One of the hottest plays at the time was Steppenwolf’s production of Sam Shepard’s True West at the Cherry Lane Theatre, imported from Chicago, which starred John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. I got an offer to be in the replacement cast and said yes immediately. The play blew me away. It was wild, animalistic, violent, absurd, and dark, and sparked laughs like I had never heard before in the theater. The play is about two brothers, one a meek Hollywood screenwriter and one a violent and dangerous drifter, trapped in a house and a fight for survival. Gary not only starred in but directed the play as well. I assumed I was replacing him as the intellectual writer, but when I got to the theater for the first day of rehearsal, Gary told me I would be playing Lee, the psychopathic brother, and that he was staying in the show to play it with me. That was a mind-fuck and took me a minute to wrap my head around it, but it turned out to be one of the greatest roles I ever got to play. The audiences went crazy for the show, and I got to act in a way I never had before, playing a larger-than-life character by finding the truth of that character and taking the audience along for a crazy ride. Gary was brilliant, and when he eventually left, the understudy, Jere Burns, took over the role. He and I became dear friends and brothers and knocked the shit out of each other, eight shows a week. We did the show for three or four months, and Jere and I were wild animals onstage by the time the producers brought in Tim Matheson to join the play and replace Jere. When Tim finished rehearsals with my understudy and had to get up on stage with me and an audience, I think I scared the shit out of him. He felt I took the violence on stage too far, scratching his face too hard with the toast and strangling him too hard with the telephone cord, and maybe he was right. I definitely made people fearful. He and I lasted about a week, and then one day I came in to do the show and was met by two security guards and the producers. They told me I was fired and said to get my stuff from the dressing room and leave. I was tired of the show anyway, and the fact that they thought they needed security guards to escort me out was an acting badge of honor I still take pride in, in some fucked-up way.

Laure got pregnant again, and we needed to move to a bigger apartment, but this time we could afford to buy instead of rent. We found a little two-bedroom on 87th Street for eighty-five thousand dollars. I was nervous about having a mortgage and wasting money on paying interest, so we took all the money from our savings and paid for it in cash. (Since then, I have bought every house, every car, and paid every tuition with cash, never wanting to be in debt to anyone, ever.) I loved owning it and felt like I was investing in myself when I painted it, put in a new kitchen counter, and got our first dishwasher. Two weeks before the baby was born, Laure’s father died, completely unexpectedly. The juxtaposition of the grief from that loss with the joy of the newborn baby still lives with us today, all these years later. Laure dealt with it with her iron will, keeping the pain and sadness of losing her dad at bay, knowing she had to focus on bringing this new life into the world safely and with joy. I got to see her go through labor all over again. The same doctor was with us and again, when the baby’s head popped out, he let me reach in, grab the shoulders, and pull the baby out. I held the baby to show Laure and I saw the little balls hanging down between their legs, just like with Henry, and announced “It’s a boy!”

Laure and the doctor looked at me like I was crazy, and said, “It’s a girl, you idiot. Look again.” Sure enough, I had missed the call, mistaking the baby’s engorged labia for testicles. (I still feel like a dummy about that one.) Sophie entered our lives that day and changed our world forever. She was a very different kid than Henry. She hated the noise and action of the city, and we started spending more and more time in Woodstock, where we were all much happier. More space, more nature, more focus, and more time together.

My only guiding principle for my career was, “work with the best film directors,” and so far that had served me well. Woody Allen asked me to play a fun character, a famous rock star shopping for art, in his new film, Hannah and Her Sisters. The scene was with Barbara Hershey, Michael Caine, and Max von Sydow. I had met Michael Caine through the Yateses and knew Max from the Samson movie, so I felt very comfortable playing an arrogant asshole in the scene with them. This time, Woody was friendly, hanging out in the trailer with me, talking trash about other actors, being funny. He was so meticulous in setting up a huge, intricately choreographed master shot that we didn’t have time to shoot one frame of film before we broke for lunch. Woody invited me to join him at a fancy restaurant along with other actors. Just Max Von Sydow, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, and Daniel Stern at a table. Talk about imposter syndrome—I spent the meal having a complete out-of-body experience, with the phrase, “One of these things is not like the other,” running in a loop inside my mind. It felt like a huge milestone to be included in the troupe of New York actors that Woody Allen called on to be in his films, my talent recognized by my idol.

