by Joe Donnelly
“I’m still on freelance contract. I might still have to go back.”
Before long, her marriage also started disintegrating. “Once we stopped drinking together, once I was like, I have to go to work, he was like [slurring], it’s not working,” says Weedman. “That’s not true, actually, it was deeper than that. It was more fucked up.” In the end, she admits, both 9/11 and The Daily Show proved too much for the couple to handle. “Our marriage survived neither, and I wanted to keep on striving ‘upward and onward’ and he told me he could no longer be married to ‘Lauren Weedman,’” she says. “He used the first and last name.”
Time to start over again.
Soon, Weedman found herself back in the comforting embrace of her gay ex-boyfriend from Indiana, who was living in Laurel Canyon with his partner. “I spent most of my early depression there, after the divorce, and then moved out so I could Internet date more freely without their judgment.”
She moved into a place on Franklin and Argyle. “I hated it,” she tells me. “Yeah, I know [doing caricature of vapid Angeleno], It’s a great strip—Birds! My friend John was like, ‘Lauren, that’s your area, it’s so arty, like you. You’re gonna love it there. There’s a place there, the Bourgeois Pig, it’s your place. And you go in there and I’ve never seen so many people write like this—type, type [stretches out], Oh, gosh. Type, type, Oooh, it’s sooo hard.’”
◆◆◆
In LA, where all the clichés hold true, but where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, she may have found her muse. If Bust, which is both a valentine and a scathing indictment, is any indication, Los Angeles and its legion of strivers (foremost among them Weedman herself) will provide a bottomless well of material.
“When I first moved here, people were like, let me tell you something, Lauren, You and I are sooo alike. You read the newspaper, I read the newspaper.”
Then, there’s auditioning. “When I’m just an actor, sitting out with the actors, and, literally, it’s like [self-important voice], Who took the pen from the sign-up sheet? Can I have that back, please? Thank you, pay attention. Even that little thing, I’m like, oh boy, I’m not thirty-seven-years-old sitting here. I’m like, This is not my adult life. This is not where I’m supposed to be.”
But still, she can’t help herself. “I feel sometimes the fact that I’m even in LA, I’ll feel as if I have some crack addiction, like I’m even trying to do this, something’s up with me. It’s like, what am I doing here?” she says. “I’m like auditioning for Fat Al, where it’s like, We don’t know if he’ll be a man, or fat, but just read the part.”
Sure, there’s that. But Los Angeles has provided other things she may not have expected. Like a home. She’s in a great relationship with Weatherford, a friend who became a lover and a collaborator. He’s a widower who has a nearly grown son. Of course, that too is a great source of material, stuff that hasn’t found its way onstage yet, but has been the subject of several hilarious short stories—one of which, “I’m Hugging You With My Voice,” appeared in the literary journal Swivel and recounts the difficulty of making love while staring at a picture of the man’s ex.
“For the first time in my life, I could see how being blindfolded was hot,” Weedman writes. “But pictures of Hannah were all over the house, which wrecked me. Obsessively staring at her photos and attempting to show how okay I was with the whole situation, I would chirp, ‘This is a nice one. Oh, and this one, too! Look at her here! I see she’s wearing a sweater, so I take it it was wintertime?’”
One of the things that is apparent from Weedman’s stage shows, aside from her obvious acting and comedy chops, is how well they’re written. Each has a fully realized narrative arc, which makes them so much more engaging than a lot of solo shows in which people just get up there and puke out their drama. So it’s not surprising that she’s developing a bit of a side career in the literary world. Her story “Diary of a Journal Reader,” which also first appeared in Swivel, made the Dave Eggers–edited Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2005, and the collection A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body: Stories From a Life of Cringe comes out from Sasquatch Books in the fall. She’s also recently received a fellowship to the prestigious MacDowell Colony (“Or, as my friends call it, fuck-fest 2007…not my good friends,” jokes Weedman), where writers like Mary Gaitskill and Arthur Bradford (author of the quirky collection Dogwalker), and genius composers and playwrights and architects and visual artists go to plan world domination.
