NEW YORK DIARY
Actors in a New Yorker state of mind
By SIMON HOUPT
Every September, as the rest of the world buckles down and turns serious again after summer’s frivolities, The New Yorker magazine momentarily swims against the current, loosens its poise, and lets down its elaborately pinned hair. This past weekend marked its sixth annual festival of readings, panels, interviews, musical performances and happenings, more than 40 events in which the magazine’s high-toned spirit infects the city’s streets, clubs and studios, and vice versa.
Fans of the magazine fly in for the weekend from across the continent and, occasionally, from overseas. Where else are you going to see Steve Martin in a banjo jam with Earl Scruggs? Or the magazine’s financial columnist James Surowiecki chat with the band Sleater-Kinney? Or Roger Angell cast his mind back over the more than 60 years that he’s been contributing to the magazine?
On Saturday night, in back-to-back sessions at the swank music club Coda on 34th Street, where orange light cast down from chandeliers proved a little harsh for the skin tone of any human being, Edie Falco and Ricky Gervais offered case studies in the uneven life of an actor. Taken together, you might say they provided a twist on Tolstoy’s famous dictum about families — to wit, all successful actors resemble one another, but each unsuccessful actor is unsuccessful in his or her own way. Both actors have spent more years of their lives struggling than they have being successes, and neither is so far removed from those early days that they don’t recall in acidic clarity how challenging they were.
All dolled up in sparkly clothes, Falco submitted patiently to a battery of questions from the magazine’s legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin. (The odd pairing could have proved inspired but didn’t; that hit-and-miss nature of the festival is what keeps it interesting.) He began by reading a quote from a critic who had noted tongue-in-cheek that Falco was considered “an overnight success” only “after working for 15 years of anonymity and not a lot of success” in New York theatre and tiny, unmemorable film roles.
Falco winced knowingly and explained that she’d done whatever she could to support herself through those years, including a stint with an outfit called Shazam Entertainment, which supplied party staff to weddings and bar mitzvahs to help get guests in the mood. She’d had to dress up as the Cookie Monster and drag people onto the dance floor, which proved hellish since she hates that sort of forced frivolity. There were also the 15 years of waitressing, which she says now “is a giant blackout” in her brain, just “little snippets of people being rude, and the smell of old beer.”
One memory of those years is clear, though. One Sunday morning as she was setting up a restaurant for brunch, she looked around and thought, “This is what my life will always be like, setting up restaurants for ever and ever and ever.”
Only about a week ago, Falco said, she was walking down the street with a girlfriend when it suddenly occurred to her that she’d never have to do that again. Probably. She’s got many, many talented friends who still haven’t struck it big, and she’s all too aware of how stars can be dropped right back to where they were found. Besides, “I did that for a lot longer than I’ve done this, so that feels more real to me, in a way.”
Which is something that the newest creation from Ricky Gervais could appreciate. Gervais, of course, is the public face of The Office, the BBC cult hit that still has people talking, even though it wrapped its 14-episode run in England more than two years ago. He’s back on British and U.S. television with Extras, a six-part series about the petty humiliations faced by a wannabe actor (Gervais) who, after five years of work as an extra on TV and feature films, has yet to break into the foreground. (The show doesn’t yet have a Canadian outlet.)
During the 10 p.m.-to-midnight session at Coda, The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin and Gervais slugged back Heinekens while chuckling about his trip from obscurity to semi-stardom. (Well, Franklin, being a New Yorker staffer, didn’t exactly slug, but rather demurely tipped the bottle to her lips.) His dad was a day labourer in Reading, his mother a housewife, and when he was eight years old his mother explained to him that the reason his older siblings were so much older than he (11, 13, and 14 years) was because he was a mistake. “Well, you were a brilliant mistake,” Franklin quipped.
Gervais went to college in London because it was a chance to move to London; he had no idea what he wanted to do. After college, he took a series of dead-end jobs in radio, including a stint as an events manager at one radio station because the station was near his house. When one of his former assistants, Stephen Merchant, had to make a student film, Gervais worked up a few skits around the character who would eventually become the self-centered boss David Brent in The Office. He and Merchant showed the film to the BBC and then raced to write six episodes of a sitcom on spec, in case the network picked up the idea. He was 36.
“I was lazy until I did The Office. But when the chance is really there, I go for it,” he admitted. “And I was rewarded. It was like a revelation at 36: The more you try, the more you get out!” Gervais cast his eyes over the appreciative crowd, and bathed in their adoring laughter.
