“You’d be curled in the corner of your messy house, eating Lucky Charms out of the box by the handful.” He checks the time. “Five questions, and then we’re out. Don’t get chatty. We need to get on the road by noon.”
I salute him obediently and follow him up the steps.
“Here we go,” he says under his breath. And then, he turns to me, asking more seriously: “Are you ready for this?”
He’s implied this question every time I’ve had to sign my name on a contract, every time a piece of this collaboration moves forward. But there’s a duality there now: He’s asking whether I’m really ready for what we’re about to dive into promoting headlong—my seventh feature film, but the first I’m making with my father—pulls me up short in a bright square of concrete.
“I hope I am.” I gape at him, heart pounding as if maybe I’ve made a huge mistake. It happens a little bit each time I start something new: the sense that I’m really a fraud, that I don’t actually know what I’m doing, that I somehow got into acting on a technicality and not because I earned it.
Usually the feeling evaporates pretty quickly. This time, though, it’s hung around since officially agreeing to take on the role of Ellen Meyer: farmer, local civil rights activist, and badass extraordinaire. Some of that has to be due to the pressure of leading a film with my extremely famous father in only a supporting role. And some of it has to come from knowing that we’ll be on a rural location together for a month and a half, and I have no idea whether it will bring us closer at all.
And on top of that—the pressure of acting with Dad aside—I’ve never done anything like this. Milkweed is a subtle script: the story about a tenacious woman who comes back from heartbreak to find the love of her life and help shape her small Iowa community, while going through the pain of losing a parent to dementia. It’s brilliant but entirely character driven, and will require acting chops I’m not even sure I have, under the guidance of one of the best directors in the world.
“What if I’m not ready?” I ask, chewing my lip.
“The correct answer was yes,” Marco says, tapping my chin so I’ll stop biting down on my abused bottom lip. “You are.”
His confidence in my ability has always been solid, but I know this right here is part bravado, too: the pressure for Dad and me to do a film together has been slowly building to a hysterical frenzy. It’s no longer a When Will They? headline, it’s become a Why Haven’t They? Admittedly, as Dad’s career has slowed down and mine has picked up, it feels like the perfect time for our Jane-and-Henry-Fonda moment. The script is incredible, the timing works, and I wouldn’t even be relying on Dad’s celebrity to get me in the door: if I back out now, it would be a PR nightmare for Marco.
“You are, Tater Tot.” A sweet smile and a wink takes the edge out of Marco’s next words: “Don’t make my life a living hell.”
He pulls open the glass door, gesturing me ahead of him. Cameras flash, applause rises in welcome, and although my brain is still stalled out, my body makes the subtle shift from Me to Tate Butler: My eyes widen, and an easy smile spreads across my face. I stand a little straighter, walk a little looser.
A tight semicircle of people waits just inside the gleaming lobby, and a stocky, bald man with a salt-and-pepper beard steps forward, hand extended. “Hi Tate, hi Marco. I’m Lou.” Lou Jackman, according to the notes I crammed in the car. Twitter’s VP and head of community engagement. “It’s fantastic to meet you.”
I grip his hand. “Thank you for having us today.”
He laughs. “Are you kidding? Anytime. We’re grateful you made room in your schedule.”
“Let’s hold off on the gratitude until you see me tweet,” I tease. Flashes pop in a constellation behind him.
“I think you underestimate how many people are looking forward to this.” Lifting his chin, Lou pulls my attention across the room to where a table has been set up with two laptops side by side, two elaborate black desk chairs, and a small vase of flowers. A bowl of Skittles tells me someone did their homework on the famous Ian Butler sweet tooth. An array of cameras on tripods are set up in front of the table, waiting to catch every one of my fumbling typos. Awesome.
Dad is already here, his charm having been quarantined in a green room until I arrived and they pulled him out from a hallway to greet me. He waves with the trademark crinkly-eyed Ian Butler–smile as we approach each other.
My stomach tilts; I saw him only four days ago at the agency offices in LA, but when he stands to give me a hug, a thousand flashes burst as though we’re being reunited after a decade apart all over again—capturing my smile over his shoulder.
The narrative is that we’re as close as any father and daughter could be. The narrative is that we’re together at holidays, birthdays, vacations. The truth is he drops in for a quick glass of wine on Christmas; his assistant Althea recruits Mom’s help to choose something lavish and semi-personalized for me on my birthday, and we’ve never taken even a day of vacation together. Clearly, the narrative is bullshit.
