He was calling to see if I had called the film company yet and just to warn me to be careful, as they (the radio station) had no idea about the film or the production company or anything at all connected with them, so he just wanted to cover his and his employer’s arses. Fair enough.
We got to talking, and he said I had a great sense of humor (he’s only human, I guess) and I’d be great on radio. He asked if I wanted to come into the station the following night and do an interview about being an aspiring actor.
Um, sure, why not. It might not be my Natalie Portman story, but Harrison Ford was a carpenter on a film before he became a Harrison Ford, so I thought I might be able to do something similar via radio.
I was excited. I had a new focus: I was going to dominate the airwaves, much like Janet Jackson dominated my teenage years.
I went into the radio station the following night at eight o’clock and was super excited. Radio! Of course, I was always told I would be good on radio—but I was also told that getting a spiral perm was a good thing, so you know, grain of salt.
When I got there, I had to call at the front desk, who then called reception, who called security to come and collect me. We walked through a series of glass doors that only a special swipe card could activate. After we went through what felt like four hundred doors in silence, I was expecting Ryan Seacrest to be at the end of the soundproof tunnel, or at the very least Harry Potter.
When I was swiped into the radio booth, I was greeted by a very over-the-top guy who had a fantastic face for radio. He waved for me to sit down in a fancy bouncy chair, and a thirteen-year-old assistant who was far too cheery for any time of the day told me how to use the headphones and microphone. (For the record, you just put the headphones on your head and talk into the microphone; it’s really not rocket science. Fuck, if Kyle Sandilands can do it, any monkey with a brain injury can.)
About an hour went by while we bantered on and off air with people coming in and out of the studio; then around 9:00 p.m. everyone clocked off—everyone except me and the DJ. His shift ended at 10:00 p.m. He said I was doing really well and that he would love to get me in once a week for an hour to have a chat, as I had a natural talent for radio. Awesome!
After everyone left, the conversation took a turn. He started asking me questions about sex—what I liked about it and how often I had it. I felt a bit weird, but I kind of let it go when he turned it into a segment and we got listeners to call in and talk about their sex lives. I heard a commercial radio station once got a woman to wet herself on air to win some cash, and given the late time slot, the discussion didn’t seem too out of place. And I was twenty and had never done this thing before, so who was I to say what was and wasn’t acceptable on late-night commercial radio?
I asked the DJ what happened overnight at the radio station. Did someone come in and do the graveyard shift? Was it prerecorded? If so, what time did the next show kick off?
He told me that from 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. the station ran itself; he needed to press a few buttons at the end of his show and then it would run smoothly until the next person came in the following morning.
I love a bit of behind-the-scenes. I always look for those bits on a DVD. I was intrigued; this was all super fancy and exciting. I was like a sponge (one of the good-quality, expensive ones), and I couldn’t get enough.
He told me that he had once forgotten to program the overnight prerecorded shows and had got as far as his car and realized that the station had been silent for about half an hour, so he panicked and ran back up through all the secure swipe doors and pressed the buttons.
Oh, how we laughed. “How crazy!” I said. “Did you get in trouble?”
“No, of course not,” he said.
Toward the end of the shift, after almost two hours in the studio, I had to use the bathroom. He said he needed to swipe me into the bathroom, because this place was not only broadcasting commercial pop music but obviously also housing all of Kris Kardashians embryos; this was the only possible explanation for the ridiculous number of locks, codes, and swipe cards.
I believed him—why wouldn’t I? I mean, I needed to be swiped in everywhere else by a man, so why wouldn’t a man swipe me into the bathroom? When I asked if I could just take the card and go on my own, he said it didn’t work like that and that he wasn’t allowed to let anyone swipe his card but him.
He “threw to a song” (which is just wanker shop talk for pressed “Play”) and escorted me to the bathroom.
When we reached the women’s toilet, he swiped me in and placed his hand on my lower back to usher me through.
Gross. I rushed through with a little gallop to dislodge his spindly fingers from me and hurried into the nearest stall.
As I tried to close the stall door behind me, I realized there was something preventing me from closing and locking it. I turned around and saw that not only had he swiped me into the toilets; he had also followed me in and was standing with his arm atop the stall door, holding it open.
I froze.
“Um, what are you doing?”
“You know what I’m doing.”
“Can you get out, please? I need to pee.”
“That’s OK, I’ll help you.”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
He reached down to my skirt and tried to lift it up.
I hit his hand away. “Fuck off! I don’t need your help.” As I tried to push him out, he pushed back.
“Oh fuck!” I thought. “I’m alone in Fort Knox with a man twice my size who is pushing himself onto me in a bathroom stall. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.”
I pushed harder and finally managed to push him out and close the stall door. Thank God—not any god in particular at this point, just anyone that was available and listening.
He laughed and stood on the other side of the door and waited for me. He just stood there and waited. I could see his ugly shoes under the toilet door.
“You don’t need to wait.”
“Yes, I do. I need to swipe you back into the studio.” Fuck.
I froze, again. So did my kidneys.
