Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,85
It was weird. As I told the joke onstage, I became her as a character. I was integrating my strengths: storytelling, characters, and comedy. It worked! Someone from the TV show The League was in the audience that night, saw my character, and realized I would be great for the part of a yoga instructor on their show. They straight-up offered me the role that night. It was incredible.
But stand-up wasn’t exactly the right fit for me. It felt . . . lonely. To make matters worse, it was really difficult for me to be around all the alcohol. I had to put my sobriety first. No matter how much I liked getting laughs, stand-up wasn’t for me. There had to be another way.
Also . . . the grind takes years and it turns out, I’m not very patient. I typed into my Facebook status: There has to be a way I can reach MORE people more quickly!
One day, I was on my way home from a pilot audition and I got the call to let me know that they offered the role to Mandy Moore. Like, good for Mandy Moore. But also, why even bring me in and waste my time? I was so done with this shit. I didn’t want to be strung along. I didn’t want to be a random face they brought in to an audition to prove to Mandy Moore that this role was in high demand. I was done.
But what else could I do? I racked my brain while I walked. I remembered this girl, Porsche, who I met at a Capital One commercial. She had hit me up afterward, asking if I wanted to make something with her. I had brushed it off, not really knowing what a web series even entailed. But you know what? I wanted to create and make my own destiny.
I called her. “Hey Porsche. I’m in.”
“Hey Laura. In what?”
“Oh sorry, in the web series thing.”
“Oh right! Cool babe, let’s do it.”
Porsche is a beautiful, stunning black model who I met on a shoot where neither of us had lines. We both played runway models. I didn’t know how well we worked together or whether she was a good writer or even a sane person! I did know that I didn’t want to audition anymore—I wanted to create.
I smiled. “Fuck yeah. Come over tomorrow and we’ll write it.”
The next day she came over to our apartment.
“I had this idea to write a web series about how absurd the modeling industry is. Laura, it’s so funny.”
Ideas just started flowing. Without moving from the couch, we wrote a pilot that day. We came up with this series called Hungry about two aging, struggling models who were incredibly underqualified to do anything else. They were figuratively and literally hungry. It was the first script I finished since getting sober, and it felt so good. We pitched the show to Russell Simmons’s production company, All Def Digital, and they greenlit it. They loved it!
Russell gave us our first show. I wrote, produced, and starred in the whole first season alongside Porsche. All of a sudden I was on the other side of the casting table. I was auditioning people, and I LIKED it. This was where I wanted to be, dude. I get to create the characters and write and act? I’m never doing that other bullshit again. I felt like a fish in water. We got King Bach to direct. At the time, he was this up-and-coming YouTuber with fifty thousand followers! (Now he has like twenty million.) After it was posted, we had an automatic reach to All Def’s one-hundred-thousand subscribers.
It was my first taste of making something and having it SEEN.
It was weird. I went from network TV to YouTube. It wasn’t glamorous and the money definitely wasn’t there, but I didn’t care. I was finally doing what I wanted to be doing. To make things better, it was received well. Before, I had wanted more than anything to be on the next Friends, but now . . . I was doing YouTube. And I felt so fulfilled.
My goals had shifted. I didn’t feel the need to be on a sitcom anymore. I just wanted to make as many people laugh as possible. THAT was my goal. I wanted to be creative and have my creativity bring other people joy.
I pulled out my laptop and the camera that Stephen bought me. My next project would be called “Product of a