There’s two things that make a star shine — the light they emit, and the inevitability of being seen. I called my mom and yelled into the phone, “The lady who cast Ralph Macchio in ‘Karate Kid’ wants to meet me!”
I met Bonnie Timmermann, the legendary casting agent, at a dinner with my husband Derek Cianfrance. They worked together on the HBO series “I Know This Much is True.” She said she liked my work — the super 8 films I put myself in, the comedy show I put myself in, the feature film I put myself in. I heard that people in the entertainment business tried to lure Bonnie to their performances with gifts of flowers, candy, snowmen made out of wax. I heard that if she likes your work that means you’re gonna be a star. I’d been putting myself in my own movies for 25 years now. I didn’t choose the auditioning route as most actors do. I wrote and directed my material so I could be cast in everything and all the time. I wanted to perform, to practice, to create as much as possible. I had a problem with authority. I needed to execute my own ideas. I didn’t want to wait for someone else to decide if my teeth were straight enough, face pretty enough, voice man enough, figure curvy enough. Here I was, twisting my fork in a pile of pasta carbonara, wondering if I’d finally get noticed. Was I good enough?
I sat across from a woman who made things happen for actors. She could see the ones who possessed a spark. She recognized talent. She pushed actors who would go onto become movie stars. Would I become a star? The definition of a star is…an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. A star is also a giant ball of hot gas.
Bonnie asked if I’d thought about doing auditions. I was once in an agent’s office, auditioning for representation. I was halfway into my monologue when the agent decided to take a phone call. It was as if I disappeared from the office, from the stage, from all of existence. No more auditions for me. “Held together by self gravity”? I imploded into a black hole. How I admired these actors that took rejection upon rejection! Always confronting their doubts that maybe the stage wasn’t where they belonged. An actor has to be like soft leather; tough but extremely vulnerable. They’re training rigorously at all times. They’re prepared for the “no, not right for the part.” Again and again they participate in trying out for the team, until they win the role granting permission to put on a wig and a mustache and do a fancy dance.
I knew I had to keep acting. But I had to do it the unconventional way. I’d have to create it all myself. The part, the script, the film. Rosie O’Donnell once asked me what I was going to do with the episode of “Chopped Liver” she and I just collaborated on. I told her I’m not very good at playing the game… it might not go anywhere. She told me it doesn’t matter how you get “there” — just grab that machete and chop down the jungle until you arrive. I would continue to strive for that “there” with my own work into middle age. I’d avoid the scrutinizing eyes of gatekeepers and find my own audience. Bonnie offered me her help. Mafioso in her determination, “once upon a time” in her eyes, she asked, “Who do you want as a partner in your next comedy show? Roberto Benigni?” Yes, fairy godmother.
Having cast such movies as “Dirty Dancing,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “Heat,” “Trading Places,” “Ironweed,” “Miami Vice “and so many more, Bonnie Timmermann has gained a reputation. The Academy just announced a new Oscar will be presented for casting directors in 2026. I foresee a nomination for her in the future. Bonnie eats, dreams, sleeps casting. She’s the offspring of a boxer and an opera singer. She’s a fighter. Never heard her sing. Slinking through smoky streets of a dark city, when the theater lights go on, Bonnie’s on the prowl for untapped talent. She used to carry a pocketful of polaroids, snapshots of actors for directors to consider. She’s Queen of the Casting Cosmos; a champ wielding a magic wand with a boxing glove. She molded actors, encouraged them and applauded them. She pushed directors to use unnoticed talent. Bonnie reminds me of the moon; she’ll always be there, reflecting the light of a star, so that everyone can see.
She invited me to a screening of a documentary. The documentary was called “Bonnie” and it was about, Bonnie. The room was filled with appreciative actors, students, agents and good friends. In the doc, younger versions of today’s movie stars appeared on raw video footage from the eighties: Benicio Del Toro, Steve Buscemi, Kate Winslet, Reese Witherspoon, Keanu Reeves, Natalie Portman. Each actor sat in an unremarkable room with an unknown name. There were no costumes, no set, no prop to lean on. The actors who came to audition had nothing to transform them into a character except their imaginations and the three or four pages in their hands. A voice behind the video camera guided them through the audition, their stellar light recorded by Bonnie Timmermann. I wished I’d been recorded by Bonnie 30 years ago.
Some people live to be seen. Some are never seen. Students want to be seen by their teachers, the homeless man asking for change wants to be seen by you. A red flower needs to be seen by the butterfly who pollinates it. We need butterflies in this world. We need Bonnies too. The actor who walks into an audition wants to be seen by the casting director. Bonnie is looking. Bonnie says of stardom — “The more you work, the more the audience is used to seeing you and is growing in love with you, and it takes time.”
Twenty-six years ago Mark Ruffalo walked into Bonnie’s room. In the documentary, Mark, as his younger self, does a reading for “Armageddon” knowing he’s not old enough for the part. He tells them he can do any kind of role. I study his advocacy for himself and his willfulness to pursue this as a career. What conviction he has! He tells the director in the room, “Maybe there’s something else for me. Ya know I’m an actor. I play characters.” Years later Mark comments on this audition. “I’m gonna pitch myself cause who else is gonna do it. I just had a belief that someday somebody would give me a part.” As a performer, I’m watching the doc and thinking maybe entertainment isn’t the right place for me. But the only other thing I know how to do, at 53, is to make a dry martini. Is it too late to become a marine biologist? Then Mark says, “At some point I realized, dude there’s no turning back now, dude there’s no bridge behind you. You tore down the bridge to make the one in front of you.”
