Happy Accidents (19 page)

Aunt Marge, my dad’s sister, had just arrived as well. She had gotten a feeling that she needed to get to the hospice and had just hopped in a cab.

I was in LA, driving, on June
11
,
2003
, when my mom called and said, “Honey, he’s gone.”

A hospice worker gave my mother the candle they’d lit in the chapel for my father, and a few days later when she was at home, she made herself a drink and lit the candle. She toasted the candle with “first today, badly needed.” My mom is a pragmatic, unsentimental type, so when she told me the candle emitted a prism of light directly aimed at her, a light that followed her as she walked around it, I believed her. When she said it was Dad sending his love to her, I believed that, too.

This was the first time I had lost someone close to me. The grief came in waves, and has never completely gone away. It still catches me today. I remember the most intense feeling of loss was the sadness I felt for my mother about a year later, at my cousin Maureen’s wedding, when the band played one of Mom and Dad’s favorite songs, “Can I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life?”
They had some kind of love, my parents.

A Mighty Wind
had opened in April, just before my dad died. Though he was pretty sick already, he and my mother had gone to see it. He was thrilled with the music and proud of me. I’m so glad he got to see it.

After we buried my dad, I came back to LA and immediately went to work on a short called
Little Black Boot
,
a retelling of the Cinderella story. I played the wicked stepmother, the first of three times I would play that character, in three different movies.

It felt very strange to just go on like that, and I had to talk myself out of feeling guilty.

That fall, the album for
A Mighty Wind
was released and we went on tour. We traveled in an actual tour bus and played to sold-out houses in Philadelphia, New York, Washington, DC, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

It was a joy to be part of this talented group of good people, a panacea for my heart and soul. We all loved to sing and we all loved to laugh, and I no longer felt on the outside of everything. I was a part of something I loved, and I felt like I deserved to be there.

I had work already scheduled for after the tour. I was mostly getting offers with no audition required, and I was partly relieved not to have to do it anymore, but I also sort of missed auditioning. Unless you are half-assed, you have to prepare for an audition as you would a performance. For me, that meant being entirely off book (i.e., knowing all the lines), because I’ve found it’s almost impossible to do well if I’m half off and half on. I enjoyed that preparation, but I also liked the feeling of walking into a room in which no one knows you from Adam, and making everyone sit up and wonder where you came from. But still, the pressure of auditioning could be pretty heavy, so I was fine letting it go.

Let it go I did, until Judd Apatow called me and asked me to audition for his movie. I was very happy to get to audition one more time. Not surprisingly, I would be auditioning for a part originally written for a man.

I’d known Steve Carell since the Second City days; we had been in different touring companies at the same time. When he was getting ready to cast
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
(which he’d written and would be starring in, with Judd directing), Steve’s wife, Nancy Walls (a fine actress in her own right), told him he had too many men in his movie. “At least read Jane for the store manager,” she said. Bless her for that. So there I was in the waiting area, along with a bunch of guys, all of us auditioning for the store manager of SmartTech.

Steve and I improvised together, and in the scene we created I offered to relieve him of his virginity. When they offered me the role, my new agents advised me to turn it down, because they thought the script was ridiculous (it was) and because I would only be paid scale, which at that time was about $
1500
a week. These agents were not going to allow me to work for a buck-fifty and a steak. I listened to them, and for the first time in my life, I turned down (legitimate) work. “If they really want you,” my agents said, “they’ll come back with a better offer.”

The script really wasn’t good, but it didn’t really matter. It was basically an outline with some suggested dialogue that would be a blueprint from which we would improvise. That’s how
Anchorman
had been made, and these were the same producers.

They did come back with a little more money, but my agents said it was still an insult. I held my breath as I turned it down again. But I really wanted it.

Then Steve called me, and said, “Jane, we wrote your audition into the script, verbatim. You have to do this movie.” That’s all it took.

I called Gabrielle, my point agent at this new agency, and blurted, “I have to do this movie!!! They
want
me! They
need
me!!! I can’t play this game anymore! Please accept their offer!” She accepted for me the next day.

I was called in to work every day that we shot at the fake SmartTech store. The set was built in a warehouse on La Cienega near the freeway. Judd wanted us all there every day because we were making a lot of this movie up as we went along, and he needed us to be handy in case he wanted to throw us into a scene. I felt like I was sitting on the bench and hoping to get called into the game. It was not at all like my experience on the JV basketball team in high school when I prayed “please don’t put me in, please don’t put me in!”

It was while sitting around waiting to play that I started to put dialogue from my high school Spanish textbook to music. The next day, I’d finished my “Guatemalan Love Song,” and I told Steve before we shot the scene that I would be singing to him and not to be alarmed. The song set the pedestrian words of the dialogue to a sweet romantic melody. My character sang the song to Steve as she recalled her own sweet deflowering at the tender age of fourteen by a middle-aged gardener. “
Cuando arreglan mi quarto, no encuentro nada
” translates as “Whenever I clean my room, I can’t find anything.” Steve’s expression was a perfect blend of dumbfounded horror and awe. “
Donde vas con tanta prisa? Al partido de futbol
.” “Where are you going with such haste? To a football game.” I blew Steve a kiss, and sauntered away.

