We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

  The movie came out and surprised everyone. We made ninety million dollars, and it’s become a cult classic. Soccer dads will come up to me and start doing the cheers, the “Brrr, It’s Cold in Here” routine, then ask me if they’re doing it right. I have to answer, “Dude, I have no idea. Sorry.”

  I worked hard to make Isis a real character. It is interesting to me that when people reenact my scenes, they turn me back into that “Me-ow” caricature the director and I consciously took steps to avoid. They snap their fingers and say, “It’s already been broughten.”

  That line is actually from a later spoof of teen movies, but perception is reality. Isis was an educated leader who refused to have her cheers stolen, but these people genuinely believe she was the villain.

  A bunch of us did a cast reunion and photo shoot for a magazine a couple of years back. Kirsten was there and I mentioned how people say the “It’s already been broughten” line at me even though it wasn’t in the scene she and I played.

  “It wasn’t?” she said, laughing. “I thought it was.”

  Perception is reality.

  SOMETIMES IT’S THE DIRECTOR’S PERCEPTION OF YOU THAT CAN RUIN A PROJECT. I get asked about Friends a lot because people know there were only two black people on the show who didn’t play something like a waiter or Chandler’s coworker. That leaves Aisha Tyler and me. For some reason, people get our plotlines confused. Aisha played the woman pursued by Joey and Ross. I played the woman pursued by Joey and Ross. Okay, I get it now.

  When I was on, it was their seventh season, when Friends started to have more stunt guest stars. Susan Sarandon, Kristin Davis, Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, and me.

  I heard I got the gig on a Tuesday, the morning after my CBS hospital drama City of Angels was canceled. The best part of that show, by the way, was working with Blair Underwood—the sixth grader in me was dying. The worst part was having to yell “Pump in epinephrine!” and screwing it up each time. (You try it.) I had heard CBS gave great Christmas gifts, so my goal was to try to hang on until Christmas. We didn’t make it.

  When I drove onto the Warner Bros. lot I was not scheming to become best friends with the Friends. I was so okay with that. By then I had done 1,001 guest roles and I understood how these shows worked. If you’re a regular, especially megastars grinding through your seventh season, you have so much on your plate that going out of your way to befriend your guest star is the last thing on the priority list.

  But they were all really nice and totally professional. I thought, Okay, this could be cool. They had it down to a science and needed only three or four days to bang out an episode. My first scene was on the street outside Central Perk, with me unloading the back of a car, announcing that I am moving into the neighborhood. (Briefly, apparently.) The director was a regular, he did a lot of episodes. He went over the scene with David Schwimmer, Matt Perry, and the extras. Then he turned to me, and his tone completely changed.

  “Do you know what a mark is?” he said in a singsong voice. “You stay on that so the camera can see you.”

  It was like he was talking to a toddler. He assumed on sight that I didn’t know a single thing.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know.”

  Of course I knew what a mark was. Did he talk to other guest stars like this? The same thing happened in my next scene, this one with Matt LeBlanc.

  “Okaaaay,” the director continued in the singsong voice he reserved for me. He mimed how I should hold a lamp. “You could do thiiiiiis,” he said. “Or thiiiiiiis.”

  His tone was so condescending, as if I had just wandered in off the street or won a contest for a Friends walk-on. It’s funny, because I was standing there with Matt LeBlanc. I had four films under my belt that had either opened at number one at the box office or at number two behind blockbusters like the freaking Matrix. Matt, meanwhile, had made a movie with a monkey. Yet the director was talking to me, his guest star, as if I hadn’t accomplished a single thing.

