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MISTLETOE GIRL #2 TELLS ALL
Ask any actor, and they will tell you the teacher who had the biggest influence on them as they crafted their technique. You’ll hear names like Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Adler, Hagen, and, of course, my own teachers, Screech and Mr. Belding.
I made my screen debut with two lines as Mistletoe Girl #2 on Saved by the Bell: The New Class. And, yes, I was in awe of Dustin Diamond, aka Screech, and Dennis Haskins, aka Mr. Belding. All the other kids on set were as green as I was, but these two were veterans as the only holdovers from the original show. In this room, they were stars.
The show taped in front of a live studio audience, but during rehearsals the studio was empty. So any scene I wasn’t in, which was the majority of them, I would go take a seat in the audience instead of going to my dressing room. I didn’t just watch Dustin Diamond and Dennis Haskins act; I studied how they interacted with the director and how they treated the rest of the cast and the crew. Dustin had been doing comedy for years, so he had this slapstick ability that he would reserve and then tweak for scenes. I didn’t realize that was a skill set you had to actually work at. Also, he was older than the teenagers on the show, and I knew I was going to be older than the people I was working with as long as I kept getting cast as a high schooler. Do you keep your distance as the adult? How much do you joke around? I literally just didn’t know anything. And Dennis was all about dirty humor as soon as work was done, so I definitely learned that you could choose who you wanted to be on set.
I actually played two different black girls on the show, coming back later as Jennifer, a girl obsessed with collecting coins. She also inexplicably dressed like a 1950s housewife heading to a garden party, but then she went to the Sadie Hawkins dance in a hot red dress. I guess her closet had some serious range. I fortunately started my career off doing a lot of multicamera half-hour shows where I had the ability to sit in the audience and watch people work. One of my favorites to study was Sherman Hemsley on Goode Behavior, a house-arrest comedy. Yeah, a house-arrest sitcom. I tested to be a series regular as Sherman’s granddaughter, but I didn’t get the part. However, the producers brought me back to play her best friend. The whole time I was on set I was thinking, That’s George Jefferson! I sat in the audience, listening to the notes he was given and watching how he tweaked his performance to suit them. It was a master class in comedic timing. Now, it wasn’t my cup of tea, but he made it sound like it was. He had just the right rhythm to wait for the laugh and then zero in for the punch line.
My go-to acting technique was to smile a lot. The guy who played Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter, Robert Hegyes, was one of the assistant directors. He saw me watching every scene and took a seat next to me out in the audience.
“I have two pieces of advice for you,” he said.
I nodded and braced for the inevitable: “One, you’re creepy. Two, stop staring at the talent.”
“I can tell you’re basically waiting for your line,” he said. “It’s ‘Blah blah blah, now me.’”
He was right. Whenever I did a scene, I smiled a lot at the other actor to show I was listening, and almost nodded when it was about to be my turn, as if to say, “That’s my cue.”
“Always remember to listen to what the other actors are saying, and react. Just listen and react.”
“Got it,” I said. “Listen and react.” I really did get it. One thing about me, I don’t mind notes if they are helpful.
“The other thing to remember is this: you are always going to be able to find people who don’t want to watch you fail.”
He saw a young person who he knew was learning and took time to pull me aside and help me. Throughout my career, all kinds of people have been generous enough to help me and challenge me so they can see me be the best version of me. Hollywood is indeed dog-eat-dog, but there are groups of great people who are just nice. I held on to that, because this business also has a lot of rejection. When I first started auditioning for television shows, the main game was at Warner Bros., where everyone would hang out to audition for a shot on one of the million teen shows on the WB. I spent a lot of time doing guest spots on these series, playing high schoolers. In those rooms, there would be hundreds of other actors like me, dressed young even though we were all in our early to mid-twenties, but also honest-to-gosh kids. You could tell who they were because their mothers and fathers were grilling them on the material so hard that eventually the kid would have a crying meltdown. Mind you, this would be for a two-line gig on Nick Freno: Licensed Teacher.
As I got older and I spent more and more time on these sets, I realized these parents had given up everything else in their lives. So those two lines could decide whether or not they get to stay one more month at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, or had enough money to eat. A guy I met in those rooms, a successful actor now, told me what it was really like.
“Do you know me and my mom and my sisters were living out of my car during pilot season?” he asked me once. “We would get to the studio early and wash up in the bathroom there.”
His mom had a trick when things got really bad. They would show up for the audition early and say that a younger sister had an accident. “Is there a trailer where we could wash her pants out?” she’d ask. Then they would go in the trailer and wash the family’s clothes with hand soap.
“That’s kind of ingenious,” I said.
“It shows how badly they wanted it.”
I was lucky in that I just wanted it for me. I became eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) with an AT&T commercial directed by Forest Whitaker. I thought the ad was going to make me an ongoing AT&T spokesperson and thus rich, but the company scrapped it. But it was a union job, and if you are not union, that first job you book makes you union eligible. You cannot take a second union job without paying your dues. I was counting on paying my SAG dues with an ongoing gig on Moesha. I was supposed to play a head cheerleader, a nemesis to Brandy’s Moesha. But they decided to not make the role recurring, and that was it. A job that was supposed to be a few episodes became just one: “Nah, we’re good.” I took that as being fired. How else was I supposed to take it? That always stayed with me. There’s always someone bigger, badder, better. Don’t save your best for when you think the material calls for it. Always bring your full potential to every take, and be on top of your job, or they will replace you.
PROBABLY 50 PERCENT OF THE FAN MAIL I’VE RECEIVED IN MY ENTIRE CAREER is because of one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I played N’Garen in the “Sons and Daughters” episode, and Trekkies tell me that it was a pivotal one because it reintroduced Worf’s son. My character had an interest in astrophysics, and as a rookie weapons officer for the Klingon Defense Force I took out a Jem’Hadar cruiser. Hadar’s gonna hate.
The pivotal thing for me was that it was a job. I was twenty-four and I didn’t want to play high schoolers forever. A Klingon, I thought, showed range.
We filmed at Stage 18 of Paramount’s back lot, which was made to look like the IKS Rotarran hanging out on the Cardassian border. I see you, Trekkies. I’m not even going to make a Kardashian joke.
It took an obscene amount of time to turn me into a Klingon, and I would sit there for hours in the makeup chair, depleted of small talk because it took so long that there was simply nothing left to discuss. The hair and makeup room was huge, housing Ferengi ears and ridged Bajoran noses. My wig was standard Klingon, but fuller and somewhat braided, and for makeup I had just a hint of rose red on the lips. The look said warrior, but approachable. The irony of the situation was that the role was kind of high school: I was one of five new recruits, and Worf’s son totally got bullied in the cafeteria. I was the mean girl of the squad.