The city was driving us crazy with two kids—taking them to the park, playdates, day care, living in four little rooms. Woodstock life was so much easier, so after a year or so, we decided to sell our apartment and buy a house in Woodstock. I figured it was only a two-hour drive from Manhattan, so I could come down for auditions. Our apartment was already worth one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and we sold it immediately. We found a beautiful, woodsy house on twenty acres in Woodstock for the same amount and opened escrow on it. We were excited and scared, but the school seemed good, and we could finally commit to our dream of raising our family in a small-town community. Laure and I went to dinner with one of my agents to tell her the news. She said, “What are you, retiring?”

I said, “No, I want to keep working, of course. But we just can’t live in an apartment anymore with two kids. We need a house with a yard so they can go outside and play without having to go to the park or a play date. We need a house!”

To which she replied with these fateful words—“They have houses in Los Angeles,” and stunned Laure and me into silence. The thought of moving to Los Angles had never even entered our minds. “They have houses in Los Angeles and they have show business. What are you going to do in Woodstock?”

Laure and I went home that night and talked it through, unable to refute anything my agent had said. But we had already sold our apartment, so we were committed to moving. We were luckily still in the window where we could get out of escrow on the Woodstock house, and we did. I spent five days in Los Angeles and found a house to rent in an area called Beverly Hills Post Office, and we told the moving company to take our stuff there instead of Woodstock. Within a matter of weeks, we were living at the top of a canyon, at the end of a dead-end road, with a swimming pool, deer eating in our backyard, sheep grazing on the side of the hill, in a house that the famed singer Lola Falana once lived in, and seeing Fred Astaire drive his Rolls-Royce up our canyon road when we went into town for supplies. No wonder we fell in love with California so deeply.

DRIVING ROBERT REDFORDAT ONE HUNDREDMILES PER HOUR

The move to California changed everything. Henry and Sophie each had their own bedroom. And a playroom. And a dead-end street to play on. Henry started preschool, and we dove right in. The beauty of it was that there were not only houses in LA, but also work. Within a week, I got offered the lead role in a comedy called The Boss’ Wife. The script was mediocre, and from my point of view, if they were asking me to be the lead actor, that meant (a) it had been turned down by all of the really good comedic leading men, (b) the director/writer was a tall, goofy Jewish guy who saw themselves in me, and (c) it was not going to be a hit movie. I hated to turn down work, so I told my agent I would do it only if they paid me the outrageous sum of two hundred thousand dollars (the most money I had ever made was eighty-five thousand dollars). Knowing they would never go for it, I threw the script in the garbage and felt good about my integrity.

When my agent called with the news that they had agreed to my terms, I had to fish the script out of the garbage, the cover now stained with baby food and peanut butter, the perfect symbol for the stain one gets from doing things just for the money. The movie was actually fun. Christopher Plummer played my boss (obviously a low point in his amazing career), and Martin Mull and Fisher Stevens became my friends as well. There was, once again, an awkward sex scene I had to do in a shower with a beautiful and wonderful model/actress named Arielle Dombasle. What made this one especially uncomfortable is that we did the scene in some makeshift set in a weird warehouse in the desert of Palm Springs, and as we shot it, ripping each other’s clothes off while making out furiously, we began to notice that our clothes were turning a very dark brown from the disgusting water they had rigged to the shower. They stopped filming to try to fix it, but they couldn’t figure out the problem, so we just shot the scene in the rusty water. I went home to Laure feeling dirty in so many ways.

Things got back on track when I got the part in one of my favorite movies, Born in East L.A. Cheech Marin wrote, directed, and starred in it as a Mexican American who gets trapped in Mexico without his passport and has to sneak back into America. I played a “coyote,” a human trafficker and a real asshole who lives in Tijuana and smuggles people across the border. True West had opened me up to finding the fun of playing a bad guy, but this was the first time I got to try it on film. The part fit like a glove, and we had a blast filming it, improvising and making each other laugh a lot. The toughest part was being away from the family. When I had a day off, I would hitch a ride in the van that drove the actual film back up from Tijuana to LA to be developed. The poor driver had to do that three-hour drive twice a day. There were a couple of times he was so tired that he started to fall asleep behind the wheel and let me do the driving—which was a big deal, for a Teamster to let one of the actors drive.

