by Greg Sestero
I was shocked. “You want me to do it?”
“Yeah. Do you think the other guy would give a shit about you if the situation was reversed?”
I didn’t know, honestly. Maybe he would have.
“I don’t know. Nothing about it feels right.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
Amber was right about that; we’d been struggling. And remember, I thought to myself, Don is a rich kid. Actually, I had no idea if Don was a rich kid. It just seemed like he was, and right now I was very fond of that impression. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Amber said—there was, I noticed, no joy or victory in her voice—and we walked inside. The phone was heavy in my hand as I dialed Tommy’s number. While Tommy’s cell rang, I imagined him making one of his semi-truck-slow turns onto another street. No. He was probably still driving down Fountain, the next street over. When Tommy picked up I asked him where he was. “I am on the Fountain,” he said. “So what’s the story? I have no time to beat the bush.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Greg,” Tommy said, “I think you make great decision.”
two
La France a Gagné
Everybody should have one talent.
—Dickie Greenleaf, The Talented Mr. Ripley
I saw Home Alone in Walnut Creek, California, on Christmas Day 1990, when I was twelve. After the movie I immediately got to work on writing the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in Disney World. The plot hinged on Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) boarding the wrong plane and winding up in Disney World, where he runs into his slightly older neighbor Drake (Greg Sestero). There, Drake and Kevin get into various monkeyshines while avoiding a crack team of bandits recently escaped from a Florida state penitentiary. I created a soundtrack, drew up a poster, and threw together a marketing campaign. When I finished the script, I remember thinking that soon I’d be on set in Orlando and skipping eighth grade.
Next, I did what all twelve-year-old screenwriters do, which was call information and ask for the phone number of 20th Century Fox. I got through to someone at Fox, though for some reason I was given the runaround. Incensed, I called information again and asked for the address of John Hughes’s production company in Chicago. Then I sent Hughes my screenplay directly.
My mother teased me about my dream of getting my movie made, but that only fueled my aspirations. I checked the mail every day after school, hoping to prove her wrong.
A month later my mom walked into my bedroom holding a brown envelope. She looked stunned. “It’s from Hughes Productions,” she said.
I tore open the package like I was about to find Wonka’s Golden Ticket. Sad news—my screenplay was being returned—but attached to the pages was a handwritten note from John Hughes himself. “Believe in yourself,” he told me in closing, “have patience, and always follow your heart.” Writing a random little boy a note of encouragement was merely a small, dashed-off kindness on Hughes’s part, but at the time it meant a lot to me. It still does. In the intervening years, I’ve learned that many people can afford to be that kind, but of those who can, most don’t.
After reading Hughes’s letter, I knew I’d found my calling.
• • •
I love my mother. She is a wonderful human being: strong, tough, loving, practical, and beautiful. We get along and have always gotten along, save for one key area: my choice of career.
The first thing to know about my mother is that she’s French-Sicilian. I’d like you to think for a moment about the temperamental implications of that genetic combination. My mother wanted me to become a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer, a doctor. For my mother, “I want to be an actor” was roughly analogous to “I want to be homeless.” Oddly—or not oddly at all—my mom had once wanted to be an opera singer. “If it were that easy,” she said when I asked about this, “I would have done it.”
In retrospect, the way my mother went about discouraging me from acting was, tactically speaking, all wrong. She could have sat me down and said, “Greg, look. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, and even many of the most talented actors barely survive. You might be great and still not make it. Is that the kind of chance you want to take?” But she didn’t say that. What she said was, “You are going to learn the hard way, and the worst part of it is you had your parents to warn you, unlike all those loser Hollywood runaways you see in the streets.” It was hard to hear this from her. My mother was the one person I wanted to be proud of me.
