ICON

When I first got the script I was super excited.  It was for the role of a lifetime – complex, intense, requiring great sensitivity and involving huge responsibility.  It was a part that could catapult me from a moderately famous actress into an icon!

“You’re made for this part.”

“It was written for you.”
“You’ll be incredible.”
“You’ll be amazing.”
Simpered my agent, his PA, my boyfriend and his publicist.

I got online and researched the part.  I went out into the world and lived it part time.  I did all I could to learn what it felt like to be this role.  At first I was super confident, but the more I read the script, the more I doubted.  I kept imagining the consequences of failure.  What the reviews would say if I bombed.  This could cost me my career, cause me to be dropped by everyone, including my boyfriend.  The more research I did, the less I believed in myself.  All my life I had existed only for me, so how would I ever be able to play a part involving so much self sacrifice?  I’d come across like a phoney on camera.  I’d look like I was acting.  But if I turned it down?  No-one would understand why and if I wasn’t good enough to play such a role what did it say about me as a person?  It would mean I lack depth, that I am a coward.

There was only one solution, I wrote down my research experiences and shared my thoughts on how the role could be tackled.  I stuffed the script and the letter into a large envelope.  I addressed it to my oldest friend who was able and sentimental enough to take on the role in my memory.  I then booked that hotel room, organised the barbiturates and bought the fancy negligee they’d find me wearing.  They’d make much of my tempestuous relationships, my history of substance abuse and my troubled childhood.  They’d remember the last characters I’d played – emotional, intense types.

No-one would guess the real cause.  The script I’d accepted without thinking, the demands of a role that I couldn’t live.  If I attempted to play it, I’d be revealed to the world as second rate.  No, let them talk instead about how great I would have been if only I’d lived to play it.  Let them say I would have been incredible.