I will gladly bet you ten-to-one odds on ten dollars, dear reader (or listener, if you are enjoying this epic work as an audiobook), that you have never seen Robert Redford’s Milagro Beanfield War, one of the sweetest movies I have ever seen, let alone been in. And instead of sending me the ten dollars you now owe me, go buy, rent, or stream this movie. It is a great American story about a town of people whose anger at their lost land and lost rights comes to a boiling point when a farmer, his field dry because the water rights to his land have been taken, illegally taps into an irrigation pipe and his field begins to flourish. The town is inspired and rises up against the land developers and, like all good movies, righteousness wins the day. It is lyrical and funny and human, with incredible performances by Christopher Walken, Melanie Griffith, Sônia Braga, Rubén Blades, Chick Vennera, my old friend John Heard, and on and on and on. Watch this film! My agent got a call offering me the part of Herbie, a social work student who comes to the town of Milagro to do some kind of study but ends up joining the town in their fight against the land developers. Redford remembered me from my Ordinary People screen test and offered to put me in the company of one of the classiest troupes of actors ever assembled. My agent explained the “favored-nations” deal, that we would all be in New Mexico for five months and everyone would get sixty thousand dollars. The prestige of the film, working with Redford at last, and being so flattered that he had cast me alongside these other actors made me very proud and excited, but the “five months in New Mexico” part was a bit of a problem. When my agent conveyed my reservations, Redford stepped up to the plate for me again. Even though it was favored-nations, he had them include in my contract an airplane ticket every week so I would be able to go home and see my family. He was so thoughtful and generous, and off I went to New Mexico.

It turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life. Five months is a long time and the friendships I made were deep. Rubén Blades was a force of nature. I could barely compute the breadth of the life he was living—a phenomenal musician, political activist, an icon in Panama who was considered presidential material at the time, and a brilliant fucking actor on top of it all. So knowledgeable, and so fucking funny too. We saw each other for years afterward, but have since lost touch. (Rubén, if you’re reading this, call me.) Having my dearest friend John Heard on the set, who had taken me into his home and life from my first day in New York, was so sweet, and we got to hang out like old times. Sônia Braga lived next door to me and fed me lots of meals. Such a loving friend. I was a Mets fan, and that was the year that they won it all, with the spectacular Billy Buckner misplay, and I watched every inning of it in amazement, cheering loudly in my little room. I loved Chick Vennera, who played the central character of the farmer, Joe Mondragon. He had the weight of the world on his shoulders as a relatively unknown actor who Redford had chosen over Cheech Marin. I was rooting for Cheech when I found out he was up for the role, but Redford had a vision for the film and Chick was the person he saw. And he was right. After my near miss with Ordinary People, I know how Cheech must have felt not getting the part, but in the end, it is right there on film to see—each of Redford’s artistic choices coming together to create a masterpiece. One of the sweetest parts for me in the film was my character’s relationship with an old man in town, a man who speaks with angels and who takes me in. He was played by an amazing actor, Carlos Riquelme, who had a long career in the Mexican film industry. He gave such a tremendously funny, smart, sly, and innocent performance, and was such a loving person.

One fateful day, I had a big scene with Carlos. His character lived in a hut, and he was teaching me a prayer or something. It was a very good scene, and I was excited to finally get to do an intimate scene with him and get a chance to work closely with Bob (yes, I knew him well enough to now call Mr. Redford “Bob”). With so many characters and storylines, you really savor the moments when you get to do your thing. We rehearsed and started shooting and it was going well but at some point, Bob seemed a little annoyed with me. (He was not really annoyed at all, but that’s how it felt, because I wanted to be perfect.) We were between takes and I was just waiting for the next setup, not doing anything. And I think that was the problem—I wasn’t doing anything. Bob came over and asked me something that still rings in my ears today.

“Do you know what lens we are on?”

“What?”

“Do you know what lens we are on?”

“Um, no.”

“So how do you know how to perform the scene, if you don’t even know what the camera is seeing?” He came up close and framed my face with his hands, mimicking a close-up. “Are we here?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are we wide?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because it is a totally different performance if the camera is seeing you here or here or here. If I am on a fifty millimeter from this distance, then I am seeing your whole body. Your body language, the scene, the atmosphere. But when I come here, on a one hundred and twenty millimeter, I am right on your face. You have to bring the whole performance into just right here. And I might come closer, right into here.” He framed just my eyes. “You have to carve out your performance for each shot, each take, and know what you are trying to do each and every moment for that particular shot. That is part of your job.”

I felt embarrassed, but also incredibly challenged. And I immediately got what he meant. It was the best film acting lesson I ever got, and the best directing lesson as well. It changed the way I have approached my work since then, understanding what each shot is, what the audience is seeing and feeling at all times, and using the framing of each shot to show a slightly different side to the character and story. I have passed Bob’s lesson on to many young actors myself. That’s what makes Bob “Robert Redford.” He is a master filmmaker both in front of and behind the camera, and he knows how to connect to an audience like no one else. Watch his performance in All Is Lost, a film with only one character, no dialogue, and shot under the toughest conditions imaginable. His artistry is on full display in that film, and his lessons are still with me in a very deep way.