So the question remains, who is this girl? Is she the woman blowing minds onstage, where her precious, nuanced, scathing, brave, hilarious pieces have the room they need to breathe and grow and get under your skin? Is she a budding humorist, like an Amy Sedaris, only funny? Or is she the woman who keeps trying to find fame, fortune, and a place on the screen, currently toiling away in stuff like Reno 911, and VH1’s Best Week Ever and other forums that just seem too small to capture the thing that is Lauren Weedman? The question hangs in the air as the restaurant empties of its other four patrons (local’s-favorite?). It’s a question that demands a cigarette, and we repair outside to smoke.
I ask her if she feels like she needs to be a star in some traditional way.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “I like how it’s going. For instance…I’ll get some hardcore compliments that are the best kind of compliments that are like—the one that I get that I love is, I hate every fucking thing and I fucking loved that. That’s perfect.”
Maybe the answer is the thing she keeps coming back to, despite the TV auditions and the striving. Maybe it’s up on the stage where it’s always been, where that intangible thing she does/she is makes all the sense in the world.
“I love being at REDCAT. REDCAT was perfect,” says Weedman. “I felt so inspired after this weekend. I had this burst of integrity and confidence that it’s okay to turn down things that don’t feel right.”
I light up another cigarette before she’s halfway through hers. It’s a good thing I never met Lou Reed. I’m not sure I’d have survived.
“Would you just keep doing what you’re doing, even if you don’t make a lot of money?” I ask, and I really hope the answer is yes.
“Well, I have,” she says. “I’m thirty-eight. I’d love to have health insurance regularly, you know, just in case I have a one-hundred-fifty-pound cyst on my ovary or something. That would be nice.”
“Hopefully you’d notice by the time it’s fifty pounds.”
“I think I have a five-pounder in there now. Or else I really have to go to the bathroom.”
Christian Bale and the Art
of Extreme Acting
Originally published in the LA Weekly, July 3, 2007
Author’s note: Scott Foundas, the LA Weekly’s film editor at the time, asked me to do this piece on Christian Bale, which would be tied to the release of Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. I tried to demur—the film wasn’t very good and for whatever reason, I was indifferent about Bale, despite his obvious talent. Thankfully, a few of the ladies in my life insisted I take the assignment, and Bale turned out to be a great conversationalist, an interesting man, and just a cool guy.
Christian Bale is an actor who may be as well known for what he does to his body as he is for his body of work. He’s done extreme things to that body in the name of art. Turning it as hard and sharp as an ice pick for American Psycho. Hollowing it out enough to nauseate in The Machinist. Making it lethal enough to become the first Batman we can really believe. Running it down to the bone again as a prisoner of war in Werner Herzog’s new film, Rescue Dawn. But did you know he did a movie in 2002 called Reign of Fire in which he battles (sometimes on horseback) fire-breathing dragons in a post-apocalyptic Britain? And were you aware of Equilibrium, the Matrix junkies’ Matrix, which also came out in 2002—a movie that, according to Bale, is a big hit with our servicemen overseas?
Let me tell you a
bout Equilibrium and me. I first learned about it weeks ago when I went to Blockbuster video with a list of Bale movies to rent. The clerk told me I had to see Equilibrium. We spent the next fifteen minutes trying to find it. The clerk worried that someone had lifted it, something that apparently happens frequently with this film, because the studio gave it a limited pressing or something, and copies are hard to find. We came up empty.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a friend and I went on the quest again, this time to a video store in Silver Lake. When I announced that I was there for Equilibrium, a young Asian male straight out of a John Hughes movie who was sitting heretofore unnoticed on the floor digging into a carton of Chinese food with chopsticks, looked up and fairly screeched: “Equilibrium! That movie is awwwwesommme.” But that store’s lone copy had disappeared. So I went to the famed Video Hut on Vermont, where everything is possible. The clerk there registered an immediate look of comprehension when I told him what I was after—apparently there is a secret society of Equilibrium admirers that I was on the verge of joining. But, to his chagrin, the store’s only disc had become corrupted. “I couldn’t let you rent it in good conscience,” he told me. So back to Blockbuster we went. Another search of endless racks, another heartbreak. Finally, a week later, I found it at my old reliable stop near the Mayfair Market off Franklin. I had earned my induction.
