Still just a geek, p.42
Still Just a Geek, page 42
* Pardon me: Sir Patrick Stewart.
Of course, I don’t think I’d do well with a shaved head (the only thing keeping me from his roles, of course).
* I’ve stepped off a dock in Fort Lauderdale every January or February for eleven years in a row, in large part because of the foundation Star Trek and her cruises laid in my life. 1989 me would never believe this, but it’s pretty great and a whole lot of fun.
* Okay, so I need to tell younger me to sit down for a second and listen closely: This isn’t funny. This isn’t self-deprecating. This is objectifying a woman who is such an important part of my life in a childish and disrespectful way.
Teenage me had a HUGE crush on Marina. That doesn’t excuse or justify the choice adult me made here. This is embarrassing, and I regret it.
* But I have found my place in the world as an artist. And to be completely honest, if I somehow HAD achieved a huge film career, I never would have grown into the person I am now, living the wonderful life I live.
Success rarely looks like what we expect, is what I’m saying, if you prefer your notes to come painted on weathered boards, hung in kitchens.
And that’s okay. In fact, I’m grateful that I have the life I have now, and a big part of that was accepting the reality that the big film career wasn’t important to me at all, like it was to my mother. If I had gotten what I thought I was hoping for—what they were hoping for—I never would have found the path into my life, where I am now, where I am happy and thriving.
* And yet, like most Jon Snows, I knew nothing. Sidebar: What’s the opposite of sticking the landing? The final three seasons of Game of Thrones.
* It wasn’t just Hollywood and humanity that I hated. I hated the way the most important humans in my life treated me, and I hated that Hollywood seemed to be so much more important than I was, which made me angry.
I’m almost forty-nine (I will be, when this is published), and when I think about that eighteen-year-old, I want to just hug him and tell him that it’s not his fault they don’t hear him, or see him. It’s not his fault that his father made a choice to love his brother and hate him. It’s not his fault that his mother is so selfish she can’t see or chooses not to see how much she’s hurting him.
But the twenty-something me who wrote this needs love and compassion, too. He’s trying to put together why his parents treated him the way they did, and he’s struggling with every breath to figure out how he can earn their love and respect.
Twenty-something me put a lot of blame squarely on teenage me, but the me who is old enough to be both of their fathers needs them both to know that it’s not teenage Wil’s problem. It never was teenage Wil or twenty-something Wil. Everything they struggled with was made even worse than it normally would have been because he wasn’t supported by the people whose primary responsibility in life was caring for him.
You’re going to see a lot of instances in this book where I blame myself for being a “troubled teen” or “sullen” or some version of “a teenage pain in the ass” because those are all ways my parents, especially my father, described me to others and to my face. They never made an effort to reach out to me and talk about why I was acting out. They never took any interest in me as a person, as a human being, as a son.
Still, I desperately wanted their love and approval. I needed it like oxygen. Nothing I did on my own seemed to make a difference to them, so I focused on the one thing I knew that at least my mother cared about: my acting career.
I believed that the only way I would ever have the relationship I desperately wanted with my parents was to be the famous Hollywood actor my mother traded my childhood pursuing.
Hollywood, the industry, is inherently unfair, capricious, corrupt, and just really hard to navigate successfully. Neither of my parents were smart enough to hold their own with the producers and casting people who are the gatekeepers in the industry. Producers took advantage of that, and me, for my entire childhood, as you’ll read later.
I’m going to talk a lot about how much I didn’t want to be an actor, so it may seem weird that I liked being on the set, because I felt like I could actually be good at something for a change, when I was. But everything else about being an actor? I hated it. I hated auditioning, I hated publicity, I hated pretending to be BFFs with whoever the hot teen star of the moment was, because my mother forced me into a photo with them for Tiger Beat. I hated all of it, and I hated that I had to endure it when it wasn’t even something I had chosen for myself.
When I look at my eyes in pictures from the Teen Idol Years, I see sadness, loneliness, fear, and so much pain. I often wonder how my parents could have NOT seen that, and if they did, why they didn’t do anything to protect and soothe their child.
* There’s this saying about how good it feels when you stop hitting your head against a wall. That’s how I felt for a year, being away from my parents and the entertainment industry.
* To build off my previous note, if I could just master acting technique, then I would have the career I thought I needed to be loved by my parents. Yeah, that was the thing that was missing! That was something I could work on. That was something I could learn.
But what I learned when I was in drama school was that I don’t have the passion for acting that I have for writing. The years I spent there made me a better actor, for sure, but more importantly they helped me realize that acting wasn’t my dream, no matter how many times my mother told me it was.
* To be clear, it was a producer’s session, a very high-level audition that is generally the final step between the actor and being cast.
