Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success

by Jeff Hiller

It is one thing to rest on your laurels as you age, but it is a very different thing to be searching for laurels when you are on the wrong side of forty.

Millennials and Zoomers shout the importance of body positivity, but I am solidly Gen X, and we stick to old-fashioned body hating.

Pizza stops the tears, ya idiot!

A modesty pouch is a cock sock. It’s just a little nylon sack that you put over your, well, sack. And also your shaft. It is useful if an actor has a scene where he wants the audience to see his butt but doesn’t want the crew to see his junk. It is less useful if an actor is on all fours on an exam table with his cheeks spread and his hole blinking at the camera lens like it’s I Dream of Jeannie granting a wish.

“Hey! You’re really funny!” This was long before Somebody Somewhere, so I guess he had seen an improv show or something? It was so sweet of him and exciting for me. I was so flattered that I said, “Ohmmm, yousotalented!” but my mouth was full of sausage, so to make room for the words, my lips let loose a large piece of meat that dribbled a shameful trail of mustard down my light-pink shirt. Mr. Groff kindly kept walking.

You really don’t realize how much the internet has changed people’s lives until you start writing about life in the 1990s.

New York is where you can find your people because all the weirdos in small towns come here and join forces so that the “normal people” back home who were mean to you growing up become the new weirdos.

Life is surprises, not deadlines or fooling yourself into thinking you need to stop wanting something to get the thing you want.

It wasn’t a very fun place to work, but at least there was a single-stall bathroom on the third floor if I needed to poop.

I didn’t recognize some of the crew when I saw their noses and mouths.

I would love to tell you that I got this fissure from getting railed three ways to Saturday, but the truth is that I just ate too many carbs and didn’t drink enough water. If you get nothing else from reading my book, let it be this: Never push.

There is no job, no person, no piece of real estate or perfect family that will make someone happy forever.