As with the Guest films, none of us knew which scenes we shot would end up staying in
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
. We shot so much film; when we hit the million-feet-of-film mark, there was a champagne toast. That’s a whole lot of film, and it can’t all be in the final movie. I try not to have any investment in whether something is in or out of these films, as I have no control over it. But I couldn’t help hoping my little ditty would make the cut.

At the cast and crew screening, Judd came up to me and said, “I think you’ll be happy to know there’s a Guatemalan love song in this movie. Who’s your favorite director?”

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
was a hit, and suddenly Judd Apatow was the hottest guy in Hollywood. His next film was
Talladega Nights
,
with Will Ferrell playing a famous NASCAR driver, Ricky Bobby. Instead of just offering me a role in that movie, damn it if my favorite director didn’t want me to audition again.

Supreme confidence. Steve Carell and me in
The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Photo courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

Honestly, it was probably because Judd was producing this film rather than directing it. Adam McKay, Will Ferrell’s producing partner, was directing, and he didn’t know me.

On my forty-fifth birthday, I walked into the same room of the same studio as I had for
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
audition. I was up to play Ricky Bobby’s sensible mother, and Jack McBrayer, who had a small part in the movie, improvised with me as Ricky Bobby for the audition. Jack had been at The Second City in Chicago as well, but several years after my time. I hadn’t met him, but I knew of him. He was adorable and funny and just so quick on his feet. Jack is also a good Georgia boy. He rolled out the “ma’am”s, which on that day served to make me feel every one of my forty-five years. (He’s a big honkin’ star now on
30 Rock
,
as Kenneth the Page, and I couldn’t be happier for him.)

I was hired to play Lucy Bobby, Ricky’s mother. As on
The 40-Year-Old Virgin,
the script was a work-in-progress and we’d be improvising most of the dialogue. I immediately borrowed a book from Jeannie of expressions and sayings from the Deep South. I loaded myself up with a bunch of them so they’d be on the tip of my tongue. I chuckled through practicing “Well, that just dills my pickle” . . . “She looked rode hard and hung up wet” . . . “I’m gonna paint your back door red.” My law-and-order granny was taking shape.

When we started filming, the story line following the rise and fall of Ricky was set, but scenes would be added or cut as we went along. One day, Will came up with a scene he wanted to add in the part of the story where Ricky Bobby is depressed because he’s no longer racing and he’s moping around Lucy Bobby’s house. Will wanted Lucy to confront Ricky about giving up and not trying to do something with his life. Ricky would then very earnestly attempt to impress his mom (me) with his newfound talent of passing gas in complete sentences like “I love you” and “Merry Christmas.” I had to say the Hail Mary to myself several times, as it was one of the best fart skits I have had the pleasure of being in. Sadly, it is not in the final cut of the movie, but you can find it among the DVD extras.

We shot the movie in Charlotte, North Carolina, and just as when I’d lived in New York, I made things hard on myself by moving constantly. I could have just moved into the same hotel with the rest of the cast, but I wanted to bring Olivia, to keep me company and because I loved her so. The only hotel that allowed dogs was a shady place on the other side of town. I moved in, but despite having Olivia with me, I was lonely. After less than a week, I moved into an apartment downtown where the wardrobe designer I’d befriended was living and where they allowed dogs. But she was so damn busy and I was not, so I rarely saw her, and I was still lonely and still far away from the cast. Finally, I snuck Olivia into an apartment that forbade dogs
next
to the hotel where the cast was staying. I got to hang out with Leslie Bibb, John Reilly, my old pal Andy Richter (whose part was cut from the movie), and of course, Jack.

Will Ferrell with my sister, Julie, and her kids—John, Ellen, and Megan.

I finally allowed myself to be a part of the group after hopping around, and to my great surprise and satisfaction, I found I actually preferred my own company; I
liked
hanging out with me. I had a lot of free time, as I had to be in Charlotte for over two months but wasn’t shooting that many scenes. I took most of my days off solo, walking around the huge mall near my apartment, carrying Olivia in a shoulder bag, spending all my per diem. I was having a ball.

My apartment was huge, with two large bedrooms. It reminded me of the cavernous apartment I’d rented in Westwood while I was doing
The Real Live Brady Bunch
. But this time it wouldn’t stay empty for long. My mother and my sister’s family would be coming out to visit, to watch us shoot the race sequences, and I offered a room to anyone who didn’t want to stay in the hotel. My mom and my niece Megan (Julie’s now twenty-one-year-old daughter, whom I adored) took me up on it and bunked at my place. We all had a great time, but when they left I was just as happy to get back to my solitary and entirely joyful puttering.