There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  Obviously, I haven’t always lived up to Hollywood’s expectations, Encino Man being just one example. I remember Dan Petrie Jr., my friend, my mentor, my trusted ally, coming up to me at my wedding and saying, “Sean, you look good; don’t ever get fat like that again.”

  I laughed, shook his hand, and didn’t really say anything other than, “I understand.”

  “No, man, I’m serious,” he added, his eyes almost pleading with me. “For your career. Don’t let it happen.”

  I knew he meant it. I’d heard it before. In fact, when I showed up on the set of Toy Soldiers a couple years earlier, Mark Berg, the film’s producer, fairly blanched at my softness in the midsection: “Come on, Sean. Get to the gym!”

  I sort of resented it, because I thought I looked sufficiently heroic the way I was. But I was wrong. I wasn’t disciplined enough to take care of my body, which should be among an actor’s most important responsibilities. That’s not to say that an actor should be excessively concerned with superficiality. Of course not. Actors come in all shapes and sizes. But an actor’s instrument is in part his physical body. Sure, the mind, the spirit, general knowledge, and technical training are critical factors in being a solid, well-rounded actor, but the body is the vessel through which you communicate the ideas of the script. And I didn’t want to play tuba parts at that point in my life. I wanted to be able to do a drum solo or be the first violin. On Toy Soldiers I knew the genre. It was an action picture, a smart pubescent thriller—and I was the mini Bruce Willis. I can see Dan cringing while reading this, because he wrote a very sensitive character and I’m reducing poor Billy Tepper to a Slim-Fast cautionary tale. But I’m making a different point.

  I needed to be told what to do, which is sad. I’d had no trouble working out when I played organized sports as a kid, or when I was training to run 10K races or even marathons, but I hadn’t yet reached the point where I was willing to accept it as part of my job. I felt I needed a reason. The obvious logic—it’s good to be fit—just wasn’t enough motivation. For better or worse, my life has been one of extremes, and that extends to my commitment, or lack thereof, to physical conditioning. Make it part of my daily regimen? Nah. I’m not a granola guy. Although I admire granola guys, I happen to love greasy food. Always have, probably always will.

  The other obvious logic is that I needed to be fit and attractive for my career, but that didn’t resonate with me as being righteous. To be good-looking for the sake of being good-looking, well, that just bothered me. I wasn’t ever “turn-heads-on-the-street” good-looking, and never would be. Once, many years ago, I had a great photo session when I was in the best shape of my life. I was waterskiing a lot, running, and lifting weights, and my metabolism was still roaring in the way that it does when you’re almost out of your teens. By twisting and turning my body, and lighting the set just right, the photographer managed to transform me into someone I barely recognized. Someone with a solid, square jaw, and if not a six-pack, at least a two-pack. I look at those photos now and almost laugh about how good I look. But sustaining that? No chance. I was more concerned with the entrepreneurial part of my career, even if I understood on some level the importance of just simply looking good. It makes sense from a business standpoint to focus on the basics of being a movie star, and part of that is being in great shape. It just didn’t interest me to focus on it consistently.

  For Rudy, however, I was willing to accept almost anything the role required, and that meant not only getting fit, but staying fit during filming. We began shooting in the fall, just as the leaves were changing in South Bend. Only months earlier I had married a Hoosier whose family lived a scant twenty miles down the road, so everything about the project felt right. On the first day of filming, the mayor of South Bend showed up on the set and welcomed everyone to the city.

  He had a special message for me: “I don’t know what your political aspirations are, but there’s a little history here, you know? The last person who starred in a movie filmed at Notre Dame went on to become president of the United States.”

  He was referring, of course, to Ronald Reagan, who had portrayed the heroic but doomed Notre Dame running back George Gipp in The Knute Rockne Story. (Yes, I know, Reagan wasn’t really the star. It was Pat O’Brien who played the titular character.) It was a nice thing for the mayor to say, and I kind of chuckled and tried to be appropriately gracious. This was a nonpartisan event, so I didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that Reagan was famously Republican and I was a Democrat. And while I wasn’t yet famous, I did (and still do) have political aspirations of my own. Never mind that the press conference was being held during our lunch hour and I hadn’t had time to change out of the football uniform I had been wearing. I felt at best unworthy, and at worst a little fraudulent sitting there pretending to be a bona fide, hard-core Domer! The appropriate thing to do was to keep my mouth shut, focus on the work, and try to honor the integrity of the movie.

  The real-life Rudy, who has become a Notre Dame icon almost as recognizable (in name, at least) as the Golden Dome or Touchdown Jesus, had arranged for me to have access to all of the school’s athletic facilities, including the football team’s locker room and weight room. I had a personal trainer. I lifted weights and ran every day. When the weather was bad, I worked out on a stationary bike that I had begged for, and that Rudy had arranged to have sent to our house. It occurred to me that I was being treated like the star of a movie, and while there was a certain pressure associated with that position on every level, I enjoyed it.