I think he felt bad about challenging me, because as we were wrapping for the day and I was getting in the van to go back “home” to the condos, Bob came out to his car, the beautiful Porsche 911 he drove to work every day. He was kind and told me what a good job I had done in the scene, and I got to thank him for guiding me through it so well. I must have commented on how cool his car was, because the next thing I heard was, “Do you want to drive it?” It was one of those moments in my show business life where it feels like I might have lost consciousness, or have awakened in Oz. Before I knew it, I was behind the wheel of a Porsche 911, just me and Bob, speeding down the mountain road at eighty miles per hour.

I could tell he had second thoughts almost immediately. Followed quickly by third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. But he was determined to really let me experience this engineering marvel and challenge me for the second time today, in a wholly unexpected way. The way home from the set is on the High Road to Taos, a spectacularly beautiful, twisty mountain road from Taos to Santa Fe, and I drove it so fucking fast! It was completely exhilarating! Very intimate, these race cars. There were only two seats in the whole car. Just me and Bob in a tuna can, screaming down the High Road to Taos. Bob looked like any dad might, white knuckles gripping the door handle, feet pressing through the floorboards, and a forced smile plastered on his face, which did not conceal the terror and nausea I could see coursing through his body. But he kept encouraging me to go faster, explaining the aerodynamic theory about how in a Porsche, going faster into the curves actually helps push the car into the ground and hug the road. Or something like that. (My knowledge of cars is basically pedals and steering wheels.) I like to go fast but not do anything dangerous, but this was a once in a lifetime chance, and anyway, to quote Rain Man, “I’m an excellent driver.” Shifting up and down, Bob taught me how to listen to the engine, roaring so perfectly, running up the rpms so high. The car hugged the road like there was glue on the tires. It felt like one tiny, wrong tug on the wheel would send us flying off the side of the mountain. But he told me to push it, and I did. I have to say, that was a lot of pressure. Not only were our lives on the line, but one wrong flick of the wrist and I would forever be known as the idiot who killed Robert Redford. Not the legacy I was hoping for. At the bottom of the mountain, there was a good long stretch of straight highway and for the first and only time in my life, I drove a car at a hundred miles an hour. I have never forgotten how sick he looked, and it still makes me laugh. He never did invite me to drive it again, but I was able to bring this American (and personal) treasure back to my condo parking lot, safe and sound and beating the vans with the cast by about a half an hour (I win!). Robert Redford is an artist and a talent of the highest magnitude and, on top of that, has done enormous things in his epic life for the environment, the film industry, promoting art, Native American culture, and on and on. And I just want it to be known that a lot of that would not have happened if I wasn’t such an excellent driver, a God Behind the Wheel. You’re welcome, world!

Crazily, a year or so after the shoot, the film was finished and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, 1990. I was in Rome, in the middle of shooting a terrible underwater monster movie that starred Peter Weller, a major flop called Leviathan. Peter’s character in our movie was similar to his RoboCop character, only stiffer and less human. I played the part of “Six Pack” (obviously nicknamed for his beer consumption, not his ab muscles), a disgruntled underwater miner with a weird hairdo and a ridiculously bad facial hair configuration. I got a call inviting me to the Cannes Film festival for the opening of Milagro. It was going to be me, Redford, Sônia Braga, and Melanie Griffith (cue “One of these things is not like the other” again). Like the idea of a Hollywood Screen Test, the Cannes Film Festival was something I had only vaguely heard about in movies I’d seen about Hollywood. I stayed at the Carlton Hotel, right on the French Riviera, and it was a crazy show-business atmosphere of actresses, producers, financiers, paparazzi, and swag. I did a bunch of interviews to publicize the movie, and all my expenses were paid by the studio, so I was having the time of my life. The day of the premiere, I was told to report to another hotel, a much nicer hotel, where Bob, Sônia, and Melanie were staying. I was waiting in the lobby when they suddenly appeared, on the move with an entourage of security. They pulled me in with them and off we went. Let the chase begin.

