Without looking back at Nick behind me, I entered the house that I’d never thought of as mine. I’d moved in and immediately treated it like a hotel where I never quite unpacked. Without the camera crew buzzing around, people holding up boom mics and lighting, it was like an empty soundstage. I went upstairs to bed and took a sleeping pill. I didn’t care if Nick went back out or if he came upstairs.
It was only when I went to take off my makeup that I realized I still had my sunglasses on. I took them off, and the harsh light blinded me once again. I washed my face and looked up to stare at the ghost in the mirror.
THE ONE THING THAT BROUGHT ME JOY WAS WORK. ON A SUNNY AUGUST afternoon, I drove onto the Warner Brothers lot, repeating my lines in my head. This was the make-or-break screen test for the Daisy Duke role in the Dukes of Hazzard reboot. The studio had wanted me for the film, but I knew the director, Jay Chandrasekhar, was resistant. He had a strong comedy background and had seen a couple episodes of Newlyweds. I think he thought I was too dumb to play a character as strong and smart as Daisy Duke. But I knew Daisy’s heart, and I wanted to do her justice. Jay agreed to see my chemistry on film with the Duke brothers already cast, Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville. I knew from the casting agent that Mandy Moore and Jessica Biel were going before me that day, and I tried not to let it shake me.
I walked in to do the scene and saw Johnny. I immediately felt something I didn’t understand, something literally attracting him to me.
“Jessica Simpson,” Johnny said, shaking my hand. I reflexively smiled at his voice and gentlemanly Southern manners. I didn’t expect that from someone who had created the Jackass franchise. He was magnetic, and just so charming.
The screen test was a blur, and when it was over, Jay said, “You’re it.”
“Really?”
“It was your smile,” he said.
“Welcome, Daisy,” said Johnny.
We would start a three-month film shoot in early November, which I thought would help get me out of filming Newlyweds for MTV. Nick and I just didn’t want to do it anymore. We didn’t want to lie to fans and pretend everything between us was fine. We also knew that even if we tried, we would have a hard time hiding our problems. At the end of August, we had a fight at an afterparty for the MTV VMAs, and the tabloids had a new story line: the Newlyweds under pressure.
The truth was far worse. “I’m starting to feel we can’t have cameras on us anymore,” I told Nick. “Our marriage is scary.” That was the thing: we were still enough of a team that we could talk about our marriage going downhill, as long we didn’t approach specifics. Then we would have to do something about it.
MTV held us to our contract and set filming to start on our anniversary. The production team arranged for Nick to take me to the Saddle Peak Lodge in the Malibu mountains, probably because it had wild game on the menu and they could have me mispronounce emu or something. By then, Nick and I knew exactly what they wanted the episode to be about, so we knew what to say to get them out of the house or leave us alone. We were living life for a line. It would sometimes be the one thing we agreed on. “Let’s just say this and have off time.”
Of course, it rained. It had rained on our wedding day and our anniversaries. And right before this big romantic dinner, a production assistant showed me a brand-new tabloid story.
“Did you see this?” she asked.
Two weeks before, Nick had been at a bachelor party for a sound engineer friend of ours. The bride was a stylist, and I was a bridesmaid. Whoever had organized the bachelor party had started it at a strip club and then moved to a private home. The tabloid said Nick did some vague thing with a porn star named Jessica. I stopped reading.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.
The production assistant looked embarrassed. I realized they wanted a reaction on camera. If we can’t get them to interact romantically, let’s have them fight. Happy anniversary. I then had to sit through this dinner, another weird, quiet meal where they shut down the whole restaurant to film so nobody could approach us. There were so many tabloid stories about Nick in strip clubs or talking to girls that I just didn’t know what to believe. Did he feel caught in this marriage? He kept putting himself into situations where he could be so easily accused of cheating. It was self-sabotage. And I was supposed to stay home and be Betty Crocker?
Nope, I was going to go be Daisy Duke.
I WAS SCARED TO DEATH FOR MY FIRST SCENE ON THE DUKES SET IN BATON Rouge, but at least Johnny and Seann were there. It was freezing, even for early November, though you would never know it by the amount of clothes I wear in my scenes. For this first scene, we all had to gather around a car, and I had to lament that the Duke brothers were going to get up to some foolishness, and I was going to have to shake my butt to distract the authorities to save the day. I was so prepared, because I wanted to prove to the whole cast and crew that I’d gotten this on my own. Not because I was Nick Lachey’s wife or because my dad had squeaked me in with some deal.
I did the scene in one take, and everybody cheered. “Yeah, you got your first line,” Seann said.
“Great job, lady,” Johnny said, giving me a hug that we let go right to the edge of going on too long. Lady would always be his nickname for me.
I smiled at him and started to worry. I felt a force drawing us together. I wondered why I was open to this. I was already living in a distrustful situation with Nick, and now I was afraid I couldn’t trust myself. Oh my God, I didn’t know my heart could do this, I thought. And then, Shoot.
At the end of the first day of shooting, I went back to the house the production company had rented for me, a simple two-story home near the Louisiana State University campus. I had brought along four friends from L.A. to the movie shoot, CaCee, two girlfriends named Jessie and Mary, and my trainer, Mike Alexander, who was a friend from high school. And my little Maltipoo, who I had named Daisy as a sort of wish that I would get the part. I went upstairs to call Nick to share how great my first day went. He seemed distracted when all I wanted was for him to be proud of me. Or to at least listen to me. Everyone else on the set was happy and proud, why not my husband? When I asked him how his album was going, he seemed relieved.
When I hung up, I heard laughter downstairs. CaCee and Jessie were whoopin’ over something. I realized that I had created a sort of dorm room of friends. My parents hadn’t tagged along for once—they were both focused on my younger sister, Ashlee, and her new pop career. My father and the label positioned her as the antithesis of me—she even dyed her blonde hair brown—and it was working because she had the talent to back it up. Her deserved success brought their focus to my sister, so my parents went from being around me constantly to barely. So, down in Louisiana on that set, I’d decided to give myself the college experience I’d never gotten to have because I was always working, moving from living under my dad’s eye to Nick’s.
And for the first time, work was 100 percent fun. Let’s be honest, I wasn’t carrying the movie, and it’s not like I had a lot of lines. I could just be Daisy, and I felt my cousin Sarah close to me. She was that Southern cool girl, too. In the film, I even wore red boots like the ones Sarah wore. Once I became Daisy, I wanted to be her for the rest of my life. Oh, people underestimate me because of the way I look? How can I use that to my advantage? I felt powerful.