosen play and handed me mine. “All right,” he said. “Now we do scene.”
“Wait,” I said. “Now?”
Tommy was unperturbed. “So what? Yes. We do it now.”
I looked around. All the tables around us were full. “Shouldn’t we eat first?”
“What? Are you not dedicated actor? Rehearsal is very important.”
Tommy was already demonstrating a lot of promise in knowing how to embarrass the shit out of me. I opened up my copy of the play. With a sigh, I asked, “Where do you want to
start?”
He was on the first page. “We start in the beginning.”
Tommy wanted to be the character who spoke first, whose name was Jock. These were Jock’s first lines: “The noisy friarbird. The featherhead. Like my English teacher.” Tommy managed to nail his performance on “The,” faltered on “noisy,” and succumbed to utter bafflement on “friarbird.” He asked what a friarbird was. I said I had no idea. We moved on to “featherhead.” He wanted to know what that was, too. Again, I didn’t know, but told him it was probably just a flavor word. Nothing to worry about. Let’s move on. Amazingly, “English teacher” also tripped him up. Yes, Tommy had made something less than an ideal choice in going with this play.
My character’s first line was this: “A poet.” I said my line and waited for Tommy to read his.
He didn’t.
“Greg,” he said, “you have to raise your voice. Okay? It’s too low at this time.”
My voice was low, I wanted to say, because I was in a crowded restaurant. “I think it’s okay,” I said, quietly.
“Is not okay,” he said. “Your voice is too low. It has to go up. I don’t like monotone stuff.”
I said the line again, to avoid further humiliation.
“Okay,” he said. “Better. For now.”
We went on a bit more, until Tommy came to the line “I’ve ploughed a whole paddock,” which he read with all the force and vigor of a Senegalese immigrant on the first day of an ESL class. Again he looked up at me. “Why don’t you correct me? You’re not helping.” He stared at the page. “What does this mean?”
It meant he’d picked the wrong play. When we came to one of the rare moments in which my character actually got to say something that was not a direct response to something his character said, Tommy again told me to raise my voice, like a teacher rapidly losing patience with an unpromising student.
We blundered through the whole play like that. The people sitting close to us at first pretended not to be listening, but were soon freely exchanging laughter and eye-rolls. None of which Tommy seemed to notice. I sort of admired his obliviousness.
• • •
It was almost five o’clock by the time we got back to Tommy’s car. “So,” he said, “I see you have this soccer ball.”