The show went great, but I could see her in the audience and I noticed she was having a couple of drinks. My mother does not drink, so I knew what she was up to: this was a manipulative tactic, because then it would mean she couldn’t drive. When she said just that, I was very direct. “We’re all going to Denny’s and you’re gonna eat some fucking pancakes and drive your fucking ass home.”
“Oh, I could just lay down in your bed until you get back.”
“Nope,” I said. “No.”
The Denny’s was attached to the hotel and we got there at two o’clock in the morning. I first went up and checked on Taylor, who was sleeping soundly. I went back down and there were a bunch of other performers there, too. We got a bunch of tables together and all sat to eat like a family.
Except my mother, who sat sniffling, going into baby talk. I had forgotten she would do that to people when I was little. She started to cry and said, “I don’t know why Stormy doesn’t like me.”
She was putting on a performance, and I knew it, but people who didn’t know her as I did were horrified and thought I was terrible. Everyone but Scotty, who could see right through her. Halfway through the meal, she upped the drama of her scene with an exaggerated cry to the heavens. She stopped short, looked for reactions, and then continued.
“Are you okay?” asked Christine.
“Don’t even talk to her,” I said. “She can sit there and cry.”
Everyone just wanted to leave, but I said, “Nope, I am just gonna sit here and finish my waffle.” Never have I sipped orange juice so slowly. Finally, I finished and the four of us headed to the stairs so she could get her bag and go home. I told her there was no room in my room because I had Taylor in my bed and Christine was in the other.
“You can sleep in Scotty’s room and use a pullout bed,” I said. I saw his head swivel, but I knew she wouldn’t take the bait.
“I’m a fine Southern woman,” she said. “I do not share rooms with black men.”
“Get your shit,” I hissed. “And then leave. You are not staying.”
The real her came through and she began screaming at me, calling me a cunt. Lights started going on in the hotel, so Christine slipped in to get her bag. I took my mother back downstairs to the parking lot to make sure she left. The hotel shared a huge parking lot with a mall, so there was this vast expanse of parking spaces. She had parked near where they were doing construction, and there was a trailer with a temporary fence around it.
She got in her car, still screaming at me. “You stole my sock, you cunt! I wish I’d aborted you!”
“Okay,” I said dismissively. “Okay. I wish you had, too. You have a good night, now.”
She took off in her car, but her rear bumper caught the end of the chain-link fence around the small construction site. The last thing I saw of my mother that night was the taillights of her Ford Escort going across the parking lot, dragging this chainlink fence that’s sparking on the asphalt. “I’m gonna go off the bridge and kill myself and it will be all your fault!” she screamed out the window. “You stole my sock!”
I went back upstairs and crept into the room. Taylor was asleep. Christine sat on her bed, bathed in light from the moon and the streetlights of the parking lot.
“I fucked up,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, you did. I told you. It’s okay, you have to see it to believe it.”
“I’ll never—” she said, cutting herself off. “Yeah. Sorry I pressured you.”
“Well, payback’s a mother,” I said with a laugh. “Take it from me.”
I auditioned on a whim, not really that invested in breaking into mainstream films. It was late 2004, and Jonathan Morgan, a fellow contract director at Wicked Pictures, told me he had seen an ad for an open audition for a movie starring Steve Carrell.
“It’s called The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” he said.
“Can’t help you there,” I joked.
“They are looking for girls comfortable with nudity to play a stripper type,” he said.
“Ding ding ding! I know that girl.”
I went down to the casting cattle call in L.A. just because I thought it would be something new to do. I read for it, playing up the comedy of the writing, and I got a callback. But when I went in for the second reading, they warned me the scene had completely changed.
“Are you comfortable with your character also doing a scene in a fake porn?” asked the very nice casting agent.
“I only have a problem with the fake part,” I joked. “Why shoot a fake porn when I can just get you the license to one of my real porns?”
“Oh, well…”
“That would actually help, because it would help sell my movie, and then you guys don’t have to shoot something extra.”
“That actually makes a whole lot of fucking sense,” said the agent.
I got the part, and they got to use Space Nuts, a sci-fi send-up I starred in, but directed and written by Jonathan, who had given me the heads-up about the part. Production started in January, and I met the director, Judd Apatow. He was incredibly polite and focused on the work, but his set was fun. It felt like an extended family, and each time I met someone new, I got the backstory on how they joined the fold. I particularly hit it off with the on-set producer Shauna Robertson, who had met Judd while executive-producing Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which she got because she did such an amazing job producing Elf. Shauna is this little California chick with honey-blond hair and such great energy. She’s exacting, and even if she has ten different to-dos going in her head, she has this calmness to her. There’s never a moment when she is not drawing you in with a sense of “Isn’t this cool that we get to do this?”
My second day on set, she came to me with a proposition. “There’s this new guy on set who’s known Judd for years,” she said. “He comes from television, but this is his first real role in a film. We want to prank him. You can say no—totally no big deal, but it’s going to be epic.”
“I’m in,” I said. Nothing makes me happier than pranking someone. Or doing something where the guaranteed outcome is “epic.”
“Okay,” she said, grabbing my arm with excitement. “So, he knows there’s a famous porn star on set named Stormy, and we want to tell him you’re a big fan of his from his TV show. The story is that we need you to come back to do this reshoot but you said you’d only come back if you could meet him.”
“Got it,” I said.
“You’ve insisted he go to your trailer and take a picture with you,” Shauna said. “When he gets there, we want you in a bathrobe with champagne. Be, like, super creepy.”
“I can do super creepy.”
“We had the tattoo lady on set make a fake tat to put on your boob. It’s of his face. When you make him really uncomfortable, we want you to whip out your boob and ask, ‘Do you like my tattoo?’ We’re going to have cameras up to tape the whole thing.”
“Even more in.”
“Oh, God, I love you. His name is Seth Rogen and the show you loved is Freaks and Geeks.”
Seth was hysterically awkward in the face of crazy me, and the prank went so well they made it a DVD extra on the unrated version of 40-Year-Old Virgin titled “My Date with Stormy.” Because I did that, I got to join the family. They didn’t even hold auditions for Knocked Up when they needed someone to do half-naked physical comedy with Seth and Paul Rudd. They went straight to the source. “I just remember that she was very smart and really strong and funny,” Judd told the Daily Beast in March of this year, “to the point where we kept asking her to do silly things in our movies.”