With my dad it was different. His idea of solid parenting has always been to say, “Just do what you can to enjoy life, because it sure goes by fast.” But with my father so low-key, my mother’s voice dominated. “Most people have nothing to lose,” she would tell me. “Gregory, you have a lot to lose.” It wound up feeling like that, which meant I lost a lot. I didn’t go out for high school drama, for instance, because I was afraid of not being good. I persisted in reading about acting, though, and remember my stomach dropping when I learned that Jack Nicholson stumbled through 350 auditions before getting his first small part. By the end of my junior year, I was fear-stifled and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t apply to colleges; I didn’t have a plan. Nothing felt right.
It was around this time that I watched another movie that had a huge influence on me: Legends of the Fall. I believed that Tristan Ludlow (Brad Pitt) was on a quest for self-understanding similar to mine, though mine, I hoped, would have fewer bear attacks. The morning after I saw the film, I noticed an ad in the Contra Costa Times for Stars, a San Francisco talent agency, that was seeking new clients. I decided to send them photos, and after a couple of weeks, someone from Stars called me in for a meeting.
A month and a half later, Stars had gotten me a gig to model in Milan. This overlapped with what would have been the beginning of my senior year of high school. I worked out an ad hoc “independent study” with my school, and suddenly I was landing at Malpensa Airport and blinking in the glorious Italian sunshine.
I got off to a frantic start, attending castings all over the city, many of which had four hundred models waiting for hours in line to be seen. This was about as intimidating as anything I could imagine. For the first time, though, I didn’t let my fear control me. Just because I was sheltered didn’t mean I wasn’t good; it didn’t mean I should quit. That said, I was greatly rattled by the beauty of the Italian women and by the alien qualities of the fashion world as seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old California boy who wanted to act. I made the mistake of voicing this aspiration to fashion people: “I’m doing this to act,” I’d say. “You should be doing this to model,” I was told (rightly, too, I now know).
Every moment of every day felt newly, freshly incredible. I did shoots in Florence and Venice and Lake Como. On my off days I hung out with other young models near the Duomo. In Paris I got the chance to work for Jean-Paul Gaultier. I met the fashion editor of Vanity Fair, who playfully asked me, “Your mom let you out of the house?” (Not exactly, I didn’t say.)
Blue Steel-ing in Milan, 1995.
After six months in Europe I returned home to San Francisco. I didn’t plan on modeling again because I wanted to focus on acting exclusively. Models, I knew, had a hard time being taken seriously as actors—sometimes for very good reason. I asked my print agent, Lisa, if she would submit me for whatever movies or television shows were filming in the Bay Area. Lisa found this request amusing: “It sort of sounds, Greg, like you want to fly up the ladder.”
Lisa reminded me of the many things I didn’t have: an acting résumé, an acting headshot, or any training. But I was adamant that she try anyway. To Lisa’s and my shock, I quickly scored a bit part in Nash Bridges as Joel, an upset guy who’d seen a murder. After I got sides, I spent three days throwing everything I had into them. My two lines in the scene were “Yes” and “No.” This is it, I thought. My break. My rocket start up the ladder. Except that it wasn’t. Phil Jackson, my sports hero, once said, “It wasn’t the l
ast hit that broke the rock but the thousands of hits that came before it.” My part on Nash Bridges was one tiny hit.
I shot the part in Oakland with Don Johnson himself. During the shoot, I met an actor named Peter Gregory, who was up from Los Angeles doing a guest-star turn on the show. We talked a bit on set. Gregory offered me some big brother–type advice. He told me I had a “young Rob Lowe” thing going in my favor, a kind of likable innocence, and that if I wanted to do well, I had to figure out a way to give that aspect of myself some kind of edge. “You don’t want to be just another pretty face,” he said. “Pretty boys are a dime a dozen in L.A.” The most helpful thing Peter mentioned was the name of his agent, Judy Schoen, which I filed away for immediate use. My scheme: Call Judy Schoen and say, “Hello, Peter Gregory recommended you to me.” Which was only slightly a lie. Peter told me I shouldn’t have any trouble attracting a Los Angeles agent, so why not start with his?
When I came home and told my mother I was going to send out feelers with L.A. agents, she said, “If you do that, if you go to L.A., mon cher, then you are on your own. I’m not helping you at all.”
