Access Hollywood

Reality vs perception of the Fame Game and why I cut my trip to LA short.

Someone with far more of an instinct for what will sell and is culturally specific, said to me, “Why don’t you do a post next week all about your trip to LA, like you’re taking your subscribers on tour with you. It can be a picture essay showing them what actually goes on behind the scenes when you’re doing a load of press and getting ready for a premiere.”

Ok great, I thought. And time-saving too, surely.

I travelled to LA for said flurry of sparkly-eyed promotion for my new Netflix show Unstable, which by the way is out TODAY. Woo hoo! You can check it out here. But the main event, day of press came. And went. I was up at 4am and eventually collapsed into my bed around 1am, 21 hours later. At the final count, I took three pictures total. Literally. The point at which I found myself hunched on the floor bending myself into shape, trying to snap a row of designer shoes stacked neatly against the wall as if lined up for a Cinderella size-off challenge (when I had a tiny window of opportunity to take a nap), is the moment I remembered who I am, that this was not an idea I could execute and that rest was much more important. And not that it was a bad idea, it just wasn’t an idea that had come from me. It was like I’d been commissioned to create a piece on something I had no emotional investment in and if there’s a reason I started a Substack, it was to be all in. To write pieces every week that speak to and from my soul.

So why the shoes? To try to make the day seem interesting I suppose. Lol. But this is precisely why I can no longer function on Instagram — since it went from sharing an impromptu picture of a sunset to demanding we all become brand and marketing experts, posting at least 3 times a day and get onboard with reels. I made my first reel the other day to try to remedy the fact that Instagram barely shares your posts with anyone if you don’t, it took me six hours. Side note, please read

Farrah Storr

’s superb piece on ‘Brand Me’ that she published this very week on this very thing.

The truth is doing press is an aspect of my job that I find I am mostly at odds with, much like taking pictures, or posting on Instagram. It feels unnatural to me. Some people really do thrive in those environments though, Rob Lowe my co-star for one, who in fairness has been in this game almost as long as he’s been alive and certainly as long as I have, takes it all completely in his stride. Maybe I will too with another ten, twenty, thirty, forty (??) years under my belt but for now, for me to try to present this day to anyone and make the experience appear splashy and exclusive, would be completely inauthentic to myself as well as the process. Though maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe it was about showing the real version of events but still, it felt laboured and I’m not really sure that that level of candidness even exists - a photo of a photoshoot? By its very definition is surely a thing borne of the self conscious. I’d have to ask someone else to take those for me anyway.

Even at the best of times I am terrible at regularly taking photos so to try to squeeze this into an itinerary as jam packed as the day was long, was laughable on my part. But all things being equal, in its stead it has been a catalyst for this piece which is all me, all in.