Dad turns to face the room of press and Twitter employees, throws up his arms like this is the greatest welcome he’s ever received, and hurls a smile at them so supremely trademark Ian Butler that a few people actually cry out “Oh my God.” Even with the more stoic men in the room, I sense the collective, vibrating thrill of being so close to a celebrity of his magnitude.
And I get it—he’s an icon. I still have that momentary buzz of adrenaline when I see him. It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s no longer the Ian Butler of fifteen years ago—he’s fifty-six now, at the top of the extended hot-years (for men) in Hollywood—he is still charisma personified.
From across the room, Marco is watching me carefully and I know our thoughts are aligned: This is it. I’m about to launch into Ian Butler’s orbit for a solid fifty days in a row. I know we’re both gauging how well I’m going to handle it. I can be surrounded by functional relationships—with my mom, my best friends, even Nana—but five minutes with my father and I’m an insecure, awkward mess.
Looking at Dad’s face still feels like a trick of the imagination. Other than the shape of my ears, which I got from Mom, I take after him completely: the brown hair, the honey-brown Butler eyes, the full mouth. We even share a beauty mark, though his is just at the top of his right cheekbone, and mine is lower. His is a face that should feel so familiar—I see it in the mirror every morning—but it’s still so disorienting to get a good, long look at him. Even fourteen years after our chaotic reunion, I’m pretty sure I’ve still seen his face more frequently on a magazine cover than in person.
We sit at the table with an enormous screen mounted on the wall at our backs. With a laptop stationed in front of each of us, we look up expectantly at Lou. Behind him, Marco regards Dad and me with a faint smile. Publicist Marco wants to remind me to keep my smile natural for the cameras. Friend Marco wants to give me a hug and tell me, You don’t have to be so nervous. You don’t have to prove anything to him.
Dad’s elbow knocks into mine and he reaches over, cupping it gently, paternally, saying a quiet, “Sorry, baby.”
Another staccato of flashes captures the moment.
“The questions you’ll need to answer are from the main Twitter account,” Lou explains. “So they’ll be from ‘at Twitter.’ These are the questions we sent over last week.”
Behind him, Marco motions for me to pull my answers from the folder.
“You’ll probably also get some questions from other users,” Lou says, “in the hashtag—which is just ‘hashtag AskButlers’—and although it’s by no means required, you’re welcome to answer any of those that you like. We just ask that you try to remember to include the hashtag in your replies.” He gives me a teasing wink. “Sound good?”
We nod, relatively unconcerned because this is a fairly simple ask. It’s not like the tearful reunification interview Dad and I did with Barbara Walters only a week after I returned from London. It’s not like the Vanity Fair shoot we did six years ago where we were required to be in near constant physical contact for over seven hours. And it certainly doesn’t compare to the exhaustion of the one and only time I walked the red carpet with Mom on one side and Dad on the other. The only reason Mom agreed to come was because it was my first Emmy nomination and the speculation about whether my parents were bitter enemies was reaching an exhausting, fever pitch. Even tourists in Guerneville were stopping her in the café to ask her about it. As Mom said to me that night while we got ready, “To be bitter enemies, I’d have to give a shit.”
Marco and Mom: my two calm, stoic constants.
Nana, on the other hand, doesn’t ask about any of it. When I come home to Guerneville, I may as well be visiting from a space station or coal mine.
I settle in front of the computer, waiting for the first tweet to appear. Beside me, Dad shifts. “How was your flight from LA, kiddo?”
Flash. Flash. Over here, Tate! Flash.
“It was fine,” I say. Ever the performer, Dad nods and casually goes back to scrolling through Twitter, but the silence that follows is heavy and loaded. Marco reaches up, pulling on his ear—his sign that I need to relax. I look at Dad and give him a goofy smile. “It was only an hour but I fell asleep and am pretty sure I drooled the entire flight.”
Dad roars with laughter at this, and the press gobbles it up. My heart is a tiny, anxious bird in my chest.
You don’t have to prove anything to him.
“Here we go,” Lou says, and a tweet appears in the column.
@Twitter: This is your first project as co-stars. What aspect of the process are you most looking forward to? #AskButlers
Ducking, Dad immediately begins typing. He’s so good at this; he’s been doing all kinds of press tours for so long that he doesn’t even question anymore whether he’ll come off as natural. Everything he says is adored. Without referring to notes, he hunts and pecks enthusiastically at the keyboard. Surreptitiously, hoping that the press doesn’t realize I’m not writing this from the gut, I peek at the answer Marco has crafted, typing the words and double-checking for typos before hitting send. My tweet pops up only a second before Dad’s does.