2002 was also the year Bale played the fussy son of a wild music producer (Frances McDormand) in High Art-director Lisa Cholodenko’s wistful Laurel Canyon. Talk about range. Bale can fill the sensible shoes of a wallflower, like the one in Laurel Canyon or the charming Metroland (1997), as easily as he can don the cape of the Dark Knight.
In fact, such is the degree to which Bale disappears into a role that one could watch his entire filmography, as I have not quite done, and still not be able to peg him the way one could peg Brando as primal, McQueen as cool, Nicholson as uncanny, Clooney as classic, Depp as daring, and Pitt as, well, Pitt. At thirty-three, he may be the biggest movie actor on the planet who isn’t a celebrity. When he walks into a room, as he does on a sunny, late-spring morning at Shutters by the Beach in Santa Monica, heads don’t turn. There’s something enigmatic about this Christian Bale, something indefinable that serves him in his craft, a craftiness that springs from not being crafty at all. He’s done about three dozen movies, and he’s utterly lacking a persona, other than the one that makes women—and by women I don’t just mean my wife—swoon at the mere mention of his name. Despite his vast and varied career, Bale remains a bit of a cult figure. Those who know have known for a long, long time. Those who don’t may never.
The great Werner Herzog—and whatever you may think of Rescue Dawn, let us not argue the greatness of the man who hauled a 340-ton steamship through the Peruvian jungle and over mountains to make Fitzcarraldo and who has made more than fifty films, some in the most remote and extreme conditions imaginable, and for the money that falls into the cushions of most Hollywood moguls’ couches... Well, Herzog told me the decision to cast Christian Bale as a real-life fighter pilot shot down over Laos in the early days of Vietnam, in the film upon which this great iconoclast and outrider pins his hopes of Hollywood anointment, was a no-brainer.
“It was instantly clear that he was the guy,” Herzog says by phone from Austria, sounding, with his thick accent, like a charming version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. “There’s casting where there’s absolutely no question. He was onboard long before he was chosen for Batman. I said to him, ‘No matter what, you have to be Dieter, and if you’re not going to be Dieter, I don’t want to make the film.’”
So what attracted Herzog to the young actor in the first place?
“What drew me to Christian is that he is the best of his generation,” he says.
Oh, yeah. There’s that.
◆◆◆
When the best actor of his generation pulls up in front of Shutters, a place famous for seeing and being seen that could only have been chosen by a publicist, it’s in a black pickup truck. He’s wearing a baseball cap and an unassuming getup of T-shirt and jeans. The look is trucker chic, though I’m pretty sure Bale has no idea what trucker chic is. He tells me the pickup is for hauling his motorized dirt bikes, which is what he’s into these days, though he confesses he’s not very Zen about the art of motorcycle maintenance.
“I know how to ride. When something goes wrong, I just look at it and want to kick it and bang it with a camera,” he laughs.
As we sit down at a large table in the grand lobby, where it seems everyone has a severe case of cell-phone ear, the waves are breaking at Bay Street, and the wind is just starting to pick up. I’ve brought my surfboard, and I’m worried about getting to the surf before the wind craps it out. Bale’s worried about, well, this uncomfortable part of the business. I eye the surf nervously; he looks like he could use a nap. A big question hangs stagnant between us, though it’s unspoken, and it’s a matter of degrees: How much does either of us want to be here? I’m breaking a long-ago pledge to never do another celebrity interview; he’s on record as not giving a damn about the trappings of stardom. For a minute, there’s a feeling that we’re the two most bored people in the room. It’s a dicey situation.
