by Sean Astin
“This is from the crew,” he said with a smile. “They wanted to give it to you for coming back to work right away.”
I have to tell you, when Peter handed me that stick, I felt like the king of New Zealand. It was one of the best moments of the entire production. I let it roll around in my hands for a moment. Later, Gino Acevedo (supervisor of prosthetics for Weta) and I carved the date, place, and some Tolkien runes around the top of it. It would become the single most unique and memorable treasure I brought home. I looked in Peter’s eyes when he handed me the walking stick, and even though his admiration wasn’t for my prowess as a filmmaker, it was enormously meaningful. It was clear that he and the crew were grateful I didn’t use my injury as an opportunity to get any star treatment. As a guy, Peter respected me. Maybe I wasn’t as tough as Viggo (who merely asked for a dab of superglue when his tooth broke off), but I had weathered a little punishment with dignity.
“Thank you,” I said to Peter, and pretty much left it at that. For a change, I was practically speechless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
You think it’s easy to wrestle with a giant spider?
Trust me, it’s not. One of the most exciting scenes in The Return of the King is Sam’s battle with Shelob, the massive arachnid who guards Mordor and at one point captures and nearly kills Frodo. It’s a thrilling and artful sequence, one that allows Sam’s courage to percolate to the surface and effectively stamps him as the hero of the third film. He is an ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance, and he rises to the occasion in epic fashion, as so many of the great literary and cinematic heroes have done. That the scene works as well as it does is testament to Peter Jackson’s vision and talent. When film critics repeatedly pointed out that Shelob was the most realistic and frightening giant spider ever depicted on film, it wasn’t faint praise. A creation such as Shelob, in the wrong hands, might well have resulted in a messy, laughably implausible climax to a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve. In other words, if not done properly, it might have been a disaster.
My job, as I saw it, was to not screw it up. Seriously. Shelob was so good, and the action sequence so well constructed, that I had only to make sure that I followed the choreography and emoted properly and energetically. But it proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Throughout filming I’d been reasonably adept at playing make-believe, at visualizing the story’s numerous computer-generated creatures; my imagination was good, and I could act opposite my imagination with relative ease. People would sometimes ask me, “Isn’t it hard to look at a piece of tape or a tennis ball and envision the thing it represents?” Well, no, not when you have Alan Lee’s and John Howe’s illustrations as models. They helped seed my imagination.
Something happened with Shelob, though. The sequence took a great deal of time to film, and at one point, when the camera was supposed to cut to me, and I was supposed to deliver the strongest line of the scene—“Let him go, you filth!”—I had a moment of crisis. Suddenly, for some reason I still can’t explain, I couldn’t see the spider anymore. Shelob had disappeared. It was as if my imagination had dried up.
“What’s wrong?” asked Peter, who directed the scene.
“I don’t know. I can’t see the spider.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … it’s gone. Shit!”
I started panicking, having an internal meltdown, which is kind of funny when you think about it. I’d held it together through all the bad moments, through all the dull and frustrating times when I wanted only a chance to show what I could do, and now, here I was, starring in the climactic action sequence of the whole trilogy—in a scene that was supposed to have the audience rising out of their seats and pumping their fists—melting into a puddle of anxiety.
The truth is, we had actually filmed the Shelob action sequence during principal photography, and most of it was handled by John Mahaffey. I had fought and killed Shelob years before. Now, during the pickup shooting for The Return of the King, I had lived with Sam for four years. I had seen the first two movies countless times and traveled around the world promoting the movies. Thousands of people had told me what they thought about my performance, and I’d read innumerable articles about every aspect of the films. In a sense, I had all of that wisdom and experience at my disposal when Peter brought me back to New Zealand to shoot, among other things, this climactic moment. I think I’d even seen a rough version of the sequences immediately preceding and following the Shelob cave stuff.
If you think about George Custer and Ulysses S. Grant, and what they knew and when they knew it, you can begin to appreciate my wee dilemma. I just couldn’t quite drop into this moment—or it didn’t feel “Sam-like.” I loved the cinematic heroism of it, and I certainly had wanted for years to get this kind of opportunity on screen. But I’d already gotten to do the boat scene with Elijah and the unfathomably special scene in the ruins of Osgilith with Frodo, where we talk about the great stories that really matter, and the fact that there is still good in the world worth fighting for. So, could I get a grip and do the relatively simple “hero shot”?
For a few long seconds, I really didn’t know.