  Christine, too, was happy. We had our “boy” with us, a Siberian husky named Byron. She could visit her family every day, and on weekends we’d have dinner on the farm where she’d grown up. It was wonderful, practically the perfect moviemaking experience. Every so often, we’d be featured on the cover of the local newspaper, which was kind of quaint and cute, and in the eyes of my in-laws, such local recognition was a unique and important sort of validation. On some level I believed I had arrived at what I was destined to do, which was to carry a movie, to be a movie star. I’d already been the star of The Goonies and Toy Soldiers, and even though I had done a bunch of ensemble films, I wanted to carry a studio picture; I wanted to be … well, I wanted to be Kevin Costner. That’s who I wanted to be.

  I remember going to the premiere of Dances with Wolves in 1991, shaking hands with Costner, and thinking, Wow! He’s accomplishing so much. Costner was still in his thirties, and yet somehow he had the talent, the drive, and the intelligence—not to mention the balls—to put together this incredible project, one that no one initially wanted to support. It was too smart a movie, too ambitious, too political. Worst of all, Costner himself was a first-time director. A neophyte trying to make a historical epic? A western, no less? Everything about the project must have seemed misguided. But there was Kevin Costner at the premiere, smiling proudly, working the room like a pro, confident that he’d not only survived the process, but triumphed. You could just tell: he knew.

  Dances with Wolves made a ton of money and won the Academy Award for best picture, and Kevin Costner became one of the most influential artists in Hollywood. I couldn’t help wondering if that was my destiny, too. Pretentious? Well, it was pretentious for Kevin Costner to think he could make Dances with Wolves. But he did. What really struck me was the fact that he was the director; he was a filmmaker. If it had been Robert DeNiro or Robert Duvall that I’d met at the premiere, I might have felt some distance from them, but this was what I wanted to be: a guy who could carry a movie and make a movie, all at the same time. I looked at Kevin as a likable, accessible film star who also produced and directed a brilliant film. He was the living embodiment of what I wanted to achieve.

  What I lacked was the overt self-confidence that Costner obviously possessed. To a degree, all actors are neurotic and insecure, and how they manage those feelings, how they keep the demons of doubt at bay, goes a long way toward determining their success or failure. I can vividly recall being at the O
mni Ambassador in Chicago toward the end of filming Rudy, and having a terrible crisis of confidence: What if this is it? What if this is the best thing I ever do? Christine still loves to tease me about our “pinnacle” conversations. I’ll have a moment of self-doubt, and she’ll just roll her eyes. For this particular pinnacle conversation, there was snow on the ground and we were filming the earlier scenes in the picture, interiors that did not require an autumn landscape and a packed stadium. Because the football scenes had been shot and I was no longer required to look quite as much like an athlete, I had stopped training feverishly and was letting myself slip out of shape again—in part because it fit the character, who begins the film as a factory worker, and in part because I really didn’t feel like working out. There seems to be a direct correlation between my percentage of body fat and how I feel about myself, and as the percentage began to climb, I was gripped somewhat irrationally by a nagging sense of doom.

  What if I just peaked?

  A similar feeling would permeate The Lord of the Rings nearly a decade later. It happens on good movies. The exhilaration and pride in having accomplished something worthwhile are inevitably replaced by feelings of sadness and regret. After all, how can you top The Lord of the Rings? And how could I, as an actor, top Rudy? I had played a drug addict in Where the Day Takes You, which was so far from who I was, and I had done Encino Man, which was a major hit for the studio, regardless of how I felt about it. Now with Rudy I had done … well, me. And I didn’t know what else I had to offer. I had played myself, or at least some idealized, amplified version of myself, and I had no idea where to go next. Christine witnessed my anxiety and was sympathetic if not bemused.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You should be proud and happy.”

  The waiting really is the hardest part—the six months or the year that passes between the time a film is wrapped and the time it comes out is agony for an actor. If the film is bad and you know it’s bad, there is dread at the prospect of having to promote it, which you are duty bound and contractually obligated to do. If it’s good or you think it’s going to be good, the experience can be different, complicated, with a daily shifting of emotions, ranging from genuine excitement over seeing the work put on display, to crippling fear that you might be wrong. And if in fact the movie is bad, there will be proof that you have not only bad judgment, but also no taste.

  I didn’t think that was the case with Rudy. I knew in my heart that it was a very good film, and that my work in it was strong. I was reasonably confident that people who get paid to recognize and comment on such things—namely, film critics—would have no trouble discerning the merits of Rudy. What I did not know, and could not know, was whether any of that would translate into the type of box-office success that can, when combined with an artistic and critical success, transform a career. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced that Rudy was going to be a hit. Hoosiers had done great, but that movie was about a championship high-school basketball team. The climactic sequence is a lengthy game featuring a buzzer-beating basket and a wild celebration on the court. Tears of sadness on one side, tears of joy on the other. As General George Patton once said, “America loves a winner.” Hoosiers was about a winner. Rudy was a different kind of winner. He was the last guy on the bench, the last guy to get in the game. His achievement was no less meaningful, but it was smaller, quieter.