Bob was the biggest, handsomest, coolest movie star and director on the planet, and this was the center of the publicity machine. It was like being with the Beatles. They took us on a freight elevator, through the kitchen and an underground tunnel to a parking garage. The four of us got into a limo. As soon as the limo left the garage, the chase was on. Racing in a harrowing fashion through the streets of Cannes, paparazzi on motorcycles butted up against the window trying to get a photograph. It was quite terrifying—not only the physical danger, but to get a small glimpse at what Bob’s life was like. He is such a humble, thoughtful artist, and so successful, and this is the price? Just insane. Weirdly, I feel like I got the tiniest taste of Princess Diana’s final moments and really, thank God we came out alive. The driver was insanely good (although Bob knew my driving skills, so I hope he was comforted that I was ready to jump in if needed). We left the narrow roads and screeched into and through another underground lot. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. When the car finally stopped and we got out, we had somehow landed right at the red carpet, with hundreds of photographers snapping our picture. We climbed the red carpeted stairway to a platform and turned to see a sea of tens of thousands of people, fans, chanting and cheering in a deafening roar for Bob and the beautiful Sônia and Melanie. And there I was, somehow right next to them all, in a terrible rented tuxedo and my Six Pack style, saying to myself, “You’d better enjoy this because this will never ever happen again.” And I was right; it never has.

Now what are the chances of having two death-defying car rides with the worldwide legend, Robert Redford himself, and living to tell the tale? Crazy, right?

KEVIN ARNOLDTEACHES ME TO READ

The Wonder Years was a game changer for me in so many ways. Neal Marlens and Carol Black had written a brilliant pilot script, and I was asked to audition for the role of the Narrator, the older Kevin Arnold who was telling the whole story. The producers wanted to cast the part of the unseen character without the bias of seeing the actor doing it, so I went to a recording studio and recorded it anonymously. It was a huge part, so much dialogue, but it fit me like a glove. A kid in the 1960s, the exact same age as I had been, living in a suburb that felt like Bethesda and my junior high school, with neighborhoods where kids played football in the street and eighteen-year-old brothers were being shipped off to Vietnam. Written with such fondness, humor, and insight, this narrator had observations into my own childhood that helped me understand myself a little more. When I got to the final scene of that audition, talking about walking through the neighborhood at night, seeing families through their windows and the blue lights of people’s televisions, I was transported back to Bethesda, walking the neighborhood at night collecting my paper route money from my neighbors. I connected with the character so much that I felt like I just had to get the job. And I did. By the way, it turned out that Carol Black was my age and grew up in the town next to Bethesda, Silver Spring, Maryland. Like I said, it fit me like a glove.

It came time to make the deal. There really was no precedent for this type of part. The offer was low, about four thousand dollars an episode, but I didn’t care about that much. I only asked for two things—to have freedom to continue to act in movies without the show interfering with that, and to be able to direct the show. They agreed to both. The only thing left to negotiate was my billing. It was a cast of unknowns so, having a bit of a reputation already, I could’ve been the first one billed, but that wouldn’t make sense since Fred Savage was really going to be the star of the show. I could have been the final person billed, with a fancier credit like “And Daniel Stern as the Narrator” or “Daniel Stern as Adult Kevin Arnold,” but both of those made it feel like my character was separate from the story and I didn’t want to mess up the show’s integrity. I thought it was important for the audience to just listen to my words and not think about me; just like at the audition, the unseen character played by an unknown actor. So, much to my agent’s disbelief, I decided to take no billing at all. Just let my voice speak for itself . . . and Kevin Arnold.

Since I was going to direct an early episode, I shadowed the director of the pilot every day to get a feel for the style he was creating, as well as to get to know the actors and crew. Interestingly, they hired an actor to stand off camera and read the narration during the scenes, to give the actors the right timing to fill up those silent moments. Very smart idea, although weird to hear someone else doing my part. I gave the script to my brother, who by this point had moved to LA to be a television writer. I knew he could write this show, which was basically our childhood, and before we had even finished the pilot, David had written a brilliant future episode. Being on the set and in the editing room also gave me a chance to become friends with the producers, Neal and Carol. They were perfectionists, and I must have re-recorded different sections of the pilot at seven or eight different sessions. The show turned out to be amazing, and not only did the network pick it up for a series, but they also decided to premiere the show in the best TV slot possible, right after the Super Bowl. I gave David’s spec script to Neal and Carol, and they wisely hired him, as he went on to write some of the show’s best episodes and has had a sensational career himself. Narrating, directing, still a free agent for films, and with my brother working on the show—it was the perfect gig.

