I actually played two different black girls on the show, coming back later as Jennifer, a girl obsessed with collecting coins. She also inexplicably dressed like a 1950s housewife heading to a garden party, but then she went to the Sadie Hawkins dance in a hot red dress. I guess her closet had some serious range. I fortunately started my career off doing a lot of multicamera half-hour shows where I had the ability to sit in the audience and watch people work. One of my favorites to study was Sherman Hemsley on Goode Behavior, a house-arrest comedy. Yeah, a house-arrest sitcom. I tested to be a series regular as Sherman’s granddaughter, but I didn’t get the part. However, the producers brought me back to play her best friend. The whole time I was on set I was thinking, That’s George Jefferson! I sat in the audience, listening to the notes he was given and watching how he tweaked his performance to suit them. It was a master class in comedic timing. Now, it wasn’t my cup of tea, but he made it sound like it was. He had just the right rhythm to wait for the laugh and then zero in for the punch line.
My go-to acting technique was to smile a lot. The guy who played Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, Robert Hegyes, was one of the assistant directors. He saw me watching every scene and took a seat next to me out in the audience.
“I have two pieces of advice for you,” he said.
I nodded and braced for the inevitable: “One, you’re creepy. Two, stop staring at the talent.”
“I can tell you’re basically waiting for your line,” he said. “It’s ‘Blah blah blah, now me.’”
He was right. Whenever I did a scene, I smiled a lot at the other actor to show I was listening, and almost nodded when it was about to be my turn, as if to say, “That’s my cue.”
“Always remember to listen to what the other actors are saying, and react. Just listen and react.”
“Got it,” I said. “Listen and react.” I really did get it. One thing about me, I don’t mind notes if they are helpful.
“The other thing to remember is this: you are always going to be able to find people who don’t want to watch you fail.”
He saw a young person who he knew was learning and took time to pull me aside and help me. Throughout my career, all kinds of people have been generous enough to help me and challenge me so they can see me be the best version of me. Hollywood is indeed dog-eat-dog, but there are groups of great people who are just nice. I held on to that, because this business also has a lot of rejection. When I first started auditioning for television shows, the main game was at Warner Bros., where everyone would hang out to audition for a shot on one of the million teen shows on the WB. I spent a lot of time doing guest spots on these series, playing high schoolers. In those rooms, there would be hundreds of other actors like me, dressed young even though we were all in our early to mid-twenties, but also honest-to-gosh kids. You could tell who they were because their mothers and fathers were grilling them on the material so hard that eventually the kid would have a crying meltdown. Mind you, this would be for a two-line gig on Nick Freno: Licensed Teacher.
As I got older and I spent more and more time on these sets, I realized these parents had given up everything else in their lives. So those two lines could decide whether or not they get to stay one more month at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, or had enough money to eat. A guy I met in those rooms, a successful actor now, told me what it was really like.
“Do you know me and my mom and my sisters were living out of my car during pilot season?” he asked me once. “We would get to the studio early and wash up in the bathroom there.”
His mom had a trick when things got really bad. They would show up for the audition early and say that a younger sister had an accident. “Is there a trailer where we could wash her pants out?” she’d ask. Then they would go in the trailer and wash the family’s clothes with hand soap.
“That’s kind of ingenious,” I said.
“It shows how badly they wanted it.”
I was lucky in that I just wanted it for me. I became eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) with an AT&T commercial directed by Forest Whitaker. I thought the ad was going to make me an ongoing AT&T spokesperson and thus rich, but the company scrapped it. But it was a union job, and if you are not union, that first job you book makes you union eligible. You cannot take a second union job without paying your dues. I was counting on paying my SAG dues with an ongoing gig on Moesha. I was supposed to play a head cheerleader, a nemesis to Brandy’s Moesha. But they decided to not make the role recurring, and that was it. A job that was supposed to be a few episodes became just one: “Nah, we’re good.” I took that as being fired. How else was I supposed to take it? That always stayed with me. There’s always someone bigger, badder, better. Don’t save your best for when you think the material calls for it. Always bring your full potential to every take, and be on top of your job, or they will replace you.
PROBABLY 50 PERCENT OF THE FAN MAIL I’VE RECEIVED IN MY ENTIRE CAREER is because of one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I played N’Garen in the “Sons and Daughters” episode, and Trekkies tell me that it was a pivotal one because it reintroduced Worf’s son. My character had an interest in astrophysics, and as a rookie weapons officer for the Klingon Defense Force I took out a Jem’Hadar cruiser. Hadar’s gonna hate.
The pivotal thing for me was that it was a job. I was twenty-four and I didn’t want to play high schoolers forever. A Klingon, I thought, showed range.
We filmed at Stage 18 of Paramount’s back lot, which was made to look like the IKS Rotarran hanging out on the Cardassian border. I see you, Trekkies. I’m not even going to make a Kardashian joke.