  Christine and I went back to California and enrolled in community college, which had the not unpleasant effect of allowing me to pursue my longtime goal of getting a degree, while distracting me from the postproduction phase of Rudy. In retrospect, I realize that distraction, while in some sense soothing, was not a sound career strategy. I remember trusting in the back of my mind that everything would work out all right, that Hollywood was built on a system predicated upon the assumption that agents and managers wanted to make money, and to do that they had to find work for their clients. That’s the business they were in, and they’d figure out how to do that for me. They’d make the necessary phone calls, hold the necessary meetings, and devise a way to capitalize on the work I’d done, most notably Rudy. Even though the film hadn’t been released, there was, as they say, a little “buzz.”

  I was waiting for the world to knock at my door. To my agents, I said, in effect, “I was in the title role of a major studio’s picture, so do your job, and I’ll be focusing on developing myself the way I want to while waiting for the next opportunity you people present me.” That’s the way it was supposed to work, or so I thought; nevertheless, it wasn’t happening. I got the distinct impression that my agents were hedging their bets, not wanting to pick up the phone and call people, or that people were just waiting to see what would happen with Rudy. Meanwhile, I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the business of my own career. Basically, I had this complex psychological issue, related to my own feelings of intellectual inadequacy, that made it imperative for me to get a formal education. I wanted that degree—and I needed it. It was one of the most important things in my life, and the fact that I was able to put myself through junior college, transfer to UCLA, and graduate with honors remains one of my proudest accomplishments.

  Of course, I probably never would have realized that dream if it wasn’t for having Christine in my life. She is my life partner, my wife, my study buddy, mentor, disciplinarian, and taskmaster. Our college transcripts are virtually identical. For example, when I’d pop off for a week to work for Ed Zwick on Courage Under Fire, she would audiotape the lectures, FedEx them to me, and be the “face” of our team to the professors or the study groups we were in. I’d fax my homework to her, and she’d hand it in for me. We worked together brilliantly. Probably our favorite part of college was that I read just about all of our assigned books out loud to Christine. That exercise satisfied the performer in me and focused my mind on what I was doing, and she simply loved being read to. People either admired us for the way we worked together or thought we were crazy, but we didn’t care. It worked for us and we loved it.

  I can’t deny that I doggedly pursued the goal of earning my degree. And yet, doing so contributed to my career stalling out. I was concentrating on school, exercising my mind rather than my body (and getting fat again), and at the same time feeling at least a modicum of resentment that film offers were not tumbling in. I wanted everything all at once. Hollywood doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. Essentially, I had just miscalculated. I trusted that my income and the potential for my income were so enormous and so obvious to my agents that they would be working hard outside my purview to help bring about a successful ascent for me.

  At a certain point I realized that not only was my career stalling, so was CAA’s perceived power—the ambient sense in the air that they were it. And perhaps a change was in order. My mother had been a client of William Morris for years, and had repeatedly tried to convince me to join her as a client of the agency. As time passed and my frustration with CAA and its handling of my career continued to grow, I warmed to her overtures. I remember on several occasions trying to get information from my agents that I felt was important to my career and personal situation, and essentially being dismissed. I knew the door that had opened when I’d made Rudy was now closing. The movie had been warmly received by critics, and my work had been politely applauded, but the film itself, while not a box-office failure, was hardly a hit. The time to capitalize on my work in Rudy was shrinking, and I no longer felt as though my agents were committed to me or my career. So, even though I liked them all as individuals—I could have a pleasant dinner with any of them right now—I decided to leave. It wasn’t personal. CAA, in my opinion, simply didn’t recognize my value and didn’t find a way to take advantage of the work I’d done.

  Concurrently, it’s also true that I was failing to live up to my responsibilities to present a marketable package to studio executives and audiences. I wasn’t doing my part. I kept waiting, thinking, If I get offered what I made before, then I’ll jump in. Now, excuse me
, I have a class to attend. I had told my agents many times that if there was a great job or a great part available, or a brilliant filmmaker to work with, I’d stop college in a heartbeat, knowing that it would always be there when I was finished. I trusted that the agents’ self-interest would keep them focused on that mission. Had I stayed at a smaller agency or been with agents who really cared about me or knew my heart and mind, I could have rested assured that my interests were being looked after with sensitivity. My miscalculation!

  The “power center” that I wanted to be part of by definition feeds on success. It is a mistake to think that money made even within a given year is an indicator of money to come for an actor in Hollywood. It’s not like being a rising executive at a company who makes fifty thousand dollars one year, seventy-five the next, and one hundred the year after that. There’s no logic. You could be offered scale for a movie you really want to do this week, and turn down five hundred thousand for a movie that shoots for six weeks but will stop you from making the one you really want to do. It’s random and arbitrary, and each individual actor has to make the right decisions in order to develop a relationship with an audience and sustain credibility. Some performers deliver exactly what their audience wants, time after time, and their pay increases accordingly. Others try to develop themselves and hope the audience grows with them. While I was struggling to sort out these dynamics in my own mind, I sensed the time was right to make a move—that’s industry shorthand for changing agents. Christine agreed, and so we held a rather clandestine meeting with some folks at William Morris, including the head of its film division, and pretty soon I had a new agency.

  The reaction at CAA was mixed. I’m sure some people couldn’t have cared less, because I was not exactly the biggest stallion in the stable. One of my agents, however, was hurt and angry.