landed work almost immediately, most auspiciously a bit part in a union show that allowed me to join the Screen Actors Guild, solving a major conundrum for many actors struggling to break in. Next, I landed a recurring role on the NBC hit show Sisters , with the theater great Swoosie Kurtz playing my mother, which paid bills while I continued to study faithfully at Playhouse West. My most special moment early in my career was being cast in Ruby in Paradise , written and directed by iconic independent filmmaker Victor Nuñez. I loved the script so intuitively that I cried for three days and through all my appointments with Victor. I just knew we were perfect for each other.
In the film my character, Ruby Lee Gissing, arrives in a Florida resort town looking for a fresh start in her young life. I decided to drive to the set in Panama City through East Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to work on my accent and see where I was coming from as this character. I took one-lane country roads the whole way (with my pet rabbit, Stinkerbelle, along for company). The poverty I witnessed was shocking. I saw Appalachian folks that even I thought only breathed in books. I sat on a shack front porch with three generations of black women one Sunday afternoon in Alabama, just drinking in their culture and the music of their voices. Acting was giving me everything I loved to do: being alone and traveling and discovering closeness with strangers.
Ruby won the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, and acting awards poured in. Before I realized what had happened, being a working actor and movie star was my norm. By the time I arrived on the set of Twisted in 2002, I had starred and costarred in nineteen movies and two Broadway plays, was one of the highest-paid women in Hollywood, and had lived the red carpet life as full-time as anyone could manage while residing in Tennessee and Scotland.
Although I loved the creative process and those fleeting, magical moments of acting, the righteous indignation, the furious need for social justice, still percolated under the surface. Once I had abandoned that part of myself at twenty-two, I didn’t seem know how to reconnect with it.
Then, suddenly, I was shown the way.
One dawn, after a grueling night of shooting Twisted , instead of settling down for a day of sleeping it off, I sat at my desk and began sorting through mail. At the top of the pile was a letter from Kate Roberts, forwarded by one of my agents. As I read through her proposal to become the YouthAIDS ambassador for Population Services International (from here on lovingly referred to as “PSI”), I realized she was offering me a chance to help save lives and raise public awareness of the most devastating human crisis since the days of the bubonic plague. Could this be what I was looking for, the opportunity to reconnect with my latent passion? A chance to bring a voice to the voiceless, to address the injustices I had witnessed throughout my childhood?
I was well aware of the scourge of AIDS. The virus had already consumed the lives of many of my colleagues in the arts and was particularly cruel and out of control in the developing world. By the end of 2001, more than forty million people were living with HIV and AIDS, and there were twenty million AIDS orphans, creating inevitable future social crises, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Three million people were dying each year. Clearly this was a global emergency. But my first reaction to Kate’s request to help was that I would also need to investigate Population Services International to verify it wasn’t a fly-by-night outfit or, worse, some sort of front for a right-wing group that would use my social capital for a hidden agenda. I didn’t want to do harm accidentally or, my ego said, be embarrassed.
Instead of trying to get that elusive daytime rest in between scenes, I scoured the Internet for information, putting my academic hat back on for a bit of research. I liked
In the film my character, Ruby Lee Gissing, arrives in a Florida resort town looking for a fresh start in her young life. I decided to drive to the set in Panama City through East Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to work on my accent and see where I was coming from as this character. I took one-lane country roads the whole way (with my pet rabbit, Stinkerbelle, along for company). The poverty I witnessed was shocking. I saw Appalachian folks that even I thought only breathed in books. I sat on a shack front porch with three generations of black women one Sunday afternoon in Alabama, just drinking in their culture and the music of their voices. Acting was giving me everything I loved to do: being alone and traveling and discovering closeness with strangers.
Ruby won the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, and acting awards poured in. Before I realized what had happened, being a working actor and movie star was my norm. By the time I arrived on the set of Twisted in 2002, I had starred and costarred in nineteen movies and two Broadway plays, was one of the highest-paid women in Hollywood, and had lived the red carpet life as full-time as anyone could manage while residing in Tennessee and Scotland.
Although I loved the creative process and those fleeting, magical moments of acting, the righteous indignation, the furious need for social justice, still percolated under the surface. Once I had abandoned that part of myself at twenty-two, I didn’t seem know how to reconnect with it.
Then, suddenly, I was shown the way.
One dawn, after a grueling night of shooting Twisted , instead of settling down for a day of sleeping it off, I sat at my desk and began sorting through mail. At the top of the pile was a letter from Kate Roberts, forwarded by one of my agents. As I read through her proposal to become the YouthAIDS ambassador for Population Services International (from here on lovingly referred to as “PSI”), I realized she was offering me a chance to help save lives and raise public awareness of the most devastating human crisis since the days of the bubonic plague. Could this be what I was looking for, the opportunity to reconnect with my latent passion? A chance to bring a voice to the voiceless, to address the injustices I had witnessed throughout my childhood?
I was well aware of the scourge of AIDS. The virus had already consumed the lives of many of my colleagues in the arts and was particularly cruel and out of control in the developing world. By the end of 2001, more than forty million people were living with HIV and AIDS, and there were twenty million AIDS orphans, creating inevitable future social crises, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Three million people were dying each year. Clearly this was a global emergency. But my first reaction to Kate’s request to help was that I would also need to investigate Population Services International to verify it wasn’t a fly-by-night outfit or, worse, some sort of front for a right-wing group that would use my social capital for a hidden agenda. I didn’t want to do harm accidentally or, my ego said, be embarrassed.
Instead of trying to get that elusive daytime rest in between scenes, I scoured the Internet for information, putting my academic hat back on for a bit of research. I liked
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