After a brief respite, a drink of water, a few words of encouragement, and a pat on the back, we tried again. And again. And again. Ultimately, I got it right, but it was hard. It took a lot of push-ups and screaming and emotional calisthenics. I did that a lot. I’d do arm curls, jumping jacks, anything to get the blood flowing, to trigger my throat and face before going in front of the camera. There’s something about screaming that actually wakes you up and gets you ready for an action sequence. I developed a bit of a reputation among the other actors. They’d say, “Oh great, there goes Sean, warming up again.” Elijah ended up mildly embracing this technique, too, and not just to ridicule me. Action sequences are not as elemental as they might seem. Think about it. You sit around for seven hours and then they call you, and you have to walk in and get all excited and start screaming at the top of your lungs. How do you go from being exhausted to doing that? You run around the block, or you do sit-ups or push-ups. You do whatever works. At least I did. My preparatory histrionics became such a source of amusement that someone put together a gag reel of me barking, jumping up and down, screaming like a madman. It was a howl, I have to admit. The Brits would watch me and say, “Excuse me, mate, are you going to be doing that all day? Because it’s a bit, well, you know, distracting.”
Even more difficult though, are the moments of quiet emotion, for there is an honesty and a rawness to those scenes that require more than just playing. You open your soul when you do work like that—or at least you should. There is a scene near the end of The Return of the King in which Sam cradles a weary and wounded Frodo on the side of a volcano, and tries to comfort him with a sweet and simple speech about the land they have left behind and all that it represents. In Sam’s tearful words is a tribute to the simple things in life, the things worth fighting for, as well as a recognition of the likelihood that they may not survive their journey: Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon and the orchards will be in blossom, and the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And eating the first of the strawberries with cream … Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
That scene was the single greatest acting experience of my life, and I’ll never forget it. But getting there—getting to the point where I was capable of such work, of meeting the standard set by my director, my fellow performers, and the script of a lifetime—was a long process. Roughly twenty-five years.
Here’s what I mean. There are four specific scenes in my career that I consider to be the equivalent of a complete educational experience—grade school, high school, college, graduate school—in terms of emotional maturity on screen. The first was in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, when I was eight years old and received a spontaneous acting lesson from my mother. She had asked me if I wanted to be in
the movie, and I thought it sounded like fun, even though I’d be playing her abused son. The role wasn’t simply handed to me—I had to audition. So I worked on the scenes with my mother at home, and then we taped the audition on the set of the television show One Day at a Time. I don’t remember feeling stressed or nervous, just comfortable doing the work with my mother. And I got the part.
The challenge came on the day we were supposed to film the most disturbing and emotionally charged scene in the movie: a scene in which the mother attacks her son in the family kitchen. We went at it according to the script. Mom grabbed me and threw me around and started banging my head against the counter, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs. Acting her little heart out. Instead of wailing like a frightened, wounded animal, as the script suggested, I covered my face and started to giggle uncontrollably. It was nervous laughter really, for I couldn’t help but think, Whoa, this is a little too close to home. I’ve known some of these moments. We did a few takes, but each time I’d break out laughing, and the director would yell, “Cut,” and my mother would walk away, seething. Finally, she pulled me aside, crouched low, and put her face right next to mine.
“Look,” she said, and I could tell by her tone that I was in trouble. “I took a chance on you. What do you think you’re doing? This is my career; this is my life.” She paused, looked back at the cast and crew. “These people are counting on me. They’re counting on you!”
With that, I burst into tears.
As soon as I started crying, my mother turned to the director, made a circular motion with her hand, and whispered something that sounded a lot like, “Keep it rolling.” And that’s what they did. Within seconds my movie mother was beating me about the head and face all over again, shouting her lines, and I was sobbing like a baby. Eventually the scene came to an end, the director yelled, “Cut! Print! That was brilliant!” and my mother wrapped her arms around me, gave me a big kiss on the cheek, messed up my hair, and said, “Now that’s acting!”
“Yeah?” I sniffed.
“Yes.”
Proud and relieved, and maybe just a bit confused, I said, “Uhhhh, okay.”
That was my first drama lesson.
The second lesson came a few years later, in a miniseries called The Rules of Marriage, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Elliott Gould, and directed by a man named Milton Catsalas, who later went on to become a world-renowned acting instructor in Beverly Hills. This, for me, was another case of art imitating life, for the movie centered on a couple in the midst of an eroding marriage. My parents were in the process of getting a divorce, just like the couple in the movie. I played their son. The audition included a scene in which the father sits with the boy in the front yard of their lovely home and tells him that he’s going to be leaving. Milton played the part of the father in the audition, and when the script called for me to hug him and cry, I did precisely that. I mean, I wasn’t really crying, but the feeling I experienced as we embraced was real enough, and he loved it. He noted it, congratulated me on the work, and I got the job.
When we shot the scene, however, something went very wrong. Elliott Gould, whom I liked and admired, and with whom I established a strong rapport, had some type of problem on the day we filmed that particular scene. I remember it was late in the day, and Elliott was beating himself up because he was having an extremely difficult time working up the requisite emotion. It’s a strange and awkward thing when this happens. The director always prefers that an actor summon whatever it is that’s required to produce a real emotional moment, to open the tear ducts in a manner that is plausible and effective. In other words, don’t fake it.