* If there’s any motivation for a Gen Xer like me, it’s “I want to be better than Luke Skywalker.”
* I don’t know if it was foolish as much as it was naive.
* I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this, and seventeen years later, I can confidently say that, in the 2000s vernacular, “edgy” meant “a little dangerous, with zero fucks to give.”
That is pretty much the opposite of me, now, and it was entirely the opposite of me, then. I was NEVER going to be cast in any of these roles, and there was nothing I could do about it. In countless unconscious ways, this dynamic triggered the pain and sorrow I felt at home, making every audition more important and consequential than it should have been (and, in turn, the rejection more powerful, too).
Every meaningful role I’ve ever played, and I’ve been lucky to play at least three of them, is a person who has no father in his life. Gordie’s father hated him. Wesley’s father was dead. Wil Wheaton (Big Bang Theory universe) has the same story as me, so his father also hates him. Even in the magnificent, weird, and never-seen-by-anyone Mr. Stitch, a retelling of Frankenstein where I was the monster, I played a creature whose father figure (the doctor who created him) betrays him.
My type wasn’t “everyman” my type was “male with father issues,” and I sincerely hope there aren’t many other people in the world, actors or otherwise, who can play that type as well as I can.
* There were moments I would have killed to be the face of genital herpes.
* And a lot of embarrassing, childish, objectification of women.
* One of the greatest regrets of my life is my lack of formal college education. I didn’t get any encouragement at home to go to college. Mom didn’t go, and Dad only went to avoid Vietnam, so higher education wasn’t a priority in my family.
I always wanted to go. I always wanted to live on my own, learn things that were interesting to me and make my family proud.
But I was TERRIFIED of failure. By the time I took the PSATs, I was such a nervous wreck I got close to zero on the math portion (though I did score in the highest 3 percent in the country on verbal! Go me!) and I was convinced that I was going to fail, prove my father right, and have nothing to show for it.
When I was eighteen, I moved to Westwood, with the intention of attending UCLA. I hadn’t applied (I didn’t know how to) but I planned to go to their extension. Had my classes picked out and everything.
Then I got an offer for a shitty Roger Corman movie, and I felt like I had to take the job because I’d been conditioned to believe that nothing was more important than acting, even if it was in a shitty Corman movie.
Sidebar: For someone who genuinely loves acting, they don’t care if it’s a shitty Corman movie or a fantastic Coppola movie. They just love acting. I get that. I see people on set who just light up when they are there, because it’s everything they have loved their whole life. I imagine my mother would light up that way. I never did.
So I got this offer, and it gave me an excuse to bail on college. I wouldn’t have to risk being rejected and humiliating myself at UCLA, because I had no choice but to take this film role. It was win-win for me.
I’ve learned over the years that 99.9 percent of movies come and go without anyone noticing, and it’s extremely rare for a single film to make or break a career. Even Nic Cage came back from Drive Angry 3D and Travolta made a KILLING with those talking baby movies before Pulp Fiction reignited his dramatic career.
That said, this movie isn’t great, but it’s not terrible, either. We’re all decent in it, as far as the material goes, and I genuinely liked the cast.
But it hurt my ego tremendously. I recall thinking “I can’t book a job to save my life, and the only offers I get are for Corman movies.”
Wait. Do I have to tell you who Roger Corman is? He’s a legendary B-movie producer who gave multiple generations of talent, on both sides of the camera, their start.
Again, if I loved acting, I’d just be happy to be working and I’d do my best to make the most of every opportunity. But I just wasn’t there. I was sad, I was angry, I was depressed (and living with undiagnosed mental illness), and I was scared of everything.
I’ve been talking about going back to college for as long as I can remember. During the pandemic, I audited a few online classes and loved it. I don’t know if younger me would have been able to hear it, but it’s about so much more than getting good grades. I don’t even take classes for credit; I just take them for knowledge, and that’s entirely okay. God, how I wish my studio teacher wasn’t the only adult in my life who had encouraged me to go to college. I really wish I’d gone when I was college-age, not just for the “college experience,” *wink* but to have learned all these things that are enriching my life now, decades ago.
* Alternatively, she could have said something like, “Maybe being an actor isn’t for you, after all. Maybe it’s more important to me than it is to you, because you don’t love the work more than you hate the rejection. How can I help you find the thing that you do love?”
* When I say “the work” I mean all the creative homework and rehearsal that goes into transforming a script into a feature. With one notable and significant exception that I’ll talk about later, I have always loved being on the set, because I have always felt that I am safe, and around my people when I’m there.
It’s everything I had to do to get there that I hated. And it turns out that, for as much fun as it is to be on the set, I don’t love it enough to overcome how much I hate the other stuff.
