Page 30 - ARUBA TODAY

A30
PEOPLE & ARTSFriday 5 January 2018
Gerwig, McKinnon other celebs
recall most broke they’ve been
In this Sept. 17, 2017, file photo, Kate McKinnon arrives at the By LEANNE ITALIE
69th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater in Los Associated Press
Angeles. NEW YORK (AP) — Clearly
not every actor suffered
Associated Press through lean times on their
way up, but origin stories
are full of tight-money mo-
ments nevertheless.
Patrick Wilson said re-
cently on the red carpet
that he once scraped for
change at the Lincoln Tun-
nel. Greta Gerwig said her
bank account was nearly
drained when she drove
past a Los Angeles movie
theater with her face on
the marquee.
Rosamund Pike and Kate
McKinnon can relate.
“It was lentils every day.
Lentils are a gorgeous sta-
ple. I still eat a lot of lentils of “The Florida Project.”
actually,” said McKinnon,
a “Saturday Night Live”
cast member who voiced
Lupe in “Ferdinand.”
Pike, in “Hostiles” with Chris-
tian Bale, remembered a
particularly joyful moment,
money wise.
“I lived in a house with
about five boys when I
started out and, yeah, I
didn’t have any money,
never had taken a taxi,”
she said. “Everything was
walking, trying to save ev-
ery penny you had, and I
remember when I did get a
job and suddenly I thought,
‘I can afford a taxi.’ It was
the most incredible feel-
ing.”
Timothee Chalamet may
be just 23, but the co-star
of “Call Me by Your Name”
struggled after a small role
in “Interstellar” turned out
not to be the big break he
had expected.
“The year I left college I
was living in the Bronx in
New York,” he said. “I had
done ‘Homeland’ at that
point but a lot of my acting
money had gone toward
tuition for school, so that
budgetaruba@setarnet.aw
was a scary time, and ‘In-
terstellar’ was coming out.
I figured there’d be a lot of
roles after that and there
wasn’t. That was the scari-
est time in my life. A first
world problem, but what-
ever.”
Willem Dafoe, at 62, re-
called working lots of jobs
in the early years “just
to keep a roof over my
head,” but the lean times
didn’t last long. Besides, he
had a safety net.
“I had a family that I knew
if I really got in trouble I
could go to them, so it
wasn’t a real cycle of pov-
erty, but I’ve had a taste
of what it’s like not to have
money,” said Dafoe, a star
Wilson, in the upcoming
thriller “The Commuter,”
was straight out of college
and working the ensembles
of musicals in Pittsburgh
when he amassed about
$1,500 for a move to New
York City. He loaded up a
rental truck with about $4
in cash to spare and off he
went.
“This was when the Lin-
coln Tunnel was about
$4 if you were a car — $2
each additional axle,” he
explained. “That’s impor-
tant because my U-Haul
truck had an additional
axle and we only had $4,
so we had to pull over to
the little side there and go
through change and had
to give them change out
of my backpack in order
to be allowed into New
York, so literally my first trip
in New York I was scraping
for change.”
Gerwig’s tight-money mo-
ment came after she ap-
peared in the 2010 film
“Greenberg,” a turning
point.
“I was staying in L.A. for au-
ditions and I had no mon-
ey. I had very little in my
bank account and I had
used the last of it to get a
rental car, and I remember
driving past a marquee in
Los Feliz — there’s a cine-
ma there — and my face
was on it and I didn’t have
a place to stay that night,”
Gerwig said.
Luckily, a family friend of-
fered a place to stay,
“then I ended up getting
two jobs and then it was
fine, but it was that mo-
ment of, ‘There I am!’ and
‘Where am I gonna stay to-
night?’”
Dermot Mulroney, star of
the recent Hallmark holi-
day movie “The Christmas
Train,” is among the lucky
ones.
Mulroney always worked,
starting with a paper route
as a 13-year-old, but “I got
a hot start coming out of
college and starting a ca-
reer so I didn’t really spend
grueling months trying to
get a foothold or anything
like that,” he said.
His father pitched in, of-
fering to pay his rent for a
year. He only had to help
for two months so, Mul-
roney smiled, “I’m gonna
ask him about that: Are
you still good for it?”q