  It’s telling, I think, that my scenes were not in the usual Friends settings. First, I was outside Central Perk, a street set that fans know to be pretty rarely used on the show. Then Joey and Ross went inside Central Perk to discuss me, and then I showed up again with both of them at an obviously fake bar. My black face didn’t darken the door of their favorite café, and certainly not the Friends’ apartments. In their ninth year, Aisha Tyler had the weight of integrating the Friends set and storyline like some sort of Ruby Bridges of Must-See TV. They let her character, Charlie Wheeler, stay for nine episodes. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly suggested it was odd that the two black girls were given the exact same storyline. “The déjà vu wouldn’t be that notable except that Friends’ depiction of New York City is notoriously lily-white.” Executive producer David Crane took umbrage. “The other story line [with Union] was quick and funny, where the two guys didn’t realize they were dating the same girl,” he told the magazine. “Charlie Wheeler [Tyler] is a brilliant paleontologist who should be dating someone like Ross, but hooks up with Joey first.” Got it.

  By 2016, the whitewashing of the Friends’ world was so apparent in reruns and streaming that series cocreator Marta Kauffman had to acknowledge the situation to the Washington Post. “That is a criticism we have heard quite a bit,” Kauffman said. “When we cast the show, we didn’t say to ourselves, ‘This is going to be an all-white cast.’”

  But it was. I didn’t call the director on the way he treated me, which I regret. I thought, No wonder you don’t have black talent on this show. He assumed I didn’t know anything and he felt comfortable dismissing me with condescending directives. It’s actually not enough to just point out that there were so few black actors on the show. We need to look at why, and why it was assumed that I knew nothing. Bias, whether implicit or explicit, hits every industry. To be a black person is to understand what it is to be automatically infantilized and have it be assumed that you don’t have the talent or the skill set required to do your job. It’s the reason Dr. Tamika Cross, a chief resident and OB/GYN, was stopped from helping a man who fell unconscious on her flight. When they asked if there was a doctor who could help, Tamika went into action. And was denied.

  “Oh, no, sweetie,” Dr. Cross recalled the flight attendant saying. “Put your hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some kind of medical personnel; we don’t have time to talk to you.”

  To compare myself to a doctor is a leap, I know, but it’s just how people talk to us. So no, I couldn’t possibly know where my mark was.

  My short time on the Friends set was a lesson, though. I had grown as an actress, raised my salary quote, and proved I could open films. But it wasn’t enough. I thought about that speech Dad gave me before I started elementary school: “You’re gonna have to be bigger, badder, better, just to be considered equal. You’re gonna have to do twice as much work and you’re not going to get any credit.”

  It was still true, even in the land of make-believe.

  ten

  CRASH-AND-BURN MARRIAGE

  Have you ever had a dream where you’re in a car and you’re heading right for a wall? You’re trying to hit the brakes, but you just speed closer and closer to your doom? Well, you are cordially invited to my first wedding.

  May 5, 2001, was a hot day, even for New Orleans. My bridesmaids were all hungover, their faces puffy and shiny from frozen daiquiris and hurricanes, a peril of having your wedding during Jazz Fest. Just before the ceremony, they were rock-paper-scissoring to see who got to go down the aisle with the Heisman winners. The loser had to walk with the groom’s friend who was just sprung from jail. He’d made bail in a murder case and was still wearing prison braids, as fuzzy as his alibi.

  Their game of rock-paper-scissors was a convenient distraction from what I was pretty sure could be a heart attack. But once they all walked, it was just me, myself, and my anxiety, standing at the beginning of an aisle that now seemed a country mile long. At the end was Chris, someone I had no busine
ss marrying.

  I took a step, and my shaking started with the first chords of “Endless Love.” I was on the edge of sobs, but not the usual wedding tears of a bride overcome by emotion. Everyone could tell, especially my father. He looped his arm through mine to escort me, which is to say drag me, down the aisle.

  “Stop it,” he hissed in my ear. “Stop this right now. You’re back at Foothill High School. You’re the point guard; you’re leading your team. Stop this foolishness.”

  I nodded, trying to turn my ugly-cry into a game face. Two guests I didn’t recognize jumped in front of the videographer to take photos. They paused a beat, each lowering their disposable cameras and smiling as if giving direction. Like maybe I’d get the idea and be happy. Chris and I hadn’t thought to write the number of guests allowed on the response card, so our wedding planner had simply seated, say, fifteen people on a card that went to one cousin. “The girl from Bring It On is marrying that football player, so invite the whole block,” I imagine them saying. “Well, yeah, he got cut from the Jacksonville Jaguars, but he’s hoping to be a Raider.”