I sat on the toilet with the seat down and pulled out my phone, thinking if I could call or text anyone, then I’d be sweet. I’d call Marika, stay on the phone with her the whole time while I got out of the stall, the toilet, and the radio station; then I’d send up a fucking flare as soon as I got outside and stand aside as the SWAT team moved in to take this prick down while I called his mother, alerting her to what a disappointment he is.
But of course there wasn’t any phone reception in this radio station from hell.
I got up from the toilet seat and slowly opened the stall door, and he was standing at the basin directly in front of me. Just staring at me. I walked to a basin farther away and he followed. He stood behind me and looked at me in the mirror. He was standing so close I could feel his breath on my neck.
I kept my head down and focused on washing my hands. I cleaned them so well that I could have performed open-heart surgery. He didn’t move or take his eyes off me. Fuck.
As I moved past him he grabbed my arm, trying to pull me back to him. I snatched my arm back and stared at his stupid man face.
“You really need to stop doing that.”
He smiled at me with mean eyes as I walked toward the bathroom door, planning on kicking the fucking thing in.
I pushed on the door and it opened! The stupid security swipe-arse door opened! NO DUMB SWIPEY CARD NEEDED!
I walked to the next door, with him right behind me, and pushed on it too, except this dumb door needed to be swiped.
Again I froze. I just stared at the door with my head down. Praying the powers of Eleven from Stranger Things would be gifted to me in that moment and I could blow that fucking door off its hinges.
He walked up behind me again, and I could feel his body against mine.
I couldn’t move. I was pinned between this predator man and the dumb-arse door. Trapped.
He leaned forward a
nd slowly reached across my body to swipe the door open. The door beeped and I pushed it and ran to the next door as he slowly walked up behind me and repeated this game of fuckwit and mouse.
This continued for about three more doors and what felt like the rest of my twenties. When I finally got back to the studio, I grabbed my bag and without looking at him said, “I’m going now. Can you please swipe me out?”
He sat down at his desk, put his headphones on, and said, “I’ll just call security to come and get you, or do you want me to personally swipe you out?”
“Security.”
I stood outside the studio door and waited for the security guard to come and get me. When he arrived I ran to him much like Blac Chyna ran to get a pregnancy test when she knew she was carrying a Kardashian baby: with desperation and relief.
I must have looked pretty shaken up, because the kind security guard—who didn’t follow me into a bathroom stall, who didn’t breathe down my neck, who didn’t try to take my skirt off or press himself up against me—asked if I was OK.
“Yep, I’m fine.” I dismissed it and just wanted to get into my car.
My dad has always told me that once you get into the car, just go, day or night. Don’t stuff around and check your phone or do anything—just get in, lock the door, put your seat belt on, and drive. I’m a good Catholic girl, so I always do what I’m told. I got into my car and got the hell out of there.
When I pulled up at the first set of lights, I checked my phone. (Don’t message me about being on my phone in the car—I was freaking out! I had just been harassed by a pimply-faced pig. Let’s all just stay focused please?!)
There was one message on my phone. It was from him. Hey, it’s really cold outside, do you want me to come and keep you warm?
I texted back immediately. I didn’t even think about it. No. Fuck off.
My phone beeped almost immediately. It was him. AGAIN. Don’t come back in next week.
And that was that. I didn’t let him fuck me in the toilet, so I wasn’t welcome back into the studio, and the side window that I had hoped to use to access my hopes and dreams because the front door was always closed now also seemed jammed shut.
Even in the telling of this story (and the story about the Big Fat Talentless Old Man at Jupiter’s Casino), I have realized that women need to be careful. It’s so common for it to seem as if we are telling our stories to defame men or profit from the stories financially, because God forbid that women would just want to be heard. Not naming the perpetrators shows that it’s not just individuals to blame but a sick culture that needs to be disarmed.
And just for the record, I don’t give two shits about what these stories do to certain men’s careers or reputations, especially if they are lucky enough to have a career that they didn’t have to fuck someone to get.
For so long women have had to put up with a strong culture of intimidation, threats, and men just being fucking gross.
But not anymore.
#timesup.
The One about Sparky
I graduated from drama school in 2002, and after a few years of performing in a number of not-for-profit plays I landed a role on the Australian medical drama All Saints in 2005.
A Brief History of Australian TV
In early-2000s Australia, we basically made four drama shows a year: Neighbours, Home and Away, Blue Heelers, and All Saints.
Neighbours and Home and Away are our staple soap operas, which we call “dramas.” The casts are made up of a handful of seasoned performers with mortgages to pay, a heap of bikini models, former Bachelorette and Australian Idol contestants, and OCCASIONALLY a random Hemsworth. If you are lucky enough to secure a job on either of these shows, you can then expect to move to America and become a movie star, all the while thanking the tiny Australian industry for telling you that you are beautiful and hiring you because of it.
Neighbours and Home and Away have been on the air for thirty-three and thirty years, respectively, and only once in a blue moon will they kill off a character, revive them, kill them off again, bring them back as an evil twin, then finally kill them off once and for all to make room for a new cast member named Margot Robbie or Tiffany McYoga Face. This leaves little opportunity for actors in Australia who don’t identify as swimsuit models to practice their craft and work in their chosen field.