These situations, of course, are accidents—the kind of accidents that happen when the son of a circus-dancer mom and a Bunyanesque adventurer of a father, who was born in Walesbut, who moved around a lot as a kid, gets picked to star in a Steven Spielberg film after auditioning on a dare from his sister and eventually ends up in Santa Monica talking to someone who, by his own conspiracy of accidents, has ended up sitting across the table from the greatest actor of his generation with a tape recorder in hand. Since there’s always the chance this will turn out to be a happy accident, we gamely order coffee and water and settle in.
Why all the moving around? What was going on—was that just life with a circus-dancer mom?
It was more partly wanting to go to new places and partly wanting to get away from other places quickly.
What does that mean? Was there a little hustling going on with the family?
Ah, just that my dad was an interesting character, you know? He was somebody who pretty much lived on his own from the age of thirteen, and that never really left him, you know? Being a roamer. That was what he did.
And your mom was a circus dancer?
Yeah, I know. She hates it whenever I talk about that, but how can a kid forget? It was definitely the most memorable job she had, in my mind. She says, “That’s not all I did.” But, you know, when you’re six or seven years old and your mom’s dressed as a clown, or mucking about with tigers or elephants in a circus, it kind of sticks in your head.
So, there was a lot of starting over and reinvention, that sort of thing?
Yeah, and just the dissatisfaction with the rut that you can fall into very easily, anywhere, but that he felt very much so in England. He was just looking for something new.
Was your dad the one who moved you to America? Or were you already over here acting?
There was always an idea of the States being the place. I remember there were a few times, when I was like seven or eight, not really understanding how things worked, and hearing my dad talk [about moving here], and saying goodbye to my friends—I was going to the States—and then being back in school by Monday. Eventually, I got work over here and brought my family with me, which was a really good thing.
Bale was eighteen when he helped the family realize its long-dreamed-of escape from dreary England. Today, he’s living proof that while you can take the boy out of the old country, you can’t take the old country out of the boy. He still speaks with a distinct brogue, and his conversational manner is that of a guy sitting at a pub having a few pints next to a stranger—friendly but not overly familiar. He doesn’t really look you in the eye, but he’s game so long as it doesn’t get wanky.
Does this feel like home now, or do you still have an em
otional tie to British culture?
Well, talking about football or something… If I see England play, I can’t help but get goose bumps, you know? There will always be that. But that’s what half of America is anyway—people who come from somewhere else. This is definitely my home now. I’ve ended up being here for almost half my life.
Your uncle was an actor and your mom was in show biz; was that what brought you into the business?
It wasn’t really in my face, growing up. But seeing my mom doing that, and I think also just realizing there was a chance for not having any kind of nine-to-five job and the chance for travel and for good, weird experiences, and, um, it just kind of grabbed me more than anything else. I didn’t really have any notion of wanting to go to college or anything like that.
Were you conscious of all that as a kid? I’m asking because you started acting at a very young age, and you’re expressing fairly mature ideas about why you wanted to do it.
Well, it was kind of a surprise to me, first of all, just how much I did enjoy it. I always hated doing any kind of school production, or anything like that, because, for me, what I liked was the complete insanity of everybody believing in what they were doing and taking it really seriously. So I didn’t like it when you were doing a school production, where it was just a laugh for a few people.
I was serious about it, and I realized how much I enjoyed this going off and becoming someone else for a while and really obsessing about it. I didn’t see a chance for that in much else that I was looking at, and I’d kind of stumbled into this in a very lucky fashion and thought it was something I didn’t want to lose a grip on. That was very early on. It was unbelievable that I got a job [Empire of the Sun] out of nowhere that had me going to Shanghai and Spain… See, growing up with my dad, he had all these great stories from when he was a kid, because he ran away at thirteen and he ended up living in Egypt. He ended up living in the Caribbean for a while. He just didn’t give a crap. He’d jump on [a ship] and get a job with somebody, and he’d jump off at some other port somewhere, see what happened, you know? Nobody looking after him, doing it on his own, and it sounded fantastic.