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

by Jeff Hiller

I paid a lot of money to learn how to properly meditate in a transcendental way. There was a weeklong training session where they give you a personal mantra. Between the first and second day, I forgot my mantra. I thought that was hilarious and told my husband the story, practically begging him to tell me how unique and interesting I was. He said, “That was a plot point in a Woody Allen movie.” I went back to class and my teacher said, “Everyone forgets their mantra.” Perhaps meditation could help me work through the realization that I was basic?

I didn’t wrestle with the call one tiny bit! I felt the call! Did I feel called to preside over church council meetings or create an annual budget? No. Not really. I just felt called to be a singing, dancing, wocka-wocka showman of God. Pastor Charo! “In the name of God, let’s cuchi-cuchi!”

I haven’t given up on God. I just look at God differently than I used to. Instead of seeing God as an old man in the sky or any kind of personified being, I now see God as hope. God is love and peace and sunsets and kindness. I know that sounds like a basic-B thing to say, but that is how I feel the presence of God.

And though I don’t go to church on Sunday mornings, I haven’t given up on it either. There is a scene in the last episode of the first season of Somebody Somewhere in which Sam, Joel, Fred, Irma, and Tiffani are driving around in Fred’s party bus, the Growler. Sam has just sung “You Brought Me Home,” a song about how Joel rescued Sam from the swirling waters of grief threatening to drown her. After that tender and heavy moment, they’re all blowing off steam by laughing, dancing, singing, and being a little dirty. In the chaos of the party, Joel screams, “This is church! This is church!” That line wasn’t in the script. I improvised it. I tell you that because I want to brag that I improvised a line that made it to the final edit and also because I believe that deep in my core. I felt it in that moment, and that’s why I shouted it out.

I felt safe with Bridget, the other actors, the crew, the director. In the same way that I reimagined God, I reimagined church. Community, friendship, showing love and compassion, helping people when they need help, laughing your ass off after three glasses of wine—that is church. Some people don’t like church, so if you don’t want to call celebrations with your close friends church, th...

You might have heard of Namibia in pop culture because it’s where they filmed Mad Max: Fury Road. It is also where Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt went to have their twins because it was so remote, no paparazzi could get to them. It is roughly the size of Texas and Oklahoma but has a smaller population than Houston. It is a desert nation, home to Dune 7, one of the highest sand dunes in the world. So, basically, exactly like Ireland. Namibia was once a German colony, which is why it is a predominantly Christian country and also why it has towns that look like Ye Olde Christmas Village but with sand instead of snow. Namibia’s history is harsh. After World War I, the territory was ruled by South Africa, which instituted the racist and brutal policy of apartheid. The country gained its independence in 1990 after a deadly war. South Africa elected Nelson Mandela in 1994, so apartheid was not ancient history when I arrived in Windhoek, Namibia, in August of 1996.

As I sit here typing, I am sort of flabbergasted that I traveled all that way when I was just twenty years old (December birthday!). I had been on a plane only two times before this, and never by myself, but that summer, I took a flight from San Antonio to Dallas, from Dallas to London (where I had a fourteen-hour layover, during which I left the airport and just hung out in a park all day clutching my carry-on luggage), from London to Johannesburg, and from there to Windhoek on a plane so tiny, they asked passengers how much they weighed. No wonder the paparazzi left Brad and Angie alone.

The study-abroad program was called Societies in Transition, which was appropriate because in 1996, Namibia was in a serious transition phase. In addition to the twelve or so American students in the program (all white), there were two Namibian students of color. The Namibian students were in their early twenties like the American students, but unlike us, they had seen the effects of apartheid firsthand. The rules of Apartheid were both ridiculous (Black ...

Bryan was a former hippie who said he had been “radicalized by the Vietnam War.” He asked me, “What caused you to become socially aware and progressive?” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d come to Namibia because I got lost on my way to Ireland, so I just said, “Oh, uh, I guess the Gulf War?” I mean, I was against it, but I wouldn’t say it had made me socially aware or progressive. In fact, I wouldn’t say I knew that much about it at all. What I didn’t know then was that the thing that would make me socially aware and progressive was studying in Namibia.

I like the word commune because it makes us sound like we all ate vegan food and had naked Fridays, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, in comparison to the binge-drinking frat parties at my Christian college, it was tame. Rather than smoking pot or swapping partners, commune members spent most of the time fighting over who’d eaten all the peanut butter. After we fought, we prayed about it. Our lives were like MTV’s The Real World if it had aired on Pax TV.