my first acting role in LA was playing a hamster

Also on set - Kevin Spacey, Sir Ben Kingsley, Mandy Patinkin, and Gary Oldman

In Hollywood, nothing is as it seems.

That's not Jack Sparrow taking photos with tourists on Hollywood Boulevard, and it’s definitely not Johnny Depp. That's Erez Peretz, a guy who pretends to be Johnny Depp pretending to be Jack Sparrow.

Nor is that Jimmy Kimmel, that's a wax statue of him at Madame Tussaud's.

And those black box theaters that line Hollywood’s streets? They are theaters, yes, but that’s not how they butter their bread. During the day, they transform into acting schools and casting workshops to educate the dreamers and schemers.

It was in such a black box theater that I found myself on a Tuesday morning in 2014, sitting in a too-plush, too-squeaky seat, awaiting the 11am Comedy Casting Workshop hosted by Jimmy Kimmel's casting director, Cecelia Pleva.

And I was thirsty.

No, thirsty would be an understatement. I was parched. Aching, gasping, in need.

In need to succeed.

I’d been in LA for less than a fortnight and already felt like I was behind. The resume I was holding in my hands, stapled to my brand new headshots, was legit — I wasn’t a nobody.

I'd spent the last three years in the minor league town of Austin, TX building up my resume, acting as the lead of a few indies that did well at the festivals, I even got cast as Dustin Hoffman's son in a big budget biopic about Lance Armstrong.

I was ready.

and scene

We got paired off to do scenes from Will Ferrell movies and the show Modern Family.

Judging by the email I sent afterwards, I’d say things went pretty well.

Alex Dobrenko – Reel (From Today's Comedy Workshop)

Great to meet you today – thanks so much for the workshop. I had a blast. And thanks for the note about my headshots, I'll update those asap and send new ones your way.

Ok so there was a note about my headshots, which makes sense given that I was sending out this heart melter:

An hour later, a reply.

Re: Alex Dobrenko – Reel (From Today's Comedy Workshop)

Great! Thanks for sending—I'll check it out. Other than LA Casting, we use Actor's Access/Breakdown Express. Talk soon—nice meeting you today!

Talk soon? Talk soon. Talk soon!

Soon, we'd talk.

A week later, we did.

Cecelia might need me for a sketch that would, I shit you not, air during their annual post-Oscar special!

Here. We. Go.

I kept reading.

The role: a Christoph Waltz body double!

Huh.

A body double.

First, I googled who Christoph Waltz was only only to realize that of course I knew who that was – he was the bad guy from Inglorious Basterds, a movie with Brad Pitt and many other successes of the industry.

Next I looked up ‘body double.’ It did not, thank god, mean that I’d be his stand-in.

I’d seen that on the Dustin Hoffman movie - a guy who, looking more or less like the actor, would stand at the actor’s mark while the camera got set up. Then, right before action, they’d do a switcheroo and Dustin Hoffman would show up and do the scene.

No, I’d moved past that. I was a body double, someone who would be on camera, in the scene, acting as the actor so convincingly that the audience would never know the difference. Key to this was, yes, that my face would not be seen, but whatever. I would disappear into the role. his was it. This was it baby!!

I kept reading.

Can you send my your sizes so I can see if they match up with Christoph Waltz? He and you will be in a custom made hamster costume. Your dream to play a hamster is becoming close to a reality!

A custom made hamster costume? For me AND Christoph Waltz? Here we frikkin go baby! The city of angels!!

one first job

There’s that meme about how explaining modernity - iPhones, self-driving cars - to a Victorian era child would kill them. Trying to explain the premise for this Jimmy Kimmel sketch would kill anyone, living or dead, now, past, future, whatever. But still, we must try:

Every Oscars night, Kimmel would air these very sleek trailers for fake films featuring super famous actors. The whole thing gave big “wacky stepchild” energy to the self-serious Oscars.