It took an obscene amount of time to turn me into a Klingon, and I would sit there for hours in the makeup chair, depleted of small talk because it took so long that there was simply nothing left to discuss. The hair and makeup room was huge, housing Ferengi ears and ridged Bajoran noses. My wig was standard Klingon, but fuller and somewhat braided, and for makeup I had just a hint of rose red on the lips. The look said warrior, but approachable. The irony of the situation was that the role was kind of high school: I was one of five new recruits, and Worf’s son totally got bullied in the cafeteria. I was the mean girl of the squad.
The direction I kept getting was “Klingons don’t smile.” All day long I would get caught on camera with a grin. “Gabrielle, Klingons don’t smile.”
At lunchtime, I would stay in my makeup and a bunch of us Klingon recruits would go to Lucy’s El Adobe Café on Melrose, across from Paramount Studios. The first time we went in, I expected some reaction.
“You must get a lot of Klingons, huh?” I asked.
“All kinds of people,” said the waitress.
I ordered the ground beef tacos. As we Klingon day players sat there looking at the wall of autographed celebrity photos, I ate as much of the salsa as I could. To this day, I love their salsa.
On the last day, after working nineteen hours and escorting a convoy of Klingon cargo vessels to Donatu V, I was beat. They said I had to wait until the makeup department was ready so I could take my Klingon face off. I had an hour and a half to kill before they’d get to me. So I went back to Lucy’s and sat alone in a booth with a book. Ricardo Montalbàn smiled down at me from an autographed picture. He was Khan on the original series and in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, so it seemed like a sign. When the waiter came over, I ordered a margarita.
“Can I see some ID?”
He held my California license up to my Klingon face and squinted. “I don’t know,” he said. “You look different.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m just kidding.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Klingons don’t smile.”
PRETTY SOON AFTER MY DEEP SPACE NINE GIG, I LANDED MY FIRST FILM: 10 Things I Hate About You. Like a bunch of Klingon recruits, we all bonded that first night at the hotel in Tacoma, Washington. There wasn’t a mean girl or boy among us, and we made a pact that this was going to be the b
est summer ever. There was Julia Stiles, wise beyond her New York years, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was recognized everywhere he went as a star of NBC’s Third Rock from the Sun. He and David Krumholtz—whom we affectionately called Krummy—bonded deep over their intellectual love of hip-hop. Larisa Oleynik was another child star, with her own show on Nickelodeon, and Andrew Keegan was the cast heartthrob. Susan May Pratt was a Michigan girl, and we clicked over our shared love of the Midwest and having a really, really good time. We were both the oldest. Playing a high schooler in your twenties isn’t exactly mutton dressed as lamb, but it still makes you feel like people’s big sister.
It was my first movie, this modern high school take on Taming of the Shrew, but we were all fish out of water. There was a “no favored nation” clause in all our contracts, which meant every cast member was treated equally. We all got the same type of hotel room, same rental car, and same type of trailer. That first week we had the run of Tacoma. It’s a really beautiful port city, so we would go waterskiing and take camping trips. I made it my mission to make everyone laugh through a trip to Mount St. Helens. We were tight.
The new guy, someone named Heath Ledger from Australia, was set to show up a week into shooting. We were so afraid he was going to be a drag. Would he fit in? Would he be a jerk? Would he light up?
The first night after he arrived, he met us in the bar at the top of the hotel. Only Susan and I were over twenty-one, so the cast sent us up as ambassadors to check him out.
We found him, all of nineteen years old, drinking a scotch on the rocks and holding hands with his girlfriend, who appeared to be at least thirty-seven. He was stunning, with long dark hair falling in curls. Then he opened his mouth and he was James Bond.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. He had this twinkle.
Susan and I looked at each other. Oh, this was going to work out just fine.
He talked about Shakespeare and art, all in an impossibly nondickhead way. He was two years out of Perth, which he described as “a wonderful place to grow up in as a kid, and a wonderful place to leave as a teenager.” He was wise and sexy beyond his years.
We went downstairs to report our findings.
“What’s he like?” everyone asked.
“He’s a man,” I said to the crew. “You’re gonna love him.”
And we did. Heath didn’t have to try to ingratiate himself into our circle, which by then had turned our hotel into a sort of college dorm of smoking weed and big discussions about life. We were all within two floors of each other, and we would always end up in each other’s rooms at the end of shooting, hanging out and listening to music. Heath would play the didgeridoo, a long cylindrical wind instrument he carried everywhere in a leather case. The sound is somewhere between a foghorn and an extended belch, but his passion for it was infectious. When hotel guests complained about the noise and the smell of weed, we acted very offended.
We also had a routine of eating together every night, and we’d often drive our little rental cars over to this joint that was like the local version of a Dave & Buster’s for burgers and video games. The whole experience felt like the best summer camp.
When the cast moved up to Seattle, Julia’s mom and Larisa’s mom didn’t want to stay, so they signed them over to me as the adult in charge. Bad move. (Sorry, moms!)
“First order of business,” I told the girls, “is getting you fake IDs.” Welcome to the Gabrielle Union Finishing School for Young Ladies.
We all went out as a pack in Seattle. Heath, ever the gentleman, held every door and our hands as we navigated the stairs of U-Dub college bars in our high heels. For me, it was fun to experience all of these adventures through their underage eyes. The rush of fake IDs! Beer! Throwing up! To add to the joy, there were lots of budding little romances among the cast, which were harmless and without drama.
