Amy Sohn - The Actress

“Bridget knew you were booked,” he said. “I was with her when she got the call. She had the executed contracts in front of her.”

“Why couldn’t I delay?”

“We don’t want to hold up Walter. He’s taking a gamble on you. Delays can be more dangerous to the actor than the director.”

“You mean he would fire me, when he’s been trying to cast Ellie for a year?”

“Bridget’s not perfect,” he said. “We’ve had our conflicts, but don’t dwell on this. She only wants the best for you.” He closed the script he was reading, a much buzzed-about drama about the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike. “One thing you have to get used to is that it’s impossible to be two places at once.”

“That’s exactly what she said.”

When Maddy walked into the restaurant in West Hollywood, for a moment she didn’t recognize him. The man waiting for her at the table was so tan and muscular, his hair grown out, his biceps visible in his T-shirt, that she thought he was an actor. But then he waved eagerly, and she realized it was Dan. As they hugged, she said, “You look fantastic.”

He had called to ask her to breakfast, saying he wanted to catch up. “Thanks,” he said. “This climate’s actually good for me, despite everything I thought about L.A. before.”

“So what have you been doing to get this buff?” she asked.

“Well, surfing.”

“You? Surfing?”

“I know. I go to San Onofre. I have all these new buddies. I feel like, if I made the choice to live here, I should take advantage of the the water and get in shape.”

She thought about her own nascent L.A. social life—Ananda McCarthy’s friends, mostly ex-models and ex-actresses. All of them had used their looks and sexuality to get money, jobs, or men. Most were housewives, with full-time nannies. Maddy felt young around them and bored by their anecdotes. She wondered if Dan’s surfing buddies were real friends.

“You look like you’ve lost weight,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been dieting.” Through yoga and swimming, Maddy had dropped from a size ten to a size six. “Just eating better. I want to be a little smaller for Husbandry.”

“Don’t get too small.”

They ordered food, and before it came, he reached for her hand on the table. “Mad,” he said. “I’m sorry about those emails I sent when you were in Venice.”

“It’s okay. It was sudden. You were angry. You don’t have to apologize.” Delicately, she moved her hand away, not wanting there to be any ambiguity. This was a friendly coffee, not a relapse date. Since Catalina, she and Steven had been making love at least once a day, even on nights when they came home late from events. She had decided that the key to her happiness was to trust him and give him his space. When she did that, he was not only warmer but hornier, which made her more confident and certain of his love.

“I want you to know that I forgive you,” Dan said.

“Uh-oh,” she said with a smile. “Did you join A.A.? Are you doing the steps?”

“No, but I started therapy. I’ve been seeing a female shrink who’s helped me a lot.”

Watching her swirl her spoon in her coffee, Dan couldn’t believe how much he had hated her once. For months he had been furious, convinced that she was a sellout. In his bleaker moments, he had told himself the online rumors were true: She had been offered a contract to become Weller’s wife and draw attention away from the fact that he was gay: $1 million a year, with a five-year minimum and a $1 million bonus for each baby.

But even if he believed such contracts existed, he couldn’t believe that Maddy would agree to such a thing. She had too much pride. And too much craft, as she would call it. She never would take money to be a prop.

More recently, he had come over to the less interesting, more depressing version of the story, the one that Rachel favored: Steven was straight and Maddy loved him but had subconsciously chosen him because he could help her career. Dan couldn’t blame her. On the screen, she was a natural. He had been a yutz for not casting her in one of his films before. He had told himself it would harm their relationship to collaborate—but it was mainly a cover for his fear. He had been afraid that if he put her in a movie, she would overshadow him.

If Maddy was with Steven for her career, then she was no more cynical than most people he had met in L.A. Everyone in the entertainment industry was an opportunist; they all just had different standards for how far they would go. He was an opportunist for taking the directing job in Sofia, and for dating Rachel Huber—even though the sex was only so-so, and she was too svelte for his taste—because he felt she could get him more jobs with Worldwide Films.

“Anyway,” Dan continued, “I spent all this time being angry with you. But now I understand that . . . we love who we love.”