That year, one of the trailers was called Ameowdeaus, a spoof of the Mozart biopic Amadeus, the best picture Oscar winning film about Mozart’s rivalry with the less talented, much more thirsty composer Antonio Salieri.

Except in this sketch, Ameowdeaus, Mozart would be replaced by the cat YouTube Piano Cat fame and Salieri by the hamster from “hamster on a piano” YouTube.

Let’s check in - how are you? Is this making any sense? It certainly shouldn’t, and yet for some reason, Kimmel got A-list actors to play all the roles.

Kevin Spacey would be playing the Keyboard Cat. (this was before his scandal broke—no way he’d be cast now).

Christoph Waltz would play the Hamster on a piano.

But that’s not all.

Sir fucking Ben Kingsley aka Gandhi himself would be in it as…Emperor?

Mandy Patinkin, the legend from Princess Bride, was an unnamed Attendant.

And, hey, look at that, yours truly. Alex Dobrenko.

Not on the call sheet was Gary Oldman aka Drexel from True Romance, my fav movie at the time, who’d be playing…another Attendant.

My role was small, sure, but remember – there’s no such thing as a small part. Just a small person playing the body double of a small person playing the part of a hamster.

Hamster Double - Alex Dobrenko

I remember arriving on set, Beverly Hills, the actual zip code 90210, at a swanky ass mansion. My call time was 630am – first to arrive, that had to mean something.

I took out my iPhone 5 and sent this photo to my parents with the text

Got a little job on the jimmy kimmel show! I think this sketch is with Kevin spacey! Don't tell anyone, we are supposed to keep it a secret.

Swiftly was I moved to the makeup room where – there in the chair next to me was Sir Ben Kingsley. I attempted what could best be described as “very aggressive small talk,” with middling results. I distinctly remember Ben Kingsley laughing - or was that wincing? - no definitely laughing.

Kevin Spacey arrived and everything shifted. This was the A-lister du jour and he had the posse to prove it. Two assistants, two hair and makeup people, two random people staring at their phones. House of Cards had just dropped, and he already had Oscars for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty.

Finally, Mandy Patinkin arrived. He was the only actor with no ‘team’ and felt like a guy I’d grown up going to temple with. This was the life for me. I’d ask him later how to pull it off.

Makeup was done - not sure exactly what was needed to make me look like a faceless Christoph Waltz looking like a hamster, but that’s not my area of expertise!

Next, we went to wardrobe where I put on my hamster costume, a 50-pound, heavy as shit white-haired costume done up with the level of realism and detail befitting a character you’d see at Disney (World, not Land).

Rolling

First up, a wide shot scurry across the screen. And scurry i did, waddling my way through the frame with the exaggerated tone I could tell this project was going for. Myself, had I been in waltz’s hampster feet and not had the luxury of a double, I’d have done it understated. A mere walk. But this was Kimmel. Hollywood comedy stuff. Broad, so I gave ‘em broad. Notice the hand movements. The precision.

Next up, a close up of my hands grabbing a giant piece of popcorn. I’d not done much close up hand work yet as an actor, nor would it turn out to be my specialty – but I gave it my all and, even with the hamster hands decreasing my overall dexterity by about 90%, I managed to pick up the popcorn each time, without issue. I’d nailed it in the first take, but we rolled on it a few times for safety.

I remember there being a lot of down time after that. I puttered around the set, still dressed as a hamster costume, sweating profusely.

Everyone kept saying “dude that was so funny” and I thought, “yep, this is how it starts.” I imagined myself one day telling this story on Jimmy Kimmel. This was how it happened and, here it was, happening.

Lunch came and went, and now it was time for my big moment.

the death of a cat who is mozart

There we were, me and Spacey, mano y mano (before the allegations) – the climax (ibid) of the trailer. Ameowdeaus on his deathbed and I, the court composer hamster, trying to trick him into writing a final ‘death march’ that I’d claim as my own.

How did I convince him? With money, of course. The moment was simple - I’d need to splash gold coins atop Kevin Spacey’s dying cat.

