“That’s life,” he says. “Or at least, that’s my life. I definitely spent a lot of time beating myself up, living with useless emotion, guilt and shame. Feeling tortured, and justifying that because the examples I had were other tortured actors. You put that on yourself and think that’s how you’re supposed to behave. There was a level of imitation going on.”

This imitation, he says, was an attempt to find himself, on screen and off. Perhaps it is too convenient, in retrospect, to wonder if we – cinema-goers and writers of profile pieces – were attempting to fit Mr Slater’s real, unscripted life into the narratives acted out by his characters. Perhaps Mr Slater himself was a little too deep in the role that Hollywood had established for him, and continued to play it even when he was off-camera. When, finally, that role became unsustainable, Mr Slater went off the map. Or is that, too, a kind of media-made meta-narrative? “I was still working,” he says, like, c’mon. “I was still trying to get jobs to feed my family. Maybe the work I was doing was under the radar. But there was certainly a point in my life where I lost track of why I was doing it. I was never really feeling completely fulfilled in who I was.” Mr Slater describes a moment during this time, when he was living in a gated community in Miami with his wife, thinking, as the doors closed between them and the world, “Well, that’s it. That’s the end of this life.”