I would swing by the writer’s room sometimes to see David and Neal and play basketball during their breaks. One day, I happened to mention that I had been offered a movie that was going to shoot in Africa. The script wasn’t that great, and I wasn’t going to do it, but it would be awesome to go to Africa. Neal was worried that it might mess up the scheduling of the recording sessions for the show, and I reassured him it wasn’t going to happen (and it didn’t). But evidently Neal was not reassured, because my agent got a call the very next day informing him that I was fired. Ouch! Even though my contract explicitly said I was free to do any other movie I wanted to—and that I hadn’t even taken the movie—Neal had second thoughts and decided to get rid of me before the pilot aired. What a two-faced asshole he turned out to be. I was devastated. I loved the show, I loved my part, and I was very upset about losing my directing opportunity too. And it made it awkward for my brother who, of course, had to stay in this breakthrough job. The show premiered after the Super Bowl, with the very talented Arye Gross now narrating the story instead of me. I was bummed watching it and kind of pissed off because I had gotten fired for no good reason whatsoever, with Neal Marlens taking something I said so off-handedly, as a friend hanging out, to stab me in the back.

But then a crazy thing happened. The very next day, my agent got a call from the studio asking to rehire me. To this day, I still have no idea who brought me back, but somebody thought that whatever I was bringing to the role elevated it to a different level, and that I was an important member of the cast. It worked out beautifully. They tripled my salary, gave me bonus payments each time I had to re-record in the studio, guaranteed me three directing jobs per season, and reiterated the terms which allowed me to take any other job I wanted, anywhere in the world. I pretended there were no hard feelings toward Neal because my brother was working with him, and I would work with him closely while directing, but I never trusted him again. He is a very small man, with an enormous chip on his shoulder, and I think the fact that I am a foot taller than him makes him very competitive with me. That little fucker separated my shoulder when he blindsided me with a vicious hit during what was supposed to be a very casual game of touch football. He and Carol created a brilliant show and hired an outstanding writing staff and terrifically talented actors, but he really couldn’t handle the pressure of producing great television every week. I was very happy when he left after the first season and Bob Brush came in to helm the show through all of the following seasons.

I absolutely loved directing. Fred, Danica, Josh, Olivia, and Jason were fantastic young people. I loved them like my own children and directed them that way too. Dan Lauria and Alley Mills, top-notch actors, played the parents. I loved leading the crew and trying to get the best out of each person. The director is the conductor, aware of what note every instrument is playing, making sure they are all in harmony as they bring the score/script to life, and directing The Wonder Years was like leading the most talented orchestra in the world. I directed ten episodes, and it was like getting paid to go to film school. I grew in confidence on the set and loved the discipline of having to meet tight schedules and find creative solutions within those limits. And I loved working with actors, watching them.

When I first had to audition actors, I would hide in the back of the room, embarrassed to be the director, on the other side of the casting game. Knowing how much each actor wanted/ needed the job, I felt bad they had to go through the humiliation of auditioning, when each one of them is overqualified to begin with. But over the years, I realized that the actors are having fun—enjoying their chance to perform, putting themselves on the line with an outrageous choice of characterization, willing to take directions and help bring the story to life, picking up their instrument and seeing if they fit into this orchestra. After years of feeling like acting was a self-aggrandizing profession for egomaniacs, watching actors audition and perform, exposing their deepest feelings for our entertainment, education, and enjoyment, finally made me realize the nobility and importance of the acting profession.

I loved watching Fred and the gang grow up. They all had high academic ambition and were wrapped up in their on-set school, coming out to do their scenes but really thinking about whatever the hell they were studying in there. Fred went to Stanford, Danica is a brilliant mathematician who has written math books, Josh is a lawyer, and on and on. They have great parents who helped them navigate the minefield of being child actors. For my money, being a child actor is a lose/lose situation for a kid. Either you try and fail, personally rejected by the powers-that-be, which can really take a toll on a young ego, or you are in a hit TV show or movie, and then you have to deal with the consequences of fame, money, puberty, and all the rest of it in the public eye. The Wonder Years kids and their families dealt with it as well as any I have ever seen.

My salary kept going up and up, although not that high by today’s standards, but it was easy money. And when I was shooting a film, I was getting two paychecks at the same time (sweet!), going into recording studios in Chicago, Reno, San Francisco, Rome, or wherever I was on location to record for The Wonder Years. When I was doing City Slickers in Santa Fe, I had to get the narration out fast for broadcast and couldn’t find a recording studio in time, so I had the sound guy from the film come over to the house I was renting, and we recorded it there. It was a very echo-y tile house, so I actually recorded it on my bed, in my pajamas, with the blanket over my head to deaden the sound and a flashlight to read the script. When we sent it in, they loved the quality of the recording and wondered what studio we used. Go figure. The other unforeseen bonus to the job was I was suddenly hot in the commercial voiceover world. The Madison Avenue commercial people are a whole other breed of human, and trying to please those executives can be a trying experience. When I recorded a commercial for Burger King, I must have said, “The winds of change are blowing with a sandwich made a whole new way,” about six thousand times, in every possible inflection, before that idiot director finally thought it was perfect. What the fuck does that even mean? It was a hamburger, for fuck’s sake!