“That’s true,” she said.

The food came—she got a spinach-and-goat-cheese omelet and he got oatmeal, both of them so healthy now—and they talked about her recent acting jobs. He said she’d been right about The Valentine being a bad script, but he expected it to do well at the box office because of its stars. He was renting in Venice Beach and doing the color correction on I Used to Know Her, and he said it was going to be really good when it came out. “But honestly,” he said, “even if all it does is earn back the advance, I’ll be fine with that. Even if it plays a couple weeks, then dies.”

She was surprised to hear him say this. The movie had been his heart and soul, and now he didn’t care how it did? “You don’t want it to die,” she said.

“No, I want you to get good reviews. And Kira. But I’ve moved on from it. It was a stepping-stone. Now I’m ready for studio jobs.”

This was the opposite of the Dan Ellenberg she once knew. “You don’t want to alternate—one for you, one for them, one for you?”

“It’s funny you should say that. I’ve been thinking about The Nest lately.”

“Are you working on it by yourself?” She hadn’t thought about the script in months. The part of her that had written I Used to Know Her with Dan seemed so young. When she remembered writing it, she had to think about the breakup, which made her feel guilty.

“Sort of. I showed it to this screenwriter buddy of mine. His name’s Oded Zalinsky. He wrote Hazing.” He coughed a little into his napkin. “And Butterface.”

Maddy had not seen either one, but the posters had been enough for her. They were misogynistic screeds about idiotic horndogs. “Why would you show The Nest to Oded Zalinsky? It’s a subtle, feminist, character comedy.”

“He was over at my place, and I mentioned the script, and he said he wanted to read it. He went crazy for it. I mean, he was so impressed by what we came up with. The idea of a girl who loves her parents more than she loves her boyfriend. So he and I were just riffing, kind of spitballing, and we reconceived it as a more adult comedy. A relationship comedy. With a male lead instead of female. He wants to collaborate with me on it, cowrite it, because he already has a vision for how he would direct it. But because you and I had started working on it together . . . um. It’s a little complicated.” He took something out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her.

“What is this?”

“Kind of a release. Basically, it says that for a small consideration, you’ll let me do whatever I want with The Nest.”

“I don’t understand.” She scanned the page. She saw the phrases “all of my rights of every kind throughout the universe in and to the Work” and “sum of one dollar.” She lifted her head slowly. “You want me to give up my rights to The Nest for a dollar?”

“Well.” He coughed again. “It sounds like you’re focusing more on acting these days, and there’s no use having those pages just sit there. I didn’t think you’d care about the money since, you know . . . Steven . . . This way Oded and I can take the grain of the story, the concept, and develop something new from it, without having to worry if you’ll—”

“Sue you?” So this was what their friendly breakfast was all about. It was sneaky to do it here, one-on-one, instead of through her manager or lawyer. Dan had been trying to appeal to her nostalgia, her affection for him, all to get her to give up her intellectual property.

She had a copy of The Nest on her laptop but never looked at it. If he had rewritten it without consulting her and the movie had come out, she wouldn’t have sued; at least she didn’t think so. But he had played his hand. Dan had always been a terrible businessman.

“I have to show this to my attorney,” she said.

“Oh, sure,” he said, swallowing some water. “No problem.”

“And I’m sure he’s going to say no way.”

Dan nodded and chewed his lip, which he always did when he was chagrined. She’d been feeling generous toward him, like maybe he still understood her, but he’d just wanted something for nothing. For a buck.

They were quiet, looking down into their bottomless coffees. Finally, she said, “I guess we’ve both gone totally Hollywood, huh?”

“Why is that?”

“We get together for the first time since we broke up, and you ask me to relinquish my rights.”

It was two weeks into the Husbandry shoot, and Maddy was removing her costume in her dressing room. It had been a long day. She had shot a difficult sex scene with Steven. She had been nervous at first, but because the sex was meant to be bad, she was able to focus on her character, so it went relatively smoothly. It turned out it was easy to play bad sex.