Before I could contact Judy Schoen, I booked a few things you would have needed a high-powered microscope to see me in. These parts are called “being a background performer” in polite company and “being a fucking extra” if you’re talking to other actors. One such gig was Gattaca, the Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman sci-fi movie directed by Andrew Niccol, in which a brief flash of my face can be seen among wanted Gattacan citizens. I was also a “featured extra” (my favorite movie-language contradiction in terms) in Metro, which starred Eddie Murphy and Michael Rapaport. The on-set casting person plucked me from a teeming mass of extras and stuck me right behind Murphy for a scene in a tavern that wound up getting cut.
Shortly after my background performing triumph in Metro, I called Judy Schoen. To her credit, she actually took my call. I explained that I’d recently done Nash Bridges with her client Peter Gregory. Soon I’d be coming down to Los Angeles; I’d love to meet with her.
“Well,” she said in a hard-ass, cigarettey voice, “don’t come down here just for me.”
I drove down, a few days later, just for her.
Judy turned out to be unexpectedly kind in person. “The first thing you need,” she told me, “is to get tape. Also training. You need good training.” She put her cigarette down and looked at me. “What if I asked you to intensify a scene? Would you know what I meant?” I didn’t answer. “I thought so,” she said. “Come back to me with tape and training under your belt and we’ll talk.” I went back to San Francisco with I’ve got to get tape, I’ve got to get training, running through my head like numbers on a stock-exchange ticker.
I enrolled in classes at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, whose alumni included Denzel Washington, Teri Hatcher, Winona Ryder, and Danny Glover. Then I got as many jobs as possible, because my eventual move to Los Angeles was not going to be cheap. I ushered at Golden Gate Theatre in the Tenderloin; I shuffled papers at an investment firm; I filed documents at my father’s land-development company.
I’d been studying at A.C.T. for six months when I called Judy Schoen again to update her on my progress. I didn’t get her directly, so I left a message. The next day I walked by my father’s office and saw him talking on the phone. From the startled way he looked up, I knew the conversation he was having somehow involved me. “Yeah,” my father kept saying. “Yeah, I know. She’s screwed up. I agree. I wouldn’t deal with her. I’ll let him know.” He put the phone down. Whatever this was, it was bad.
“Dad?” I said.
His eyes lifted heavily to meet mine. “Your mother talked to that agent. She said Mom was rude or harassing to her assistant, so now she doesn’t want to hear from you anymore. So it’s over. You need to let it go.”
My mother, being French, can ruffle and alarm people not accustomed to more, shall we say, Gallic forms of no-nonsense directness. It’s not rudeness, or not intended as rudeness, but try telling that to Judy Schoen’s assistant, who called me back and got my mother. She pretty rapidly found herself being shouted at—and then shouting right back. The whole debacle ended, I later learned, with Judy Schoen herself getting on the phone and telling my mother, “Don’t ever fucking call my office again. I’m not interested in your son.”
I’d spent the last six months doing everything I could to get represented by Judy Schoen and it had all collapsed in one thirty-second conversation. I went home immediately and confronted my mother, who had an interesting appraisal of the day’s events. Her first point was that Hollywood people, as she’d long argued, were “flakes and thieves.” Her second point was that this was exactly the sort of thing she’d been warning me about. Her third point was that Hollywood didn’t work in the way the rest of the world worked. You needed to have connections, rely on the casting couch, or be rich. I, in turn, had one point, which I repeated to her again and again: She should have let me return that phone call and not taken it upon herself to torch the one connection I had. Other than that I had nothing to say; soon enough, neither did she.
Several weeks later, my mother was driving my brother to Los Angeles for a dental school interview. She offered a spot in the car for me, too, so I could meet with some Hollywood agents. I knew this was her way of apologizing.
I went despite having been unable to make any appointments with agents. “By referral only” is basically the model of every legitimate agency in Los Angeles. Thus, operating out of complete hopelessness, I decided to crash the offices of Cunningham-Escott-Dipene, a prominent talent agency I knew of mainly because they represented Mark Hamill. My hope was that every law known to govern the entertainment industry would cease to exist for the few minutes I was there.
My crash of CED’s offices went exactly as it should have gone. Did I have an appointment or referral? I didn’t and was asked to leave. I began to make a case for myself and heard my voice develop a worrying quiver, so I stopped, nodded, and walked out.
• • •
A month later I got an unexpected bit of good news when my San Francisco agency booked me for two commercials. One of them was for Ford, in which I portrayed a college guy hanging out with his girl. A Ford truck goes by and it’s so amazing, we wave at it. It made no sense, but it got me my SAG card and a few residual checks—which was helpful.
Less helpful were my classes at A.C.T. Students didn’t get a lot of time onstage and the place had an intimidating vibe. So I asked around: Where else did people seek training in San Francisco? One name that kept coming up was Jean Shelton. I went to see her and, after a short conversation, she let me in.
It was now April 1998. I was almost twenty years old. After a week in Shelton’s class, the good news kept coming: I got a call from a casting director working with Tom Shadyac on a film called Patch Adams; Robin Williams was the star. The casting director had seen my headshot and thought I might be right for a character who didn’t have any dialogue but would be prominently featured in several funeral-scene close-ups as the dead girl’s grief-stricken brother. I was cast and drove out to Napa Valley. My mother didn’t understand why I was driving so far to shoot a scene in which I had no lines.
I arrived in St. Helena—the town where we were shooting—around seven in the morning. I was given my funeral wardrobe and then waited around like everyone else. Out of nowhere, my name was called over the loudspeaker. The line producer, incredibly, wanted to speak to me. She said she thought it would be good for me to talk to Robin, because I was a member of his on-screen family. A little intimacy, she said, might be nice.
Robin Williams is a longtime resident of San Francisco; I grew up watching him on local television. I thought he might find it funny if I greeted him by referencing one of his local bits: an odd character named Handsome Williams, whom he created right around the time of Mork & Mindy. When I approached Williams he was slowly pacing a few feet from his trailer. The line producer, walking ahead of me, sped
up to prepare Williams for my arrival. I was about to talk to an actor whose work I admired and who had only weeks ago won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. When I got close he smiled and stuck out his hand.
“Handsome Williams,” I said, excited, smiling, as I shook his large, hairy loaf of a hand.
Williams stared at me blankly. “Handsome?” he said. He’d stopped shaking my hand. He had no idea what I was referring to. He was too focused on the scene he was about to shoot to remember some goofy old bit he’d done.
“Handsome Williams,” I said again, unhelpfully. I felt all the soft parts of my face get blood-gushingly warm. Williams let go of my hand, gracefully putting the misunderstanding behind us. He began to explain to me, in a very calm voice, that the scene we were shooting today was an intensely emotional part of the film for him. My job, consequently, was to stand there and radiate sadness. He was very kind, and actually pretty helpful, and after some polite chitchat he thanked me for being part of the film and walked off.
I was shown to the mark on which I was supposed to stand for the duration of the scene. Next to me was a guy I mistakenly assumed was another extra. In fact, he was a young actor I hadn’t yet heard of, though he’d already done terrific work: Philip Seymour Hoffman. I tried to make a little small talk with him, but he was also in the zone or trying to get there and sent back my way some palpable energy indicating that I should just shut the fuck up already, which I did.
Tom Shadyac, the director, suddenly appeared, and walked back and forth in front of us, occasionally suggesting a few microarrangements. Shadyac was very cool, in a rich-hippie kind of way. He’d already done a few huge movies, Ace Ventura among them, but carried himself in such a manner that his authority always seemed pleasant and gentle. Eventually he zeroed in on me. “I’m going to go a little bit tighter on him,” he said to someone trailing him, “and then we’re going to do a little bit more with him later.” Then he spoke to me directly: “Really great, Greg,” he said. “Thank you.” By now I knew enough not to say anything. Not even a thank-you for remembering my name, which truly was above and beyond. I just nodded.