  As Dad held me up down the aisle, I saw that the pastor that Chris’s mother had insisted we use was not there. My family is Catholic, but Chris wouldn’t commit to doing the Pre-Cana classes you have to take in order to get married by a priest. His mother’s suddenly precious pastor had skipped the rehearsal. I thought if he was a no-show, that would be my out. Then I saw him, blending in and chatting with the groomsmen. Mingling at my wedding ceremony.

  I had asked one of my closest guy friends, Dulé Hill, to do a reading. He was playing Charlie on The West Wing at the time, and I had been his girlfriend on the show. Dulé thought this marriage was a terrible mistake, so as he read from Corinthians, he kept sighing dramatically, pausing to look at me like, “Are you getting this?”

  “Love is patient,” he said, “love is kind.”

  After an eye roll, he continued, ticking off all the boxes on what was wrong with my relationship.

  “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others.”

  Long pause. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  I heard a plane in the distance.

  “It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

  If Chris and I had kept no record of wrongs, we would have had nothing to talk about. His endless cheating had given me permission to cheat, too. I was just less sloppy about it, so he wasn’t aware. While he dealt in volume, I dealt in quality. A note for the novice cheater: never, ever cheat with someone who has less to lose than you. You want someone who will be more inclined to keep his or her mouth shut.

  “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” the pastor asked, his voice thick with Louisiana country. Chris suddenly turned his back on me. I remember it in slow motion, him stepping down from the altar and moving toward his groomsmen.

  I was being left at the altar, I thought. This was really happening. I had missed my chance to run, and now he was Julia freaking Roberts, the Runaway Groom riding off on a horse. He knows, I thought. He knows I cheated on him and he won’t marry trash.

  Chris leaned in with his groomsmen, taking a huddle. They stamped their feet in unison, all turning back to me with a football chant of “We do!”

  It was a joke. Chris had planned this. He wasn’t leaving me. He didn’t know I was trash. I was saved from shame and washed with relief. I could endure a toxic marriage, but the humiliation of being left, of being publicly rejected—that would have been too much.

  The pastor began the vows. “Do you, Gabriel, take Christopher to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  Wait, I thought. “Gabriel”? This guy just mispronounced my name at my own wedding? But I was raised to never correct people. Certainly not a pastor. All I needed to do was say my name the right way when I repeated the vows. But because I was a good Catholic girl, I said it wrong.

  “I, Gabriel, take . . .”

  A groan went up from the bridesmaids. I glanced back at their disbelieving faces, then over at Dulé, ready with the faintest shake of his head. I smiled at Chris, which is something I always do to another actor when I am nervous in a scene and just want to get through it. I had a hard time looking at him, so my eyes settled on his forehead.

  The pastor pronounced us man and wife, and our exit song down the aisle was Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be.” It’s a cockeyed ode to bliss that now seems a little too on the nose irony-wise. Our videographer walked backward in front of us, capturing the exact moment one of our groomsmen, a huge guy named Zeus, clapped us on the back.

  “Y’alls is married now,” he said, riffing on a Color Purple line with a voice full of forced wonder and excitement.

  On the video, which I have watched only once, you see my face fall. It was the beginning of the end.

  SO WHAT GOT ME THERE? WELL, MY ROOMMATE IN 1999 HAD A THING FOR linebackers in the AFC Central Division. Her taste was very specific, and I can’t fault her for it because they were actually all great guys. One in particular hosted a three-day party in Jacksonville, Florida, every April. My roommate and I went one year with some friends, and on the first night there was a bowling party. I immediately clocked this guy in the next lane, definitely not my type. He was a running back, short and built, and a Jacksonville Jaguars teammate had given him the nickname “Little Thicky.” That was an accurate description. He had on these baggy jeans, and he’d cut off the hems to shorten them. Later, when I was shopping for him, I learned that 38-28 is in fact a mean size to find.

