Jason Priestley (15 page)

My experience on
90210
is why I think I got along so well with race car drivers and other professional athletes. We were all approaching thirty years old, but acted and felt as if we were eighteen. Professional athletes tend to be very young in many ways, and I'm not just talking about their chronological age. They've been big stars since their teens, and that's just about where much of their growth and education stopped. It's the same thing with many musicians and actors. I fit in great with my actor friends and athlete friends, but as far as being a real live regular human being—no. I had a lot of catching up and growing up to do.

Whether you're a five-year-old kid, a teen actor, or a middle-aged guy on the set, if it's a big successful show, people do things for you. There's always somebody there to feed you, to fetch your car, to find your clothes, to throw out your garbage. You simply don't have to take care of yourself. All the mundane daily stuff is done for you. That isn't real life, and I was savvy enough to realize that. I knew I needed to break out of what was, in many ways, a gilded cage.

I had been working on the show for so long and hard that most of day-to-day life had passed me by. I had no idea what was going on in the greater culture. Work was how I clocked everything . . . in terms of what episode I was on, which show I was directing, what film set I was on. I had worked close to twenty hours a day for years.

Those years went by in a blur. We were shooting what we called “double-ups.” Three times a year, we brought in an entire second crew to shoot two episodes simultaneously. The actors bounced back and forth between the two sets. This resulted in our whopping thirty-two shows per season, an unheard-of amount of material. This was why the cast and crew affectionately referred to the show as the Sausage Factory. We churned out tons of sausage, efficiently and fast.

Plus, I was racing—I was still under contract to Ford and MCI. I was very seriously burning the candle at both ends.
90210
and racing and red-eyes and travel and promotion and casual dates. There was a swirl of activity around me all the time. Still, I knew there was another world out there. Some of my friends had regular, nonindustry jobs and were climbing the corporate ladder. They had all read books I hadn't read and argued passionately about politics I didn't understand. I wanted to rejoin the rest of the human race. I was a part of everyone else's pop culture, but I had no idea what was going on. Staring thirty in the face, I knew it was time to make a change.

On a purely practical day-to-day level, I also didn't like what the show had become. The plots had become quite nonsensical. I had begged Aaron to stop the show. It was way past time to marry everyone off and pull the plug, but he wouldn't hear of it. I made up my mind. The show could go on forever, but I was leaving. By that time I was on a one-year contract, and when my contract expired at the end of the eighth year, this time I was going to go. I set up a feature film to direct about Barenaked Ladies that would occupy the entire next year of my life. When he got the news, Peter Roth, who was the head of FOX at the time, tried hard to get me to stick around for the ninth season. I resisted, which wasn't hard. It was much tougher when I had to talk to Aaron face-to-face.

Aaron summoned me over to the Manor on a weekend to discuss my decision. He had just undergone double hernia surgery, so he was in bed, and I actually had to sit at his bedside for this very difficult conversation. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach the entire time, as it was a painful discussion for me to have with a man who had treated me so well. I felt so guilty that I wound up making quite a few concessions. He talked me into staying for the first four episodes of the ninth season. But that was as far as I was willing to go.

With
90210,
Aaron and I had created something great together. Now here I was, telling him I didn't want to do it anymore. That I, too, was walking away. It breaks my heart, looking back, that I was so insensitive. It's hard for me to have to face the fact that I hurt someone who was so good to me. I can't even try to fix it, as he's no longer here. I wish I could talk to Aaron one more time, and tell him how sorry I am that I left, but, more important, that I'm sorry I let him down personally and hurt his feelings.

Aaron had been through this scene many times before; he took my leaving well and didn't reproach me. He stayed my friend, of course, and we continued to see each other quite a bit. But our relationship was never the same. It couldn't be. That was my fault. At that time and that age, I was just too focused on my own wants and needs. It is only now, as an older man looking back, that I can understand how much my defection must have hurt him. To have caused that man one minute of pain is one of the biggest regrets of my life.

