Chris McPherson

The third season of Orange Is the New Black is now on Netflix.

[Natasha Lyonne to waiter] Could I have water and an iced green tea?

Same for me.

So, SoHo. Saturday night. Kids today, huh?

With the face-sitting.

Yeah. They're obsessed with it. All day, all I get is a series of face-sitting messages.

Do you think all these nice young actresses with their Clairol ads are getting all kinds of face-sitting comments? Am I asking for it?

I don't think you're asking for it, but the role you're playing on Orange Is the New Black—it's not always easy for people to separate the character from the performer.

I see.

This wouldn't be news to you, would it?

No. It's not.

I was watching a talk-show clip with the group of you, and Lea DeLaria was talking about fisting. I think audiences have gotten more virginal. I've had a hard time with the show sometimes. It's a very provocative show.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

It doesn't feel especially provocative when I'm doing it. If I'm honest, I don't find the tweets provocative. There's a certain immediacy to "Sit on my face" as a friendly hello that's more fun in a way than "Hey, how are you? I'm a big fan of the show!" I don't know if they're actually requesting that I actually come to their house and actually sit on their face. Nobody's sending addresses, you know? Nobody's sending phone numbers. They're anonymous things that they're writing me in a comments section.

You read comments?

I put up a picture of Buster Keaton on Instagram and the response was "Sit on my face, sit on my face, sit on my face, sit on my face, sit on my face." Imagine my surprise to see how well these people knew me. They're not discounting Buster Keaton.

I think they are.

Here's the thing—I think so much of my life has been colored by darkness, maybe I'm an optimist. I'm really thinking this is their way of saying "I'm a big Buster Keaton fan!" I'm assuming the best. Not only are they saying "Please sit on my face," they're saying "I think you're charming and attractive and, most importantly, you're lightweight enough to sit on my face and not smother me to death," which is also a compliment about my figure. Do you think I'm taking it wrong?

If that's working, thinking positive and secure thoughts is the healthy way to go.

Wallpaper your mind with love, you know what I mean? "Sit on my face" is not an "I hate you" response. It's not like "Oh, you're a shitty actress."

What percentage of those invitations are from females?

I feel like the ladies really like me. I feel like I could just really clean up in that department should I decide to swing that way—even maybe to my own destruction, maybe even be an animal about it, because there would be so many opportunities. Like, if I were to go on a college tour, it might become a real nightmare.

You've posted photos of your dog, too.

Oh, Root Beer gets on there. I'm not a fan of when they sexualize dogs, but they tend not to. They move swiftly and seamlessly from "Sit on my face!" to "What an adorable doggy!" It's really wonderful that they can go the whole spectrum. Every movie I would ever want to make and would ever want anyone to go to the theater and see is going to be somewhere between a little-doggy movie and a sit-on-my-face picture. Frances—the great Jessica Lange movie—definitely somewhere between what-a-cute-doggy and sit-on-my-face.

What made you think of Frances?

I was just thinking of great roles for women.

Great role.

Great role. Full Metal Jacket—somewhere between adorable-doggy and sit-on-my-face.

[Waiter arrives.]

I'll have the individual pieces for nigiri sushi—so could I have three pieces of scallops?

[Waiter: Three scallops.]

And two pieces of toro and two pieces of salmon. And a piece of ikura.

If I order the omakase, will you have some?

I'll see how good it is. You're getting the full omakase? Okay, I'll eat it.

So you were on Pee-wee's Playhouse at the age of six?

Yes.

Were you already a model by then?

I think so. I don't totally remember. It was all kind of the same time. From eight to ten years old, we lived in Israel. Whatever those years are prior, there was already a whole thing happening in my child-actor career, and when we came back, I was still doing all that stuff. I even made movies in Israel, in Hebrew.

Your dad was a boxing promoter?

Yes, he was. I grew up in a lot of boxing rings and with a lot of boxers. He's a proper Flatbush, Brooklyn, Jew from a very black-hat family. He was the eccentric black-sheep figure of that family, with big '80s dreams. His father's button business was quite successful, but he became a race-car driver and a boxing promoter and met my mother, who was this Hungarian redhead. Her parents were Auschwitz survivors who had moved to Paris, where she was born.

Exotic.

Yeah. A real redhead and he had a long black ponytail. And he drove a black Porsche and she drove a red Alfa Romeo Spider. They were the wild ones, the black sheep from very Orthodox families. Of course, what's implicit in that kind of thing is the intended debauchery that comes with that kind of high-stakes, ego-driven life. They were great at their best, but very tragic at their worst.

And they produced a troubled child star.

I think that so much of why I dropped out in my success—aside from drug addiction—was a response to "What is this thing?" What is this thing that I was unwittingly signed up for? How did this become my life, and is this actually aligned with my interests?

As a father, I always wonder why parents would push their kids so hard.

I think it's really an obsession with fame, which is why I walked away from it. It instilled in me a real revulsion to fame, because I was so confused and perplexed by why a parent would do that to a child. In their defense, I probably would've wound up doing something similar anyway—I am sort of wired that way. But part of that wiring has to do with growing up in such an absurd household that by the age of ten, Scarface, The Godfather, and Rocky were my three favorite movies.

I didn't really know until I got into so much of my own trouble—that was such a textbook response to my childhood—that I really had a tricky childhood. I was on board very young with the roller coaster that it was. I knew no other life. My first job, in Heartburn—there's Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. I remember Pee-wee's Playhouse was a big reprieve in the middle of all that, because the set felt so safe and kind of appropriate relative to so much of the other stuff that I was seeing.