But maybe the most life-changing thing about my wonderful years on The Wonder Years was that I actually learned to read. I had already gotten a little bit better at reading from reading more and more scripts. I even ventured into reading books for fun every so often, once I discovered Harry Crews and Elmore Leonard, although they still took me a while, fighting through my dyslexia. The years of reading The Wonders Years stories out loud, week after week, year after year, vanquished my fear of reading out loud, of the dreaded “cold reading,” a fear I thought I would never overcome. I can now pick up any book or script or article and read it cold, almost flawlessly, with meaning and understanding. I have no idea how I do it, except that so many times I was handed a new rewrite of a Wonder Years script and had to read it cold, with meaning and understanding, so my brain learned how to process the information and make it come out of my mouth, while keeping me and my fears out of the way. I am still flabbergasted and proud every time I do that.

Narrating the show was the opportunity of a lifetime. Every script was great, and I loved my part in each one. Every week I got to tell my story to America. Sure, I was playing Kevin Arnold, remembering his stories. But his stories always felt like my stories—my first kiss, bad teachers, great teachers, my older sister, being a hippie, the music, and on and on. My connection to the show was bone-deep and the connection the show had with audiences, and still has, makes me deeply thankful to have been the voice of this seismic cultural experience.

The show ended after six years, one short of where I think it should have ended. If Kevin had had one more year, we would have watched him graduate high school and deal with the final coming-of-age rituals that happen at that time. But for whatever reason, they pulled the plug. It was a late decision, and the writers had to try to write a decent finale in a very short time, with no chance of the real groundwork being laid in the shows leading up to the last one. But like the true champions they were, they wrote a beautiful final script, wrapping up stories, giving glimpses into the future and saying a heartfelt goodbye to the audience that had been with us the whole time. In the final moment of the show, the premise of the whole series, that Kevin Arnold is now an older man telling the story of his childhood, comes into play for the first and only time. Suddenly there is another voice on the narration track, the voice of a child talking to the Narrator, interrupting his storytelling and asking him to come outside and play. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but that very last day, I brought my son Henry to the studio and he read those lines, playing the unseen son to my unseen character. Like I said, from the very first time I read it, The Wonder Years always felt like it was really my own personal story that I was telling every week, and having Henry there bringing it to a close was almost more than I could handle. The recording session lasted much longer than usual because I kept crying in the middle of the reading, so sad to see it end and so proud of what we had accomplished.

ENTER JOE ROTH

Life was very full at this point. California started to feel like home. With the money from the New York co-op and the movies, we bought the rental house in Beverly Hills Post Office. Henry and Sophie consumed our lives, driving them back and forth to each of their schools, play dates, sports teams. When Henry was five, I signed up to coach the T-ball team in the Beverly Hills Little League, loving teaching those little boys and girls the game and soaking in their innocence. (Throughout their childhoods, I coached all of my kids’ baseball and basketball teams.) The joy increased exponentially when our third child, Ella, was born. At her birth, we had a different doctor in a different hospital, but I felt the same awe when I got to pull her out by the shoulders and announce her arrival, “It’s a girl!”—which was the right call, because she was, in fact, a girl. (Two out of three ain’t bad.) I was only thirty-one and had a ton of energy, which was needed to put the time and focus into raising three very different kids, each with their own needs and at very different developmental stages. Laure had become the greatest mom, wife, and partner in the world, and kept our lives organized and our bellies full. And while the kids were young, we decided that instead of me leaving everyone at home when I got a movie out of town, everyone would come with me. When Laure was a teenager, her father was in the foreign service and was stationed in Spain, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Every time the family moved, Laure watched her mother find a house to live in, schools to attend, stores to shop at, and cultural experiences to learn from for the kids. Who knew that all of that would come into play in our lives, but she was built for this. Working on good films and bringing my family with me was my deepest dream come true.