I remember being escorted to set. Kevin Spacey wasn’t there, his stand-in was. Poor guy, I thought.

Everyone got ready. A cat with the face of Kevin Spacey walked onto set and laid down on the bed. The cameraman was right there above my right shoulder to capture the throw in all its glory.

This was going to change everything. All I had to do was throw the coins.

And so, hamster hands be damned, I let those gold goblets of sweet cash fly atop the body of a giant cat.

The next second lasted for years before Spacey looked right at me – a great sign that I knew meant we were connecting so hard he’d forgotten I was but a double – and said, “Did you have to throw them all on my dick?”

“CUT” screamed eight different voices.

“What?” I maybe said.

“Did you have to throw them all right onto my dick.”

There were giggles and snickers but not an all out laughapalooza because Kevin Spacey wasn’t kidding. He was serious. He was upset. I was escorted off the set.

They set up for another take but no one was coming to grab me.

I asked the AD if I should hop in.

No, he said, they were just gonna do it themselves. It was a really technical move. Nothing against me.

I had barely any wiggle room for my fingers with the hamster hands, I thought about telling everyone. Don’t pin this on me.

I felt shame and anguish and a touch of wtf-style joy. People kept coming up to me and apologizing. Sorry about Kevin, they’d say. That’s when I understood that this was my underdog origin story.

From the ashes, a hamster rose and became an A-list star.

Driving home, I tried explaining the sketch to my parents. “You ARE Christoph waltz?,” my mom asked, “Kevin Spacey IS a cat?”

Cecilia asked me to come do another couple sketches - one live and one as David Spade’s double. I was in Austin for both. I haven’t heard from her since.

the confidence and the thirst

Looked back through the many emails I was sending around 2014, both re: Keyboard Cat and other, less glamorous projects, I am most struck by my how unadulterated my hope was.

Pure and true, eager, a believer. I was going to make it, I was sure.

That hope was sucked from the marrow of my little soul over the next ten years. Not because of the industry, exactly, but because it all just hurt too much for a sensitive little guy. And, more so, because I could never, not even for a day, see whatever that was in front of me as enough. I hadn’t “made it.”

I dabbled, flirted with it, but I never became one of the actors Kimmel called to be in his Oscar sketches.

Nothing is as it seems. For example, why doesn’t the word hamster have a ‘p’ in it? And who are each of us, really? Aren’t we always pretending? Usually its other versions of ourselves, but sometimes its famous actors who are pretending to be hamsters.

Regardless, we fail and, in the failing, as David Foster Wallace once said, “of course, we end up becoming ourselves.”

I am not a famous actor nor am I a career long body double for Christoph Waltz, though I did recently edit a double reel for that exact purpose as a joke.

I’m a writer comedian guy living in Asheville who is writing a story about the time he threw coins on kevin spacey’s cat dick. That’s me, right now, but only for a little longer. Soon I’ll be the guy who wrote that essay and life will, in quick order, make mince meat of the man I thought I was.

And yet, still, I try. I hope and I long, I double down and rage and beg for things to be different.

It’s hamster costumes all the way down.

Maybe the failing is the point?

Failure, after all, is the comedian’s craft. It is the falling down that we laugh at, the goof, the boof, the trying and lying, the ruins we make of our lives in pursuit of pointless things. Tragedy is forgetting how dumb it all is. Comedy is laughing about it. I choose the latter, though most of the time life still feels like the former.

"I was so thirsty back then," I say now to friends, as if anything has changed. I am still thirsty. I will always be, parched and afraid, thinking that maybe if I can throw enough coins on the right preverbial dick, that’ll solve things. It won’t. It can’t.

Because the trick to thirst is simple - drink some water. There’s hamster sipper bottles everywhere.

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Ameowdeaus (2014)

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comments, get yr comments

1. Whats the weirdest gig you’ve ever had?

2. Do you feel like you’ve ‘made it?’

3. How do you remember the good stuff is the now stuff?

5. Are you Christoph Waltz? Do you need a double? Here’s my double reel: