By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  I knew that the long-term plan was to work as much as possible but that I’d have to start small. I also knew that the end goal was to get full-time custody of my kids and then be able to give them whatever they needed to succeed in life and send them to college. But at this point I still just owed money.

  While I couldn’t believe people were willing to give me another chance, at the same time I know that America loves to watch people rise and fall and rise again. For some reason, it’s built into our culture and DNA to enjoy seeing people from the highest heights fall the greatest distances and then watch those very same people dig themselves out of the mire and re-ascend to that hallowed place. I think that unconsciously people are jealous of success, so the fall is somewhat satisfying. But then I think they like to see the rise again because it sort of affirms for them that anything’s possible—and in turn makes them feel better about their own struggles.

  Still, there are a lot of actors who have fallen and never come back. People like Brad Renfro, who was never a big star but probably would have been had he not struggled with addiction—and also probably could have gotten his life and career completely back on track had he not died of a drug overdose. And Chris Farley. So many others. When Downey made it all the way back, I thought, “I’m happy for him, but how many of us can there be?”

  I was about to find out.

  CHAPTER 9

  TODAY

  IT’S AMAZING WHAT you learn about yourself when you stop doing drugs. It’s amazing what I’ve learned. In sobriety, I started to do things I never would have thought I’d ever be interested in. I started to draw and do Photoshop stuff and teach my boys how to ride dirt bikes. I joined an intramural flag football league—something I would never have done as an active addict and probably wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through. I also tried to reacquaint myself with the things I really enjoy doing. Like my dad, I’d always been a big reader, but during those last few years of using, I’d stopped even doing that. Now I picked up books again. And I got back into exercising—almost obsessively for a while by doing it twice a day. Drew and Bob had drilled it into my head that one of the key things for me would be to eliminate free time and to fill it productively.

  Once I got some clarity about my situation, I could see that I was an addict, of course, but also that addiction is a disease and that I had a genetic predisposition to it. For a long time, I didn’t know I had it—or, more accurately, I was in denial about the fact that I had it. But Bob pointed out to me all the indicators, such as all the obsessive-compulsive tendencies I can have about things and the fixation I’ve always had about being good at something. Even the hyperfocus I’ve always had on acting—which has been a good thing in many ways, because it’s part of what’s made me successful—isn’t always healthy. I hyperfocus on football, even if it’s just throwing a football against a certain spot on a parking lot wall. These sorts of obsessions are touchstones for addiction: if you have that kind of brain, you already are a potential addict. It all started to make sense. Aaron has struggled with various levels of substance abuse. My grandfather Sizemore was an alcoholic—though he stopped drinking at the age of fifty-two—and my entire family has been rife with addiction. I also saw that I had a predisposition to depression, which is also in my family. Before, when I would be in those deep, dark holes, it didn’t matter if people told me, “You’re talented” or “You’re a good person.” But in sobriety, I learned how to understand that when I was in a hole I should just ride it out—that as much as depression comes over me for no clear reason, it lifts in much the same way. Once I began to understand all of that, I was able to enjoy being me and to start to forgive myself. It was hard to do but at the same time easier than I thought it would be.

  I began to focus on what sober people call “getting right-sized” and tried to train my brain to just stay clean and be a productive employee. I would talk to Downey about the attitude I really wanted to develop: the part of me that could stop thinking about myself and just be a productive part of the machine—the part that could be a good employee and a good dad. And of course, good employees and good dads don’t do dope.

  WORKING TODAY IS an interesting experience. I can’t tell you the number of people I encounter who say, “I thought you were dead! Where have you been?” They’re often suspicious—I suppose for good reasons—and there’s very much a feeling of “Let’s watch him and see if he’s still doing drugs” or “Let’s see how much drugs have affected him” or even “Let’s just watch him in general since he hasn’t pitched in eight years.” In sports terminology, they’re watching my performance and pitch count really closely when they’re giving me a starting position because they want to be sure they’ve made the right decision. They know that if they haven’t, they need to change things when there’s still a tenable alternative. I had a director I worked with recently say to me, “I know you’re clean, but what’s the residual impact of those drugs?” I immediately became paranoid that I was doing something to make him think I wasn’t all there. Then I remembered that people have every right to be suspect. Besides, I’m fifty now and I feel my age. I don’t feel good all the time and I can’t do what I used to do physically. I woke up recently and thought, “Oh my God, I’m tired—getting out of this bed is hard.” And look, I get it that if I’m lucky, I’ll only be around thirty or thirty-five more years. I want to make the most of it.

  Lately I feel like I’ve been doing just that—making the most of it. I’d been sort of trudging along, doing smaller sort of B movies, when Antoine Fuqua, a very big-time, talented director who did Training Day, called me in early 2010 about a Fox television pilot with Ethan Hawke that he was putting together called Exit Strategy. It was a much coveted and talked-about pilot, and he was completely straight with me: he said that when he brought my name up with the producers, it didn’t exactly set the room on fire.

  He came up with this strategy that I didn’t think would work but it was basically to run the clock. He told me they were talking about offering the role of Ethan Hawke’s mentor to people like Kevin Kline, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Cooper, but that everyone they wanted either passed or there was always a dissenting voice in the room and the deal was that everyone had to agree. And by the Thursday before the Tuesday they were going to start, they still hadn’t found someone for the role. So Antoine, completely acting, says, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it, how could we have forgotten Tom Sizemore?” Apparently there was total silence in the room—this was literally the week that Charlie Sheen was going around and acting crazy when he was getting fired from Two and a Half Men. And no one was more against the idea than Heather Kadin, this very proper and smart executive. She apparently said something like “Wow, what a brilliant idea. Who else is coming out of rehab or prison this week that we could throw into our Ethan Hawke pilot?” But the rest of the room was open to the idea—or at least willing to be open to the idea. And finally Heather said something like “Aw, screw it, why not?”

  Antoine called me and said, “Brother, sit down. You’ve got to come in here tomorrow. And you have to give your best work. Private Ryan ain’t shit compared to what you have to do tomorrow—you have to blow the roof off.” He got the pages over to me and told me that my audition was at Fox at 4:15 the next afternoon. I was so panicked that I couldn’t even prepare for it—all I could do was worry that I couldn’t do it. I’d just stare at the script and think, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it.” I couldn’t even remember what the hell I’d done before, back in the day when I went in for big auditions all the time.

  Then, finally, I remembered. I would just read the script a lot without even trying to commit it to memory, then I’d have someone go over it with me in the morning. And just having read it a lot the day and night before would make me able to remember everything. I wouldn’t put anything on it—no juice, no emotion—because I didn’t ever want to do that until I was in front of the camera for the first time.


  De Niro is similar. He doesn’t even say the lines until he’s on camera for the first time. He’ll practice by saying, literally, “Blah blah blah.” You run a line with him and he responds, “Blah blah blah.” If you’re truly a great actor, the only part that counts is “action” and “cut.” The rehearsals don’t count. In the NFL, they call a guy who plays real well in practice but folds under the pressure of the game a “practice player.” I don’t want to be a practice player in life, period, and particularly not in the performing arts.

  After reading the script over and over again, I went to the roof of my building and took some notes on it, then tested myself to see if I could write down my first speech. I told myself that if I could write down six sentences perfectly, I could go to sleep. And I did. I didn’t know if I had everything memorized, but it felt great.

  The next morning, I read the cue lines and then my own lines into Windows Movie Maker, put it on my iPod, and listened to it. I took a steam and then had a friend run lines with me. When I did it perfectly, I decided I wasn’t going to practice anymore.

  I was still so goddamned nervous—so nervous that, on the way to the audition, I had to have my manager pull over so I could throw up. And driving onto the studio lot made me uncomfortable because I hadn’t been on one in a long time, and I remembered that I used to be on them all the time. Then I just sort of said to myself, “The only way you’re going to be on this lot regularly again is if you go upstairs and throw a touchdown pass.”

  When we walked into the audition room and I saw that there were around seventeen people there, I was initially intimidated, but I just tried to take control of the situation. I said, “I’d rather talk after I read. Who am I reading with?” Someone said, “Me,” and I said, “Thank you. Are you any good?”

  And so I went for it—and man, did it feel good. During the last few lines my character gets up and leaves, so I got up and left the room. From outside, I heard applause, and I was so happy I wanted to cry. But my manager came out and got me. “You’ve got to do it again,” he said. “They think you were maybe lucky.” And I came back and did it again and it went even better. Heather told me later that I simply blew the doors off of anyone else they had had read.

  After I left, they had a real dilemma on their hands. I found out later that they’d basically said, “Well, he’s the best but can we even insure him? Isn’t there anyone else we can think of?” But there wasn’t anyone they could come up with. Even when they’d agreed, though, they still had to get it approved by the network. At one in the morning, Antoine called me and said, “It’s official. Les Moonves signed off on it.” I just started weeping, I was so grateful.

  We did the table read two days later and I guess the producers were so happy with how I did that they went from thinking, “Let’s have this guy do as little as possible because we’re not sure how reliable he is” to “Can we get the writers to write more of Tom’s actual voice into his character?” and “Can we get more scenes with Tom’s character in the script?”

  The shoot went incredibly well. It was almost three weeks of night shoots, and I was as prepared for them as I’ve ever been for anything. Heather told me that I was actually the only actor who knew all his lines every day. But I was very excited to be getting another chance, and the way she treated me really helped. One day on the set, when I was just standing around, she gestured to the seat next to her and said, “Come and sit down next to me.” It was a small moment, but at the same time it was huge because I felt like she was inviting me into her inner circle, and it had been a long time since I’d been invited into any inner circles I wanted to be in.

  During breaks, one of the writers—David Guggenheim—and I would discuss politics or we’d just shoot the shit. Because Heather was a nice Jewish girl, I’d jokingly break into the Jewish prayers I’d learned when I’d toyed with the idea of converting. Heather would howl. She also thought it was funny that I would wear biker jackets and biker boots when in fact I’m really this sensitive bookworm of a guy.

  I guess all the producers were surprised that I was so open, because they’d been worried about how they were going to be able to talk to me about everything I’d been through. But I just told them the stories—whatever they wanted to hear, whether it was about the drugs or what happened with Heidi or the Whizzinator. At one point I remember acting out the whole Whizzinator incident for them and thinking, “How could I have gotten any of this back?”

  Everyone was surprised when the show wasn’t picked up and I was so shocked that I went into one of my twenty-four-hour mourning periods. There were initially plans to retool the whole thing but then Ethan Hawke pulled out and it got shelved. Still, I made what I hope will be lifelong friends with some of the people involved. Heather went from not wanting me in their office building to being one of my biggest advocates. She would tell me that I was “a walking, talking example” of why you shouldn’t believe anything you read.

  Once Heather got the news that Exit Strategy was definitely not going to happen, she asked Peter Lenkov, the director of Hawaii Five-0, if he’d consider writing a part for me into that show. Hawaii Five-0, which was a remake of the original, was a huge hit for CBS and also produced by K/O, the company that made Exit Strategy. Peter liked the idea so Heather set up a meeting for the three of us. I guess she had told him ahead of time that I was going to be really quiet and reserved, because that’s how I’d been when I came in for my Exit Strategy audition. But I was in a pretty exuberant mood the day of the meeting and Peter and I really hit it off. Peter had a football in his office and we started talking about how I used to play and even tossed the ball back and forth. I was doing my Robert De Niro impressions and telling stories about shooting Heat and I guess Peter was looking at Heather going, “Where’s the quiet guy you’d told me we’d be meeting?” But while we had fun together, the main thing I wanted to do was show him how serious I was about acting again and how hard I would work. He seemed to understand that, and once they got the idea of me appearing on the show approved by CBS, Peter had me written into an episode as a character they’d created for me: Captain Vince Fryer, the head of Internal Affairs.

  When I got to Hawaii to shoot the first episode, I became suddenly very emotional just being on the set of a TV show; seeing the entire crew and this cast of people working together stirred up all of these feelings in me about what I’d lost. I guess Peter wasn’t expecting me to be so emotional; he called up Heather and said, “Tom’s sort of freaking out. I hope this is going to work.” But I shook it off and everything went really well—so well that even though I’d been hired for one episode and that episode had complete closure, they figured out a way to write me into another five.

  The more episodes I was on, the more Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, the two stars of the show, started pushing Peter to make me a series regular. And though I’m told he very seriously entertained the idea, it would have basically been impossible to continue to come up with reasons to justify having a series regular who wasn’t a part of the Five-0 team. Honestly, I was happy to be involved at all.

  Apparently the joke around the K/O office is that they now have to find a role for me in everything they do. As soon as they put something into development, I guess everyone says to Heather, “But who’s Tom Sizemore going to play?”

  I loved everything about the shoot. It was great to connect with Scott Caan, since I’d known his dad, James Caan, a long time—but probably the best part about it was that when they were putting together the episode where my character was getting killed off, they needed someone to play my wife. I suggested Maeve. We hadn’t been in touch in a long time but I knew she’d continued to act and had actually moved into producing shows. I was, of course, thrilled when she agreed to sign on and even more thrilled when she came to Hawaii for the shoot. While we didn’t have any scenes together, I finally got to sit down with her for the first time in a decade. I’m not going to lie; a large part of me fantasized that now that I was gett
ing a career going again, I could win her back. But I also understood that this was, on a certain level, a fantasy. And just to be around her and have her say that she supported me and that she could see that I was in a good place meant more than I can ever express.

  BECAUSE OF EVERYTHING I’ve been through, I definitely psych myself out when it comes to work in ways I didn’t before. If you were to sit down and think about the pressure of each take—the amount of money being spent on a very large production—you wouldn’t be able to work. Most actors know all this intuitively, so they don’t focus on it. If you actually sat there and thought, “If you don’t know your lines or if you make a mistake, you could, in effect, cost somebody a hundred and twelve thousand dollars,” you’d lose your mind. But suddenly I was thinking about those things.

  And honestly, the hardest part about acting, for me, is that you’re sitting there on a set for fourteen hours only to act for maybe around twenty-eight minutes. So for thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes you’re sitting in your trailer, and when you have a mind like mine, that’s a very long time to think about a lot of bizarre shit.

  But once I started to realize that things were actually going well, the more positive I felt during my downtime. I still have really bad days where I don’t even believe that what’s going on is going on. And then I have really good ones. When I watched one of my Hawaii Five-0 episodes, I actually sat there and thought, “Wow, I look good—I look like a real movie star again. And I still know how to make bold choices.” Of course, you can’t make bold acting choices all the time but I still know how to do stuff that makes people go, “I’m willing to continue to watch this guy even if he’s talking about banal shit, like the weather.”