I
n retrospect, I should have stayed on that show until they dragged me off in a body bag. Until Brandon died in the Beverly Hills Nursing Home of old age. I was a complete dumbass not to stay until the bitter end. Whatever damage was done to my acting career in terms of typecasting was irrevocable. A year or two more of playing Brandon would not have mattered in the least. I should have socked away as much money as I could before transitioning into the next phase of my career. By the way, that's what I would tell any actor, ever, period. No discussion: if you're lucky enough to be on a hit TV show, don't leave until they kill you off. You never know when, or if, the next one's coming.

I also wish I had stayed because I believe the show should have ended differently. I think we owed the fans the ending many wanted and seemed to think was coming. There had been a classic episode where faced with a choice between Dylan and Brandon, Kelly said, “I choose me!”—which led to endless hours of comedy between Jennie, Luke, and me afterward. However, in the intervening years, particularly after Dylan left the show, the story arc made it pretty clear that Brandon and Kelly were written in the stars. Meant to be. Now, of course, given the benefit of hindsight, I should absolutely have stayed on the show and had Brandon and Kelly live together happily ever after. That's the way it
should
have ended.

Aaron was a good guy and he stayed on good terms with most of the actors who left the show, myself included. My leaving was a big blow; having Luke return a few months later for the last two seasons gave the show a much-needed boost after eight years. Our great friend Paul Wagner had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and Luke was particularly close to him; I believe that the chance to spend time working closely with him was a large factor in Luke's decision to return. Paul was a great man whom we sadly lost a few years later.

My last day of work was oddly anticlimactic. No one gave me a cake or going-away party on my last day of
Beverly Hills 90210
. On the fourth episode of season nine, I shot my last scene with Daniel Cosgrove, a new addition to the show playing the role of Matt Durning—my replacement, basically. We were the first scene up in the morning, so I was in and out. I said my good-byes right then and there, then everybody else moved along to the next scene. For them it was just another day at work.

I walked to my dressing room for the last time, grabbed a box of stuff, went out to my car, and drove off the lot. I was a bit sad to be leaving this group of people with whom I'd spent the last nine years of my life. But it was time for other adventures. I was going on the road with my racing buddies, and then on tour with a rock band!

B
y this time, I had closed the doors of my race team, Triple Caution Racing. Andy Pilgrim went to drive for GM, and I was fortunate to get picked up by a team out of Toronto called Multimatic Motorsports. I drove for the next two years with a partner named Scott Maxwell, another very talented driver, one of the best in North America. He taught me a lot. We raced not only Mustangs but did a lot of damper development work for other teams. We were also running a GTS1 Mustang program. That was a tube-frame 780-horsepower race car. We got a third-place finish at Laguna Seca in the 1997 season in that car against all the big European GTS1 teams. The two of us did very well together.

I'd met a guy named Greg Moore at a charity softball tournament in Indianapolis a couple of years before. He was a very young driver, barely out of his teens, from my hometown of Vancouver. After meeting in the dugout, we were fast, forever friends. He loved
90210
and every now and again I'd thrown in a word, or gesture, directed specifically at him, which absolutely delighted him. Freed from my day job, Greg and I, along with some other guys on the Indy car circuit, did some traveling, saw the world, and had some unforgettable times. Racing was my world, I couldn't ask for better friends than these guys, and I loved every minute of it.

When summer rolled around in 1998, I went on tour with the Barenaked Ladies for a couple of months. My original impulse was to shoot a documentary about this incredibly popular band from Canada, the hottest thing ever up north, but coming to the States and playing to six or seven people in a bar someplace. The dichotomy interested me, as did the whole idea of breaking through in America. I wanted to juxtapose them playing in front of huge stadium crowds in Toronto, then five people in a bar in Phoenix. That, I thought, would make for a funny movie.

Things did not turn out as planned, however; by the time I was out on the road with the band they were extremely popular; they had the number one song in America! It was quite an adventure and I wound up with more footage than I knew what to do with. I parked myself in an editing suite in Vancouver and started cutting.

A
n offer came along for the role of a very bad guy in a movie called
Eye of the Beholder
. It was director Stephan Elliott's follow-up to
Priscilla: Queen of the Desert,
though this was a much darker project. The film starred Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd. It only required a quick one-week shoot on my part, and the movie was filming in Montreal, a place I love. Stef was a crazy Australian genius and I was anxious to work with him.

Working with Stef and Ashley (whom I was very quickly calling by her last name only, Judd) was a pleasure. In the film I played an evil guy who came in, beat up Judd, shot her up with heroin, and pretty much messed everybody up. This was a role as polar opposite from Brandon as I could find, and I relished playing a villain.

Ashley and I were passing the time one day on the set, idly talking about her love life. She was single at the time and bemoaning it. She knew I raced cars and mentioned a driver she'd seen in an interview on TV. She thought he was really cute, a Scottish guy named Dario Franchitti. I said, “I know Dario!”

“No way!”

Of course I knew him, through Greg and everybody else. “You'll see, Judd,” I promised her. “I know him.”

A few months later I had business in Los Angeles and while I was there threw a party at a restaurant on the West Side called the Buffalo Club. I happened to know that both Greg and Dario were in town and invited them . . . along with Judd. She met Dario at the party and that was it. They were a wonderful match, both supersweet people. Both excelled in extremely high-profile professions but were very private people at heart. Dario spent much of his off time in his native Scotland; Ashley didn't live in L.A., preferring her homes in Kentucky and Tennessee. Growing up in a famous family as she had, she felt so much of her life was already out there for the world to see. She guarded her personal life carefully. I was happy to see two friends so happy together.

Sometime later I found myself in Nashville on Indy Racing League business. I was very taken with this southern city, and the surrounding green countryside was absolutely gorgeous. I gave Judd a call to see if she wanted to meet for dinner, and she insisted that I come stay at her house instead of a hotel. It was at her beautiful home that I was introduced to one of the great pleasures of the South. Judd had a well on her country property that produced the purest, most delicious water. The bar in her living room had a water line that drew directly from the well straight to a jet in her wet bar.

“Try this,” she said, and mixed me a drink of bourbon and water.

Now, I'd done my share of drinking—vodka, scotch, rye—but I wasn't familiar with really good bourbon. To me, Maker's Mark was as fancy as it got! I had never known anything like this magic elixir. Blanton's is a small batch, single-barrel bourbon. Phenomenal! Ashley had her own supply, straight from the maker, with her own personalized label. That was quite impressive.

I may have changed Judd's life by introducing her to Dario, but she absolutely returned the favor by introducing me to Blanton's.

I
n November of 1998, a producer friend named Peter Simpson called me to talk about a movie he was putting together called
The Highwayman
. I told him I couldn't even consider it; I was right in the middle of cutting my film. “Ah, you need a break. It'll be good for you to get away for a month. Come to Toronto, shoot this movie for me. At least take a look at the script.”

The project was a crime drama about a bank robber named Breakfast and his partner, Panda. Panda was a wild, crazy sociopathic criminal. As I read, I thought to myself: Coulson! What a brilliant idea! I called Peter and said, “We should bring Bernie Coulson in to play this guy! I've known him my whole life, it'll be perfect! We'll have a blast!”

Peter didn't exactly jump on this suggestion; in fact, he sounded strangely reluctant. Looking back, I think it's because, living in Toronto, he knew more about Bernie's situation than I did. We had all been young and wild in the '80s and early '90s. L.A. life was full of temptations. Plenty of people I knew skated right on the edge in terms of partying. Drugs were all around, all the time. Some people did too much, some didn't. Some people could turn the party off, some couldn't. It was dangerous, all of it, though it hadn't seemed so at the time. We were cool, it was fine, everything was under control, of course.