Though most of my acting work isn’t on camera these days, largely living in audiobooks and other voice-over acting, I am still using my abilities as an actor, and doing a pretty good job with them.
But when I wrote this, and indeed until quite recently, I didn’t believe I was any good at my job. I believed until I got external validation from some authority figure (obviously my father, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time), I was a fraud.
It hurts my heart that I spent so much of my life feeling that way. Whether I work a lot or not, I know now that I’ve always been enough, as an actor and a person, and I guess I’m writing this note specifically to me from 2004: I see you. You’re enough. You’ve always been enough.
* I also suspect that, emotionally, I was at least a little bit stunted from the weirdness of my professional life, which made me more suited to these younger characters.
* Which, weirdly, is a kind of manic lethargy only a teenager possesses.
* And yet, ironically, still not edgy.
* We are about to celebrate our twenty-second wedding anniversary. We are such a great team, and I am so lucky she’s my partner.
* Well, everything that was left over after my parents spent as much as they could.
* Who I now think of as Peter Questwam.
Or like to pretend I do. He’ll always be Prove to Everyone to me.
And he’s a dick.
* Not quite the same experience without Google, let me tell you.
* Like iTunes except . . . no, exactly like iTunes, it just didn’t quite make it.
But it really whipped llama’s ass.
* Her words, you pervert.
* This is not funny now, and I don’t think it was particularly funny then. I was trying to be—ugh—edgy. I was just disrespectful to my wife, and honestly it’s just real cringey for me to read now. Sorry, everyone.
* In those days, you had two choices: pay someone a lot of money to build something you couldn’t change, or learn HTML and CSS yourself (and PHP and Perl, if you really wanted to do cool stuff). There was no social media. There were no videos you could stream. YouTube and TikTok didn’t exist. It must be incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t around then, but building a website was really, really hard work. It took me weeks to get the most basic thing. I’m still proud of the work I did because this choice fundamentally changed my life.
* Again, this is dramatization. But it feels like he’s in the room, right?
That’s good writing. Good job, Wil from the past.
* My relationship with my parents had been so transactional, I was reflexively suspicious of anyone who wanted to help me. I didn’t want to be in debt to anyone, and I didn’t want anyone taking credit for my hard work, or exploiting the benefits of that hard work, the way my mother had.
* But I would be, so clearly I was prescient.
Bet on the Los Angeles Kings in 2027. I’m just saying . . .
* “Lame” is an ableist term. I’m not happy about seeing it here now, but I need you to know that it’s going to come up a lot in this text, so I’m not going to shy away from it now, as much as I want to edit it away.
I am, however, sincerely sorry to anyone who is hurt by my using it, and I hope you know I’ve grown since I originally wrote this.
* I can neither confirm nor deny I had this site bookmarked.
* Which back then was probably Alta Vista or Ask Jeeves.
* I think I’m quoting the Bloodhound Gang here.
* TNN was The Nashville Network. It served what apparently wasn’t the overwhelming desire for country music inspired programming 24-7. It was rebranded to The National Network, your destination for all things . . . professional wrestling? Okay. Then it became The NEW TNN (?) around the time we showed up with Star Trek. They rebranded yet again to Spike TV, which lasted for a long time, before it became the Paramount Network.
This history lesson is included free of charge and will not be on the test.
* Meanwhile, I can see all the Millennials and Gen Zers rolling their eyes.
Yes, I can actually see you! Don’t make it weird.
* Imagine Saturday Night Live, but . . . no, I can’t even dignify it by comparing the two.
* My editor is noting that I used “cool” and “coolest” here, and that kind of echo is a sign of bad writing. He notes I use variations of “cool” a lot.
I’m noting that my editor is now on my Shit List.
* Maybe a lot.
* All these years later, this still makes me laugh.
* Told you it was cool.
* Wow, way to bury the lede, Wil. I glossed over this so casually, here, but it’s meaningful to me that, right here in my first blog post, I revealed what was at that moment the single greatest struggle of my life: my TNG family was successful and happy. I was unsuccessful and miserable. They were all close to each other, and always had been. I foolishly (and incorrectly) presumed they would treat my own lack of career success the same way my family of origin did, so I was consumed by shame and avoided them.
Of course, my TNG family is nothing like the family that raised me, and none of them cared how much I worked, how much money I had, or anything else. They loved (and love) me unconditionally and without reservation.
It hurts my heart to look at this now and know how many years—at least a decade—I presumed my TNG family would treat me the way the family that raised me did. All that time, just lost forever.
* My editor is starting to annoy me.
* It was a nice day for a golden shower.
With a rebel pee, I said “More, more, more!”
Rock the urinal cake of love.
