The direction I kept getting was “Klingons don’t smile.” All day long I would get caught on camera with a grin. “Gabrielle, Klingons don’t smile.”
At lunchtime, I would stay in my makeup and a bunch of us Klingon recruits would go to Lucy’s El Adobe Café on Melrose, across from Paramount Studios. The first time we went in, I expected some reaction.
“You must get a lot of Klingons, huh?” I asked.
“All kinds of people,” said the waitress.
I ordered the ground beef tacos. As we Klingon day players sat there looking at the wall of autographed celebrity photos, I ate as much of the salsa as I could. To this day, I love their salsa.
On the last day, after working nineteen hours and escorting a convoy of Klingon cargo vessels to Donatu V, I was beat. They said I had to wait until the makeup department was ready so I could take my Klingon face off. I had an hour and a half to kill before they’d get to me. So I went back to Lucy’s and sat alone in a booth with a book. Ricardo Montalbàn smiled down at me from an autographed picture. He was Khan on the original series and in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, so it seemed like a sign. When the waiter came over, I ordered a margarita.
“Can I see some ID?”
He held my California license up to my Klingon face and squinted. “I don’t know,” he said. “You look different.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m just kidding.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Klingons don’t smile.”
PRETTY SOON AFTER MY DEEP SPACE NINE GIG, I LANDED MY FIRST FILM: 10 Things I Hate About You. Like a bunch of Klingon recruits, we all bonded that first night at the hotel in Tacoma, Washington. There wasn’t a mean girl or boy among us, and we made a pact that this was going to be the best summer ever. There was Julia Stiles, wise beyond her New York years, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was recognized everywhere he went as a star of NBC’s Third Rock from the Sun. He and David Krumholtz—whom we affectionately called Krummy—bonded deep over their intellectual love of hip-hop. Larisa Oleynik was another child star, with her own show on Nickelodeon, and Andrew Keegan was the cast heartthrob. Susan May Pratt was a Michigan girl, and we clicked over our shared love of the Midwest and having a really, really good time. We were both the oldest. Playing a high schooler in your twenties isn’t exactly mutton dressed as lamb, but it still makes you feel like people’s big sister.
It was my first movie, this modern high school take on Taming of the Shrew, but we were all fish out of water. There was a “no favored nation” clause in all our contracts, which meant every cast member was treated equally. We all got the same type of hotel room, same rental car, and same type of trailer. That first week we had the run of Tacoma. It’s a really beautiful port city, so we would go waterskiing and take camping trips. I made it my mission to make everyone laugh through a trip to Mount St. Helens. We were tight.
The new guy, someone named Heath Ledger from Australia, was set to show up a week into shooting. We were so afraid he was going to be a drag. Would he fit in? Would he be a jerk? Would he light up?
The first night after he arrived, he met us in the bar at the top of the hotel. Only Susan and I were over twenty-one, so the cast sent us up as ambassadors to check him out.
We found him, all of nineteen years old, drinking a scotch on the rocks and holding hands with his girlfriend, who appeared to be at least thirty-seven. He was stunning, with long dark hair falling in curls. Then he opened his mouth and he was James Bond.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. He had this twinkle.
Susan and I looked at each other. Oh, this was going to work out just fine.
He talked about Shakespeare and art, all in an impossibly nondickhead way. He was two years out of Perth, which he described as “a wonderful place to grow up in as a kid, and a wonderful place to leave as a teenager.” He was wise and sexy beyond his years.
We went downstairs to report our findings.
“What’s he like?” everyone asked.
“He’s a man,” I said to the crew. “You’re gonna love him.”
And we did. Heath didn’t have to try to ingratiate himself into our circle, which by then had turned our hotel into a sort of college dorm of smoking weed and big discussions about life. We were all within two floors of each other, and we would always end up in each other’s rooms at the end of shooting, hanging out and listening to music. Heath would play the didgeridoo, a long cylindrical wind instrument he carried everywhere in a leather case. The sound is somewhere between a foghorn and an extended belch, but his passion for it was infectious. When hotel guests complained about the noise and the smell of weed, we acted very offended.
We also had a routine of eating together every night, and we’d often drive our little rental cars over to this joint that was like the local version of a Dave & Buster’s for burgers and video games. The whole experience felt like the best summer camp.
When the cast moved up to Seattle, Julia’s mom and Larisa’s mom didn’t want to stay, so they signed them over to me as the adult in charge. Bad move. (Sorry, moms!)
“First order of business,” I told the girls, “is getting you fake IDs.” Welcome to the Gabrielle Union Finishing School for Young Ladies.
We all went out as a pack in Seattle. Heath, ever the gentleman, held every door and our hands as we navigated the stairs of U-Dub college bars in our high heels. For me, it was fun to experience all of these adventures through their underage eyes. The rush of fake IDs! Beer! Throwing up! To add to the joy, there were lots of budding little romances among the cast, which were harmless and without drama.
When we wrapped, we knew for sure we would all see each other again, just like summer camp reunions. But that never happened. We were never all in the same place again. We all went right into new films except baby Larissa, who went straight off to college. I would see Julia on a plane, maybe Krummy. Andrew was such a club guy that I’d run into him here and there.
I don’t want to overstate my own bond with Heath, because every single one of us shared it. Whenever I ran into him in L.A. after 10 Things, it was like we had just wrapped yesterday. We would both reel off names of people from the movie that we had seen and share updates on their lives. There was never the weird Hollywood distance that creeps in. You usually get so close on a set and then it’s out of sight, out of mind. You forget you were family for a while. Not this cast. Heath and I would hug and say, “Take care.” His loss was a death in the family that all of us felt equally.
I’D PRETTY MUCH CORNERED THE MARKET ON OUTSPOKEN-BLACK-HIGH-SCHOOLER roles when I was invited to do a table read for a project called Cheer Fever. Honestly, the only reason I took the table read was that I had really wanted to get a role in Sugar and Spice, a bank-robbing-cheerleader film. I didn’t get a spot in that one because, guess what, they didn’t want to go black on any of the characters. And it bombed. It bombed so bad that I love telling people I didn’t get the job, because it’s like saying the Craigslist Killer never got back to you.
I was intrigued by the concept of Cheer Fever, which would of course become Bring It On, because it highlighted the rampant appropriation of black culture. Here, the idea was that a white high school squad, the San Diego Toros, get ahead by stealing cheer routines from a black team, the East Compton Clovers.