There's a lot of different forms of bad parenting. They weren't belittling me, telling me I was a waste of space or a loser. There was no shortage of them instilling false ego in me, that I was something great. It was much more like, "Go do something impossible for a six-year-old child to do. Because you can, dammit. Look at Shirley Temple. Go outdo Shirley Temple. What's wrong with you?"

It was just deeply misguided in terms of what the consequence was gonna be. But I think that they were actually trying to offer me what they thought was the best thing they could imagine. The way certain parents would be obsessed with getting their kid into Harvard, my parents were obsessed with baby-De-Niro-ing me. They loved Janis Joplin and did not realize that being encouraged to love Janis Joplin as a little girl is not necessarily gonna be healthy as you start aging. Once you start getting old enough to put anything into practice, it's gonna be Ray Liotta and a bunch of cocaine, and Joe Pesci breaking someone's legs, and Janis Joplin OD'ing. If you're doing it right, your life is not a movie and you're not a cartoon character.

It seems like you've lived three or four lives already. Two separate acting careers. Addiction. Hepatitis. A collapsed lung. Heart surgery.

My body, I was done with it. It wasn't like I was making decisions based on Oh, this is me partying this weekend and then I'll get back to life. I was done, checked out, and then shocked and disappointed to find that I was still kicking and gonna have to get it back together again. I just did not expect to return from it.

I don't know how anyone pieces together a decent life.

It's a miracle that anybody does it. It's a lot of work being a person. Everybody's got a bag of rocks; everybody has their version of this. Having a mind is a nightmare, anyway. You know that your life is so low stakes relative to the rest of the world around you, where there's actual injustice and terrible things happening. I think a lot of the expe-rience of being an adult is: What am I even complaining about?

Part of the reason I am open about my story is I do think we're all very shame-based. We all have problems, and I'm not quite sure why we put such a mystery around somebody being crippled by their demons. I don't know why we consider it such a shameful, mysterious topic. Maybe the good news is the more we would see it, the more we would understand that that's something that happens in life and people move through it. Give them some privacy, give them some support. Everybody's going through these things in some version.

You seem to be loving life.

I'm really enjoying getting older. And I'm getting older with friends I've had for 20 years. Even this birthday was very much like, Holy shit—I'm really doing okay. Friends, boyfriend—life's good.

You're also doing great work.

Well, thank you. And all these jobs I'm excited about doing. I'm really having a good time doing them. I'm getting to work with all these incredible women. [Orange Is the New Black creator] Jenji Kohan's incredible. Worked with Lena Dunham, worked with Amy Poehler, just finished another movie with Jamie Babbit—we did But I'm a Cheerleader. An extraordinary group of women. Amy Schumer. All these heavy women that I'm getting to work with and be exposed to. Holy

fuck—how great is it not being 20 years old and doing this? This is fucking incredible.

Plus you got to work with Abel Ferrara, one of my favorite directors. I profiled him back in the 1990s. He still owes me 40 bucks.

Abel calling me on the phone was so huge, such a symbol of the end of the old chapter of my relationship with Abel, which was very much about me knocking on his door at 5:00 a.m. looking for trouble. If I saw Abel on the street, it was a series of mumbles. Suddenly, Abel and I were running into each other and actually talking to each other, and he was just so kind to me. It really made me want to do this for a living again. It was one of the first things where it was like my past life was not necessarily my enemy. It was sort of this early glance into this idea that my bad reputation and insane life history—I'm gonna be able to actually work and do stuff with them. Maybe I could do this thing again, maybe there's a different way to do it.

My parents' version was very much about whatever the biggest thing was. My mother was always very disappointed in me for having turned down Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was something that as a teenager—as a pseudo-intellectual, misanthropic, drug-addicted teenager—was the worst thing you could have put in front of me. My mother would continue to say to me, after Slums of Beverly Hills and the Woody Allen movie [Everyone Says I Love You], "Should have done Buffy." Because it was this big Bonanza kind of show. My version was Who am I getting to work with? What is the project? For me, Abel Ferrara was my Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was my own personal triumph. This is the kind of career I want.

Is this edible? What do I do with this?

You leave it there because he's gonna deep-fry it for you.

So you got thrown out of the yeshiva for peddling weed?

Yes. It was very shocking when I got to a yeshiva on the Upper East Side as a scholarship kid and suddenly I was this outcast who was broke, who was from a single-parent home. The big houses and cars were gone, and it was my mother and I sharing an apartment, and no one wanted to be friends with me. Well, if I'm not invited to your parties, I'll just make my own party on the stoop with a bunch of other misfit teenagers in the neighborhood. If I'm not invited to your parties, I'll just sell you a bunch of drugs.

Did you ever finish school?

I went to Tisch [part of New York University] for a film program, which I promptly

dropped out of when they asked me for tuition. They skipped me my senior year, so I assumed they knew that since I was only 16 I didn't have the cash to give them. I assumed they were going to carry me. I would never pay tuition, so I would have to drop out every semester. My high school graduation was dependent on completing my freshman year at Tisch, so since I never completed that, essentially I'm a high school dropout.

Not even a GED?

No.

Well, maybe in prison you can finish up.

Maybe in prison I could. Maybe between face-sitting sessions, I could finally get that GED.

Published in the June/July 2015 issue.

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