  “What are you, Huck Finn?” I asked, looking down at his frayed cuffs.

  “My name’s Chris.”

  “Where’s Jim? He out watching the raft?”

  He gave it right back, trash-talking my game. He was legit funny, a country boy from Kenner, Louisiana, where they take turtles out of the swamp to cook them. He liked drinking dark liquor and playing cards, and he reminded me of the kind of men who married into my family. The contrast was that he also had tattoos all over his arms, two earrings, and an easy cartoon cat smile. When we were all leaving, he got on a Ducati, and that sealed it. As a child of Grease 2, I was always on the lookout for a Cool Rider.

  I found myself thinking about him, and the next night he showed up at the house where most of us were staying. One of my girlfriends was like, “He’s downstairs!” He had come back, so that meant he was interested, too. It’s funny, in retrospect, how excited I was.

  We spent the rest of the party weekend joined at the hip, hanging out and trading potshots. A big part of our courtship was ragging on each other. Sure, later we would use it as a weapon, having learned what to say to wound and what would be the kill shot. But in the beginning, it was good fun. It felt like a mutual chase.

  We would visit each other in Jacksonville and L.A. for weekends. My career was starting to rise, so the arrangement was good. I could focus on work and auditions while he did his training. We had dreams. “After football, I’m one class away from my kinesiology degree from Michigan,” he told me. “I want to go into sports medicine.”

  In July, after three months of dating, Chris bought an engagement ring, but he held on to it until my birthday, at the end of October. I flew to Jacksonville to celebrate. I spent the whole day at the spa, and when I got back to his house, there was a rose petal path from the front door to the bedroom. At the end was Chris, down on one knee. He had a bucket of KFC on the floor, and he was eating KFC potato wedges with one hand while holding a ring in the other. When I tell this story to new girlfriends, they always ask, tentatively, if there was some sentimental thing about KFC. No, I have to tell them; in the first of a list of many ignored red flags, I guess he was eating and I had surprised him.

  The ring felt big and special, and so many of my friends were already married. I’d won something under the wire, I thought. I was the girl who called everyone to share my news, but I remember feeling more and more apprehensive with each call. I’m the opposite
of impetuous. I am a “measure sixteen times, then cut once” person. And then torture myself in the middle of the night about how I kind of did a half-assed job on that sixteenth measurement. So I got defensive when the general response was “Are you sure?” and “As long as you’re happy . . .” People thought it was a terrible idea, given that I’d only known him a few months and had only seen him on random weekends. People on the other side of marriage know what happens when you’ve never spent any real time together. I had no idea what that reality actually looked like, but I told myself I was just efficient.

  The next day I had to fly up to Wilmington to audition for Dawson’s Creek. It was a quick trip, there and back in one day. Back in Jacksonville, I let myself into Chris’s place while he was still at practice and got on his computer to check my e-mail.

  Kids, this was medieval times, when olde-timey laptops used to have messages pop up on the screen like they were breaking in with a special report. And there it was:

  “Yo, you still got that girl coming in next weekend? Nigga, she’s Greek. Nigga, she’s Greek.”

  This was from his best friend. Now, I am not Greek. Nor do I know why his friend was so insistent about this woman’s Greek identity. All I knew was that I was going to be back in L.A. the weekend of Greekfest. And this was literally not even twenty-four hours after he had proposed to me.

  I packed my bag and kept my ring on just so he could see me take it off when I threw it at him. When he walked in the door, I nailed it, throwing the diamond right at him. Chris entered the scene in full apology mode, as his boy had tipped him off. I guess my reply—something like “Yes, what was her name again?”—gave away that the person typing wasn’t Chris. He bent to pick up the ring and was crawling on the ground, begging.

  “You just proposed,” I yelled.

  “I didn’t know if you were going to say yes,” he said.