TUESDAY - I have to wake up early today. Extremely early. I have an interview with an East Coast morning radio program at 7:30 AM, which means 4:30 AM for me in Los Angeles, which means I have to wake up around 4:00 or 4:15 if I want to even have a chance of getting rid of "raspy morning voice". The phone rings at exactly 4:30 and on the other end are two extremely hyper Florida DJs. I thought I had been awake long enough for my voice to sound normal and chipper, but compared to these two, I sound like I’m still sleeping. I quickly take another gulp of coffee and pray that I can keep up. This is my first radio interview and I have no idea what to expect. The hosts ask me some standard questions about what it was like to work with Brad and Angie, what was the funniest thing that happened on set, etc. Surprisingly and refreshingly, they do not ask me anything about "Brangelina" per se. At one point the DJs start doing their thing, going back and forth between each other making jokes. It goes on for so long that I start to wonder if the interview is over and I’m supposed to hang up. But then they come back to me, we chat for another minute, and it ends. I promptly go back to sleep for a few hours.
I wake up again at 9:00 AM and proceed to have an uneventful morning of working out and catching up on email before I have to do my next phone interview. It’s at 1:00 PM with an author name Tim O’Shei. He’s writing a book aimed at teenagers and pre-teens who are interested in the entertainment industry. I don’t know how exactly I fit into the whole concept, but I think what he’s going to do is intersperse quotes from me throughout the book. He’s quite friendly and our interview lasts for about an hour. We talk about how I got started in the industry, and about the fact that I went to college. It seems like I’m going to be the example of, "You can go to college first and get into acting later." Which is funny, because there is a small part of me that sometimes wonders what it would have been like to skip college and go straight into entertainment. Although in retrospect, it was probably was much safer to have my partying days in the relatively safe atmosphere of College Station, Texas as opposed to the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles. But I digress.
The interview continues with questions about my acting technique, where I studied, how I got the part in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, etc. By the time we finish, I feel the way I feel at the end of every interview: like I haven’t really said anything. I don’t know what it is, but I always feel like I’m rambling on and on without really answering the question I’m being asked. Reporters are trained to let you keep talking, and I don’t like uncomfortable pauses…put those two things together and you can see where the focus might get lost. I do have a very nice time talking with Tim, though, and I hope I make it into the book somewhere.
And now we come to the part I’ve been dreading. In my ideal world, the above two paragraphs would have been condensed to two sentences so that I could spend the rest of the time writing about the L.A. premiere of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is tonight. I would be regaling you with the dress I wore, how great it was to see Brad and Angie again, and how I stayed up until two in the morning partying like a rock star. But this is Hollywood and anything can happen, or, as the case is here, not happen. The credits for the movie do not run in alphabetical order, nor do they run in order of appearance. According to the producers, this means that the names are listed in order of importance. Because I’m the 8th cast member listed, it didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t be invited to the premiere. Rookie mistake.
I should have been on this since January, making sure that I got invited. I didn’t start looking into it until a few weeks ago, and by then the premiere was already overbooked by hundreds of people. I could have called one of the producers and finagled a way in, but I didn’t want to be "that girl". So I decide to let it go and practice my positive thinking: "There will be more premieres to go to".
Ironically, I’ve been invited to premieres of other movies because of my role in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. This town’s weird. So my husband and I spend the night with some friends playing poker: No-Limit, Texas Hold’em. At least I won 80 bucks.