sophie heawood

It is late December, the last few days before Christmas, and I’m staying at The Jane hotel in New York for four nights while we shoot the ending to a film that we worked on in LA over the summer. It’s called Wolfe With An E, directed by David Zuckerman, produced by Michael Hekmat, written by DZ and Mandy Kahn. It’s about the musician Henry Wolfe, but he’s a mysterious figure, whose appearances are fleeting, and somehow my lines are more plentiful. I play a British music journalist from The Times, sent to America to interview Henry. She’s called Sophie Heawood. Yup, the method acting is killing me.

So I spent today pretending to be myself going record shopping in the West Village. Pretending to be myself running into an old friend. Pretending to go to her Brooklyn loft and pretending to get excited about Haydn’s clock symphony and then pretending to get so worked up about classical music and the mathematics of time travel and interplanetary egg breakfasts that I nearly slipped into unconsciousness. (Still not quite sure about that bit, but it was in the script. I did ask but they just frowned and muttered something about “the future”, and then started calling me Soph, always a sign I should have kept my mouth shut.)

Gaby Hoffman, who’s been acting professionally since she was a small kid living at the Chelsea Hotel, played my longlost friend. You can tell her to say anything and it just springs out of her mouth like she invented the language. I thought I sounded quite natural until I saw how she inhabited it; how the words she said didn’t sit and linger on her for a second. She seemed to be made of earth. I could have watched her for days.

My own experience of acting is quite like my experience of broadsheet journalism. You try and try to make sentences sound good while a small voice inside your head won’t stop nagging at you “but is this how you ACTUALLY TALK?”

Except today, acting was way better than journalism ever could be, cos I got given my very own hair and make-up lady to keep beside me all day long, patting my face down, sexing up my eyelash dossier and rearranging my “bangs”. She was, no word of a lie, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to the front section of my head.