Last night, William Forsythe came in to my Wednesday acting workshop with a new film that he’s going to direct.You’ll recognize him as an actor from a bunch of great movies, maybe most notably as Evelle in Raising Arizona.
My fellow actors and I ran scenes for him, then listened to him tell a great story about his big break.
Back in the early 80s, William’s agent called him and told him to rush over to an audition at Chateau Marmont. When he arrived, William found a lobby full of actors, and a casting director who pointed at him and told him to come back the next day with a three-minute monologue.
William decided to write his own monologue, about his grandfather, a bear of a man who had an interesting way of squinting one eye when he spoke.
Back at Chateau Marmont the next day, William was still unsure about what film he was there for, until an actor came out of the audition room stunned that he'd just auditioned for a movie starring Robert DeNiro and directed by Sergio Leone. William tried to keep his cool, went in, and performed his monologue. Sergio, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, came up to William, held his face in his hands and told him that when he'd envisioned this particular role in the film– a guy named Cockeye– William was exactly what he had in mind. The squinty eye choice was a homerun.
Soon afterwards, William was in Rome, shooting Once Upon a Time In America. Almost a hundred movies later, he’s still on top of his game.
Few careers offer the chance to change your life in a morning. And if it takes until the age of 120 to get my big chance, that'll be fine by me. How I'm going to fill this blog with daily entries until then is a whole other story.