A few days after the screening of “Bonnie,” I watched Mark Ruffalo again. This time it was live. He was doing a benefit reading of “This Is Our Youth” by Kenneth Lonergan at the Center at West Park in Manhattan on 86th street. The Center was raising funds to save itself from the looming threat of new construction; the plans for a skyscraper hovered from above. The space was a church but also a theater; a venue that embraced two faiths, both practicing a belief in the existence of what you don’t see. If bread and wine can become body and blood, then a 56-year-old Mark Ruffalo can become a stoned and neglected 19-year-old from the Upper West Side. Once again I watched Mark make something out of nothing. In a sanctuary where whispered prayers were once answered, Mark wielded magic. Abracadabra. He was 19. We all believed him.
The black stage was empty except for the folding chairs where three actors and a man reading stage directions were seated. Mark read from loose papers on a music stand. He led an audience from the Real to the Imagined. For two hours we forgot about the upcoming holidays, about broken down subway trains, about the pole between us and the stage, about the man in front of us who laughed loudly, righteously applauded, and threw in some whistles, after a line in favor of cannabis. The only tangible item Mark teleported from reality to this pretend space was a baseball cap. Mark assembled a make- believe world where dialogue illuminated apartment walls, a football was tossed with pantomime, and props fell and broke all in silence, a crash heard only through the actor’s reactions. With his remastered childlike play, he brought our attention to the unseen. And, I could see everything! We didn’t need a set, furniture, or a real bag of cocaine to drop on the floor. We saw the white cloud rise from his feet. We saw the suitcase of money when he opened the case that wasn’t there. We could see what Mark saw because he was our guiding light.
I ask Mark about the imagination. He tells me about his teacher Joanne Linville. who taught her students to build an environment around them. On our zoom call I watched him place an oak tree behind him and sit beneath it in his office. I watched him bend forward to look at a flower in an Italian garden. I could smell the tomato plants! He said an actor has to relearn to use the imagination. It goes away at some point. That’s why my stuffed animals don’t talk to me anymore. We used to commiserate about canned spinach. When we got scared we got close together. They were my best friends and then one day they were gone. Packed away in a black garbage bag. Something beat the daydream out of us.
“Get real Mark. Earth to Mark!” Mark Ruffalo tells me this is what happened. Society starts telling you to snap out of it. My cousin used to tell me the stuffed animals couldn’t talk. I still don’t believe her. Mark says the imagination is a muscle. “Hold it gently like a bird but if you hold it too loose, it flies away.”
Mark’s performance reminded me what a gift the Imagination is and how badly we need it today. To imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, to imagine peace but more importantly imagine how to get there, imagine potatoes for fuel, imagine the shovel, or imagine a new form of punishment to replace prisons. Imagination is a tool greater than any other. It’s the place ideas are born and from there reality is cultivated.
A star can mean many things for different people. I tilt my head back in awe when I see a star in the night sky, or on the silver screen, or a man on a high wire, or a pelican fly past the sun. After all, a star can be just a twinkle, and then it’s gone. Mark wouldn’t consider himself a star. He said so. But I do. Through acting he illuminates the tragedies, the challenges, the goofiness and imperfections of being human. We’re a crowd of onlookers who, from his light, long to see what we are and what we can be. While he uses his experience of pretending, we gaze at his performance and recognize our own faults, our uncontrollable anger, our unbridled joy. We practice compassion by identifying with his characters. Mark has a light that continues to brighten up the stage. He isn’t flickering or dimming. He’s like that oak tree that he imagined into our zoom call. Strong, persevering, and giving all that he can, as often as he can.
Bonnie wanted to be a violinist. When she finally sat in the pit of an orchestra her bow was up but everyone else’s was down. She said she couldn’t hear the music anymore. She knew it was time to go. “You need to know what you can and cannot do,” she says. And when you know what you can do…bang. “They don’t give up getting to Somewhere and eventually Somewhere explodes. It gets wider and wider and you become a star at the center of your own galaxy. There’s a lot of magic in this business.”
In the galaxy of entertainment actors might be called stars, but we’ve all felt that stardom once, or still, or every once in a while. Some of us in sports, some as a mother or father, some in hospitals, some on the street, some in a classroom when our homework gets read aloud, some as artists. We have our moments. To sustain the brightness we have to work really hard. When, exhausted and doubtful, we ask ourselves why we’re doing this; when there are no results but we continue to love what we do; when we know we have something that has to be seen, said, or heard, then, maybe someone will look our way; someone like Bonnie, and we’ll know we’ve just been seen. Carl Sagan said, “Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.”
Once in a while it’s nice to believe the moon can see you. That’s when you know you’re shining.
Shannon Plumb is a performer, writer, and director who currently stars in the comedy show Chopped Liver. Her films have screened in festivals, movie theaters, museums, and galleries. Her essays are published on Talkhouse.com.
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