The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness

The scent of smoke from prop cigarettes hung in the air—­a mixture of marshmallow root and rose petals. Everything fake was sweet, it seemed. Syrupy blood on the side of my face, sticky like the hot night air. My purple paisley dress was soaked in sweat, but there was a rack of identical dresses on the costume truck, like a cartoon character’s wardrobe. I was part of a team, working together to create an illusion, and re-create a truth. We were shooting Detroit, a film about the Detroit Uprising, the most violent of the urban riots that took place in the United States in the year 1967. The film depicted a night at the Algiers Motel, where three young Black men were murdered by the police.

One night in July during the Uprising, a teenager named Carl Cooper fired blanks from a starter pistol into the air in one of the rooms of this Detroit motel. In response to the sound, the building was stormed by a riot task force consisting of the Detroit Police Department, the Michigan State Police and the National Guard. For the rest of that long and brutal night, twelve guests from the motel—­ten Black men and two white women—­were subjected to cruel and violent interrogation by the police. Three of the men—­Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple—­lost their lives. The police officers responsible for their deaths were later put on trial and an all-­white jury found them not guilty. Forty-­nine years later, in 2016, the contemporary relevance of this story felt sickeningly clear.

In the film, I played one of the two white women who had been at the motel that night. I had been working as an actor for ten years at this point, but Detroit felt bigger than any previous project. This was in part because of our director—­Kathryn Bigelow. Before I had been cast, the idea of working with an Academy Award–­winning director like Kathryn would have been beyond my wildest dreams. And now, here I was, on set with her every day.

We were shooting in Boston, Massachusetts, where the summers are humid and hot. In between takes I would snack on tropical fruit, the sweet flesh of a pineapple or mango chunk the only thing I had an appetite for. I often skipped the actual meals on set or simply picked at some salad. I was losing weight from my already lean frame, a fact that secretly thrilled me.

I had never felt happier in my body. I felt strong and lithe and energized. Before every take, I would drop to the floor and do as many push-ups as I could as quickly as possible, working up my heart rate for the intensity of our scenes. I could do as many as the boys in the cast. We were actors, our bodies were our instruments, and they were shiny, gleaming things.

My character’s name was Julie. She was an eighteen-­year-­old girl from Cleveland, Ohio, who was a huge fan of Motown music and had been visiting Detroit in the summer of 1967, staying at the Algiers. On the night of the murders, Julie was one of the twelve guests interrogated and abused. She was struck in the head by a police officer’s gun and was sexually assaulted, her dress ripped from her body.

The character was based on a real woman, who was on set every day. She was in her late sixties and was kind, funny and clever. We smoked cigarettes together as she told me stories from the sets of Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill, which she had worked on as a hairdresser. I was amazed to be able to have a direct connection with this real person I was playing. It felt important every day to speak with her, connect with her, touch her, hug her. I felt that the stronger my bond with her, the more her essence would seep into my being. It was a privilege and a responsibility and a luxury and a challenge.

I had played a real person once before: Sylvia Ageloff, Trotsky’s secretary. The movie was called The Chosen; it was about Trotsky’s assassination. Sylvia was engaged to the man who would turn out to kill Trotsky. She had passed away long before we shot our film in Mexico City in 2015, and there was very little record of her. I did not feel obligated to do any sort of imitation, nor could I have, as there was no evidence of her mannerisms or what her voice sounded like. It was not like getting cast as Tony Blair or Marilyn Monroe. And yet, I still felt a weight of responsibility portraying Sylvia, something I had not quite experienced in my years playing fictional characters. It was a desire to do something really authentic, something that connected with the truth of a person who had lived and breathed and walked the earth. I spoke to an acting coach about my anxieties, and he introduced me to the idea of opening yourself up as much as possible to let something “come through you.” He described this way of working as “almost shamanic,” and this, I realized, was what I wanted creatively—­to connect with something outside myself. This significantly altered my process as an actor, in ways I felt were wholly and utterly good.

In my Mexico City hotel room, I had drunk double espressos to stay up all night in preparation for the film’s most intense scenes, wanting to be as raw and vulnerable as possible, edgy and thin-­skinned. On set, in this altered and slightly deranged state, I could feel myself channeling things that felt distinctly other. Tears would fall unbidden and unforced. I was not having ideas or making choices; I was a vessel for history, for the spirit of Sylvia, for the untold trauma she had experienced in her fiancé’s profound betrayal. Rage and devastation would course through me, and that rage and devastation felt utterly real. It was exactly what I had hoped for, and I believed it was some of the best work I had ever done. Was it shamanism? I didn’t really know, though I had liked the use of the word when my coach applied it to acting. I mainly knew of shamanism, and shamans, through friends in the habit of taking the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, something I had personally always been too scared to try.

With Detroit, with Julie, I wanted to experience the same process, to apply the same kind of magic, to feel as open as I could. But I was also entering new territory. I was playing a real person who I was getting to meet, getting to know, and who was watching my performance, not only the finished product but every single take I did. The weight of my responsibility to her felt difficult to ignore.

One day, we shot one of my biggest scenes, a two-­hander between me and Ben O’Toole, playing one of the police officers. In the scene he slapped my face multiple times, while I spat back defiantly that my uncle was head of the Cleveland Fire Department. Later, when I saw Julie outside for a cigarette, she told me, “You really got me.”

Such direct praise from her gave me chills.

Making the movie was a beautiful experience, but the material we were working on was serious—­violent and dark. I was no stranger to dark content in my acting career. It seemed, for the most part, to be my bread and butter. My first professional role had been the anorexic Cassie in the teen drama Skins, and I was currently best known as Gilly in Game of Thrones, a young woman who had had her father’s baby. In the decade I had been working professionally as an actor I had depicted three suicide attempts onscreen—­the first, in Skins, was an overdose, which required me to swallow over a hundred Tic Tacs, later vomiting up a sweet minty liquid in my trailer; the second saw me dragged from a blood-­filled bathtub with slit wrists in an ITV drama; the third had me hanging from a tree in a Danish independent film, for which I wore a harness that caused excruciating pain and left angry red welts under my armpits. I was used to crying in scenes—­though I still didn’t feel I was very good at it. But I knew how to access pain, how to explore and, perhaps, exploit my own traumas onscreen and onstage. I liked roles that were tough to play, both physically and emotionally. I liked enduring for my art.

Detroit certainly required endurance. The days on set were grueling. I say days—­but we were almost exclusively shooting at night. In scenes I was grabbed and manhandled and thrown up against walls, and after a week or so my arms were covered in a tapestry of blue and purple bruises.

I refused to acknowledge these bruises as anything other than a privilege. I was determined not to be precious and “actress-­y” about it. Particularly when I was getting paid to play pretend under the supervision of an excellent stunt team, in the same room as a woman who had experienced the events we were depicting as one of the most traumatic nights of her life. I was determined to be grateful for the incredible opportunity. And I was. I was absolutely happy about everything. I was having the most wonderful time.

Until we shot the scene in which my dress was ripped from my body. This was one of the biggest moments for my character, and was a ­moment Kathryn had made me aware of during the audition process, apologizing for the fact the role required some nudity, but saying it was important to tell the story of this incident of sexual assault that had actually taken place.