Midtown lunch-time screening room; I'm reviewing the movie for EW. No one there but me until just before it starts, when Judd sweeps in with 5th Ave. shopping bags and her lapdog to get a look at her new movie. We nod. She sits a few rows behind me. The lights go down. https://twitter.com/tyburr/status/1306239403174637570

Pretty early on – maybe the scene where Judd’s character carves up a guy with a butcher knife then wails psychotically for her dead father – it’s apparent we’re watching something quite uniquely terrible.

As the movie turns increasingly incomprehensible, I feel her eyes boring into the back of my skull wondering what I’m thinking. What is SHE thinking? What goes through an actor’s mind as they realize a project they’ve put time & energy into has gone south in every way possible?

At one point during the screening, I feel something crawling against my leg. It’s only Ashley Judd’s dog; he wants some of my sandwich. I break off a piece and give it to him. We bond for a bit and then he goes back under the rows to her.

When the movie’s over, Judd and I chitchat politely at the screening room door without once making eye contact. It’s like there’s a dead body in the room that we can’t bear to look at.

It was the first time I realized an actor’s experience making a movie and an audience’s experience watching it are radically different and that the only way for an actor to remain sane is to not get emotionally attached to the result.

I feel like that screening was her way of sighing and moving on.

For me it was a chance to watch a movie with Ashley Judd’s dog. [end]