When we wrapped, we knew for sure we would all see each other again, just like summer camp reunions. But that never happened. We were never all in the same place again. We all went right into new films except baby Larisa, who went straight off to college. I would see Julia on a plane, maybe Krummy. Andrew was such a club guy that I’d run into him here and there.
I don’t want to overstate my own bond with Heath, because every single one of us shared it. Whenever I ran into him in L.A. after 10 Things, it was like we had just wrapped yesterday. We would both reel off names of people from the movie that we had seen and share updates on their lives. There was never the weird Hollywood distance that creeps in. You usually get so close on a set and then it’s out of sight, out of mind. You forget you were family for a while. Not this cast. Heath and I would hug and say, “Take care.” His loss was a death in the family that all of us felt equally.
I’D PRETTY MUCH CORNERED THE MARKET ON OUTSPOKEN-BLACK-HIGH-SCHOOLER roles when I was invited to do a table read for a project called Cheer Fever. Honestly, the only reason I took the table read was that I had really wanted to get a role in Sugar and Spice, a bank-robbing-cheerleader film. I didn’t get a spot in that one because, guess what, they didn’t want to go black on any of the characters. And it bombed. It bombed so bad that I love telling people I didn’t get the job, because it’s like saying the Craigslist Killer never got back to you.
I was intrigued by the concept of Cheer Fever, which would of course become Bring It On, because it highlighted the rampant appropriation of black culture. Here, the idea was that a white high school squad, the San Diego Toros, get ahead by stealing cheer routines from a black team, the East Compton Clovers.
But when I got the script for the table read, my character, Isis, was a combination of Foxy Brown and eight other blaxploitation characters squeezed into a skintight cheerleader uniform. There were all these made-up slang words. Now, I am not the most Ebonically gifted person, but I recognize a made-up word when I see it.
The initial script had one word in particular, or, I should say, a collection of letters, that I just tripped over as I was reading it in my living room. I couldn’t figure out what it said, so I showed it to my husband at the time. Chris peered at it like a word problem and then recoiled.
“Oh, God,” he said.
“What?” I said. “What does it say?”
“I think they transcribed a Martin episode.”
Martin Lawrence used to have these comic exclamations of disbelief as a realization dawned on him. It’s an improv riff that he mastered, but they had tried to spell it out. The full line was “Ossaywhattawhattawhat? Me-ow. Me gonna ow you. My nails are long, sharp, and ready to slash.”
Clearly they were going for an Oscar. I love campy humor as much as the next person, but I didn’t want to be picketed by the NAACP. The original script had Isis and Kirsten Dunst’s character, Torrance, ending up cheering together at UC Berkeley. If you know what it takes to get into the UC system, you know Isis is not an ignorant fool. She’s a leader, she’s a great student, she’s taking AP classes, and she’s got high SAT scores. I wanted Isis to be presented as a tough leader who was not going to let these girls steal from her without some cheer justice for the act of cultural appropriation.
The director, Peyton Reed, was on board, and every morning we would meet in my trailer to rewrite dialogue to make it more believable. I could not, however, make my cheerleading skills seem at all believable. The actresses on the white squad, the Toros, had started filming earlier and had about three weeks of cheerleading camp to boot. Our squad, the Clovers, had nine days to learn the same number of routines. The Clovers consisted of three members of the girl group Blaque, several college cheerleaders, and me. Of course the pros and the girls from Blaque got it quickly, but me? I am not by any stretch a dancer, or someone who picks up eight counts quickly. So pretty much every day I would come into cheerleading camp smelling of Icy Hot, like somebody’s old uncle.
Hi-Hat was our choreographer, and the poor thing knew I was hopeless. She just looked at me like, “Well, just do your best.” I know she was thinking, This bitch is never gonna ge
t it.
So they did a lot of close-ups of me during the routines. Wide shots were out because I don’t match anybody.
One day I finally broke Hi-Hat. She threw up her hands.
“Do what you’re gonna do,” she said. “Just commit to it so it will look good.”
Kirsten had a house with her mom out in La Jolla during that shoot, but the rest of the cast was staying in a San Diego hotel, going to all the bars and clubs around town. Everyone was horny, and there were a lot of marriages that didn’t make it to the end of production. Normally I would be right in there for the fun, but I kind of felt like the cruise director. I was older and knew the area. There were a lot of people who weren’t quite twenty-one yet and I couldn’t get a million fake IDs. So the only place I could take them was Tijuana.
“How do you know TJ so well?” one cheerleader asked me, five tequilas in.
“I was on travel soccer in high school,” I said. It’s true. My soccer team was made up of the biggest female hellions in California. One time we walked across the border the night of an away game. We returned with one tattoo and six marines.
Kirsten was still in high school, and compared to me then she was so young. She was super nice and we would go out of our way to include her whenever we could. Her mom hosted barbecues, and we would all go because we wanted Kirsten to feel like part of the gang. You went, you ate, and you turned to the person next to you. “What bar are we going to?”
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