Joe Roth is one of the most brilliant movie producers and executives ever to participate in show business—starting his own company, Morgan Creek, then running 20th Century Fox, then Disney, Revolution, and on and on. I didn’t even think about who had those executive positions at this point because my boss was always the director, and I didn’t need to please anyone but them. Morgan Creek was producing some of the best films around, but Joe decided to take a break from producing and to get behind the camera and direct a sweet little film called Coupe de Ville, another terrific coming-of-age story of three brothers on a road trip needing to readjust to life with the news that their father is dying. I really liked the script, and the part was a tough Air Force pilot, the oldest brother and disciplinarian, very different than any role I had ever gotten to play. Joe and I met, and he gave me the part. He had loved the coming-of-age movies I had been in, Breaking Away and Diner, and I think wanted to capture some of that feeling in this movie. We shot the film in Florida and South Carolina, and Laure packed us all up and moved us into houses and neighborhoods in both places, even finding summer camp for the kids. Not only did Joe and I hit it off right away, but Joe’s wife Donna and Laure became fast friends. They were in the same boat as us, with a newborn baby, finding housing, shooting the film, and we all became friends for life during that time. Joe was a really good director, very encouraging and focused on the nuances of each character. He had a clear vision of the film but was also open to letting the actors own their characters and improvise. Maybe a little too open.

It was a comedy, but the storylines were filled with conflict, which the cast was more than capable of creating. It was an intimidating joy to do scenes with the hyper-talented Alan Arkin. He played my father, and watching the subtlety he brought to everything he did was like getting a masterclass acting lesson in real time, forcing me to find the simplest truth in each and every beat of a scene. And off camera, his humility as a person and an artist were life lessons in themselves. My younger brother was played by Arye Gross, the actor who had temporarily replaced me on The Wonder Years. Arye and I became fast friends, had a great time doing our scenes together, and really bonded over dealing with the actor who played our youngest brother, Patrick Dempsey. Patrick was an up-and-coming young star, handsome and funny. He had done a couple of teen comedies, but he acted like he was a major movie star. He was probably around twenty-three, and he had recently married his acting coach/manager/guru, Rocky, who was about twenty-five years older than him, and the two of them set out to undermine the director and take over the film. I have worked with arrogant actors, but I have never seen anything like this. Rocky would be on the set, and after we did a take, instead of coming over with the rest of us to talk to the director about adjustments he might like to make in the scene, Patrick would beeline to Rocky, who would whisper her notes to him. It was incredibly disrespectful, but Joe didn’t want to cause a problem with one of his lead actors, so he tried to manage the situation rather than confront it. Rocky’s notes to Patrick seemed to be all about how to draw attention to himself at every moment of every scene, even if that meant not doing the dialogue, taking other people’s lines, doing extraneous physical business to distract, and whatever else the two of them came up with in their fucking little confabs. I got tired of that shit real fast and told him so. He said his character was a clownish person and he was just playing it to push my character’s buttons, which would be fine if that was what the director asked us to do. But this had nothing to do with the collaboration that needs to take place on a film set and everything to do with ambition and self-aggrandizement.

I finally lost my shit one day. The movie is called Coupe de Ville because the three brothers are driving their father’s prized car across the country so he can have it back before he dies, and my character is the one who does all the driving. The picture car was a beautiful and rare car and, both as the character and the actor driving it, I had to take really good care of it. We were shooting a scene of us driving down the highway, talking about something or other, and Patrick was riding shotgun. In one of the stupidest improvisational moments in film history, Patrick slides over to me, pins my foot down on the gas pedal, and tries to wrestle control of the steering wheel from me. The camera crew was driving right beside us, filming from an open truck, and this putz risked crashing into them, running us all off the road, and killing people. I slammed my elbow into him to get him off of me and he finally slid back to his side of the bench seat. I pulled the car over, went around the car, and pulled him out. I think he scared himself, or at least knew he had crossed a line, but still tried to laugh it off as just “improv.” The crew pulled us apart before a real fight began, but I made it clear I wasn’t going to play that way anymore. From then on, Joe took more control of things, Rocky was not allowed on the set, and Patrick got moved to the back seat. Assholes.

Joe and I really bonded over it all. When we got back to LA, our families were still seeing each other regularly. He knew that I was interested in directing, and when he decided to shoot an additional scene to open the movie, which had younger actors playing the three brothers, he asked me to come to the shoot and help him direct the child actors, since I had experience doing that from The Wonder Years. I offered absolutely no help whatsoever, but it was flattering to be respected in that way. And this was just the beginning of the influence Joe had on my career and my life. Joe was not only editing the film, but secretly negotiating to leave his own company and take the job of running 20th Century Fox. Only a couple of months later, I was in Chicago shooting a film, and Joe had taken the reins at Fox. He called me up one day with very exciting news: “Hey, I just bought your movie.” That movie was Home Alone.

“SO WHAT ISJOE PESCI REALLY LIKE?”