Elliott was giving it his best shot, but nothing seemed to work for him, and with each passing take the anxiety and tension mounted. There were discussions about whether they should resort to using artificial tears, but Elliott balked at that notion. Meanwhile, Milton kept looking at me, the ten-year-old kid on the side, in much the same way that a baseball coach might look at a pitcher in his bullpen. I was the ace reliever, the guy Milton could insert into the lineup if he needed someone to capture the emotion of the scene. But I could feel that pressure, and when we shot the scene, I was just honest and reacted the way I had in the audition with Milton. Or so I thought. It didn’t come across that way on camera. Milton had been more committed to me in the audition than Elliott was during the actual filming of the movie, simply because he was thoroughly consumed by his own anxiety over how he was coming across in front of the camera. There was no give-and-take, no partnership, no sharing of the emotional burden. It was almost as if each of us was performing a monologue, which was exactly the opposite of the scene’s intent.
We shot the scene a couple of times, but it never really worked the way it should have, which exasperated Milton.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me. “Why isn’t it like it was the last time, in the audition?”
I had no answer, of course. I was only ten years old and following the lead of the adults. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t my fault, and that awareness caused me to lose respect in that moment for both Milton and Elliott. Over the years, as I matured and learned more about acting, my memory of the incident only intensified; how unfair, I thought, to expect a child to carry the full emotional weight of a scene when he’s working alongside a seasoned professional who is having a bad day. Later, I audited Milton’s class and reminded him of that incident. I told him how I felt, and he apologized. He didn’t realize I had experienced the incident in that way, and he felt bad about it. I was impressed that he was so open to hearing me talk about something that had happened so long ago, and it was important for me to share the memory of that experience, because it really did screw me up for a while; whenever I had a crying scene in a movie, I had tremendous difficulty summoning the requisite emotion to make the scene work.5
Crying in front of the camera is an interesting act, one that is often devoid of any real emotion. Most actors have ways of faking it and getting by. They can pinch a tear or two and project emotion that seems to match the quality of the scene, or they can rely on chemical help, a dash of instant tears. Really, though, it’s extraordinarily rare that someone is talented enough and emotive enough to cry authentically on cue, in the moment, take after take after take. When it happens, it’s no accident; it’s usually a marriage of a great performer and the best moment in a great script. Here’s the truth: a lot of the time, actors have a hard time crying because the scenes in which they are asked to cry really aren’t that good. The writing doesn’t facilitate the muse. It’s a remarkable thing when you see an actor who is so emotionally available that he can be sitting off camera, eating a burger, waiting for his call, and then moments later, when the director says, “Start crying, please,” he does it. I’ve seen this, and I’ve often wondered, How can anyone do that? Because I just don’t get it. But when it happens naturally, when the drama of the scene lends itself to real emotion—that I understand.
My third acting lesson—college, so to speak—occurred when I was playing a college student: Rudy Reuttiger. Rudy is a movie that wants to make its audience cry, which can be a dangerous thing. Done properly, emotional movies stir something in the viewers and pull them into the experience. Done badly, they become unintentional jokes and black marks on the résumés of everyone involved. Rudy, I think, was exceptionally well done. The writer took great care to be faithful to the character’s legitimately inspirational story, while refusing to fall prey to the pitfalls of overt sentimentality. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Angelo Pizzo wrote a great script. My job was to inject honesty and believability into this blue-collar character, to make him a three-dimensional human being, and not just a sports-movie cliché.
A pivotal scene in the movie, and the most challenging for me as an actor, is one that depicts Rudy’s acceptance to Notre Dame, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It’s a powerful scene, one that begins quietly, with Rudy reading the acceptance letter while sittin
g on a bench. The director, David Anspaugh, designed the scene beautifully, with a crane shot that pans from humble Holy Cross Junior College, where Rudy is a struggling student working his way through school, to the glistening Golden Dome of Notre Dame. The point of the shot, made with elegance and grace, is to convey a sense of Rudy’s journey: he’s moving less than a mile away, but his life is about to change forever. The tears shed by Rudy as he opens and reads the letter represent not only an expression of joy over this accomplishment, but an awareness of what it means. It’s nearly a perfect scene, one that captures the spirit of the entire movie.
On the day we filmed, David Anspaugh encouraged me to remain isolated from the rest of the cast and crew, which isn’t something I normally like to do.
“I don’t want you to talk to anybody,” he said. “You’ve got two or three hours before we shoot this thing, so just go away and clear your head. Don’t speak to a soul.”
I did as instructed. To occupy my time, I read the script again, start to finish. I did that a lot on Rudy, partly because I was the star and felt significant pressure to be thoroughly well-versed in the subject matter, but also because I just loved reading the damn story. Anyway, eventually I made my way to the set, and we began rehearsing the sequence. Finally, it was time to shoot the scene. Everything was designed for me to succeed in that moment. I was working with a superbly composed scene and a thoughtful, sympathetic director; I was playing a character with whom I felt an innate connection. So I opened the letter and started to read, and …
Nothing. Not a drop. My tear ducts were dry, my heart empty.
We reset the scene. David shouted “Action,” and again … nothing.