When you tell people you are an actor in Australia, the first question you get asked is “What have you been in?” and the second question is “Have you been in Home and Away?” To which I would answer (respectively) “None of your business” and “Yes.”
Blue Heelers was a police drama that was on air for thirteen years and was great for actors in the Australian TV industry who didn’t look like Victoria’s Secret models but wanted to get some exposure on TV. Aside from the core cast of police officers, each week saw a new group of characters come and go on the show: criminals, victims, local shop owners, and a random dog. It was great: a heap of talented actors and a ton of shit ones got to sink their teeth into scripts playing the pivotal characters for that week’s episode, allowing them to hold their heads high that Christmas when annoying aunties would ask if they had done any real acting yet.
The situation was similar on All Saints, Australia’s longest-running medical drama. (I like to think of it as Grey’s Anatomy meets ER, only George Clooney and McDreamy forgot to show up for their shifts.)
The setting of the show originated in Ward 17, where a core cast of doctors and nurses pretended not to want to have sex with each other. Then it moved to the emergency room, opening up the possibility for a lot more guest roles and semiregular gigs for us actors.
And this is where I met the late, great Mark Priestley.
In 2004, I was working at a really shitty dress shop in Balmain. (Not the European brand, pronounced bol-moin; rather a suburb in the Inner West of Sydney that housed fancy restaurants, excellent coffee, and a bevy of awesome, charismatic homeless men. Two of my favorites were DJ Darling Street and Michael, a gentleman who always wore a suit soiled with urine [his own], slept out in front of the police station, and at least once a week would walk down the main street of Balmain waving around a wad of fifty-dollar notes and shouting, “Yep, that’s fucking right, mah bitches,” to the tune of Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes.”)
Balmain was awesome. It’s the first place #hothusband and I lived together. Our house was small and didn’t really have a floor; there was carpet, but there wasn’t much under it.
We loved it there. On New Year’s Eve the place was sectioned off because the main street led down to the harbor and uninterrupted views of the Harbour Bridge, where at midnight millions of dollars’ worth of fireworks would light up the city. So Balmain was a sought-after location on NYE. The only way in or out was to show the traffic controller your ID and address.
It was a magical suburb that you never had to leave, so when I scored a job at the local shitty clothing store I was stoked.
After working in the clothing store for six months, I got an audition for All Saints as paramedic Bree Matthews. My audition consisted of dramatic looks off camera and made-up medical jargon. It was a guest role, just one episode, and I nailed it.
I fleshed it out to a four-year, semiregular gig. Not because I’m a magical unicorn actor who can turn dust into an Oscars speech (we all know that only Marion Cotillard can do that), but because I can hustle.
I really respect the Hustle. I believe Madonna to be the originator. She’s not a great singer or dancer, but that hustler deserves a Nobel Prize for her services to the Hustle. She has turned it into a career. Think Lisa Rinna—her Hustle has become about talking about what a hustler she is. Respect.
I worked that All Saints set and my professional relationships much like Britney works an Auto-Tune. And I succeeded, continuing to make up medical jargon alongside some of my most favorite actors. I was finally contracted as a main character six weeks before the show was canceled (red frustrated face emoji).
Mar
k played nurse Dan Goldman. I don’t remember the first time I met him, as I don’t really remember a time without him in my life. He got me. He knew what I was capable of as an actor before I even knew it. We would fuck around on set all the time, doing everything we could to put each other off. I was always worried I was going to get fired, but he never cared if it pissed people off. No one would ever fire Mark, because he was Mark, a creative genius who would throw a pencil in your face five seconds before the director called action, then as soon as the camera rolled he would lovingly kiss an elderly character on the forehead and say his final goodbye, having everyone in tears and unable to move on to the next scene.
He was a comic genius and made me feel like I was one too. At one stage during my stint on All Saints I was performing in a low-budget, not-for-profit theater show, BoyBand, in which I played the band’s choreographer. (Did I mention I used to dance?) The show was a comical look at what goes on behind the scenes of an overproduced, overmanaged boy band. (We thought we were geniuses: we changed the lyrics of a Backstreet Boys song from “Backstreets back, all right” to “I suck cock, all night”; there were some really top-shelf gags.)
Mark and I had worked on a few episodes of All Saints together and weren’t super-close friends at this stage, but I fucking loved him and was a little starstruck by him and was completely beside myself when he came to a performance of BoyBand.
After the show I went up to him and asked what he thought. (NB I fucking hate going to the foyer after a show; it is my least favorite thing to do—well, that and putting petrol in my car. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is a dickhead in the after-show foyer; no one looks you in the eye, everyone becomes a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, claiming everything you did was a fucking revelation, and people you’ve never met before feel it’s OK to kiss you hard on the mouth. I, too, am one of these dickhead people. Something comes over me, I feel I can’t look anyone in the eye, and I’m sure it seems as though I’m looking over your shoulder for someone more exciting to talk to when in actual fact I am looking over your shoulder, only because I’m trying to find the nearest exit, or more to the point wondering when the hell the catering is going to bring the plate of spring rolls to me first, as requested.)
Challenge Accepted! Page 8
