Fame – that elusive measure of popularity that so many of us reach out for, and so many of us fall short. On rare occasions, the mighty lightning bolt of fame strikes an individual so suddenly that we are shocked by their meteoric rise into the public spotlight. How does one change when rather than being born great, one has greatness thrust upon them? With only a week’s worth of time at my disposal, I set to find out. This week, I am diving deep into the mind of one of Missoula, Montana’s quickest rising stars – Sean Kirkpatrick. Sean is an award-winning actor, playwright, director, and comedian who recently had a comedy video on YouTube go viral. This video is what brought the dark-haired, dark-eyed, 22 year old into my life, and after such a sudden jump to fame, it was time to further pull this talented young man out of the dregs of obscurity.
My week with Sean first started on Sunday at a local bar in Downtown Missoula, The Badlander. “This is one of my usual haunts,” Sean said as I slid into the booth seat across from him. “Get the Carolina Cosmo or the Mississippi Mudslide, that’s what I usually get.” Sunday at The Badlander, apparently, is a special night with a live jazz band and $5 martinis, and Sean was quick to tell me that he is there almost every week. “It’s a great place to just chill, you know? Pretty low-key, great drinks, great music,” he leaned in across the table, as if he was telling me a secret, “And anytime I take a guy here on a date it has a – well, it has a happy ending.” He relaxed back in his seat and fluttered his eyebrows at me. Sean has such a strange way of interacting; where he is both flirting with you and making you feel like he doesn’t enjoy your presence. It was very hard to ignore his sexual charisma and natural charm.
As the night went on, this reporter found himself more and more enthralled by Sean. We eventually ended up sampling every martini on the menu and discussing topics ranging from his opinion on sweatpants to dissecting Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a narrative map for Willem Dafoe’s career. A quick rundown of Sean’s thoughts on…
-Politics: “Looks like the circus was in Washington and left all the clowns behind.”
-Religion: “We all basically worship the same god, right? [Holds up a dollar bill] This is the one true god that all men bow before. Am I right or am I right?”
-Music: “Once someone finds a new way to play the same four chords, then I’ll be interested.”
-Theatre: “Theatre is inherently fake, you know? Like, why try for something real when no matter what you do will be a lie.”
-Love: “It’s a choice, like, sure you can ‘fall’ in love with someone, but maintaining that connection is a lot of work. Every morning you have to wake up and look over at that person and think ‘yes he snores, yes he leaves his sh*t all over the place, but I’m choosing to overlook that.’ But I’m just too lazy, you know? I haven’t found the person that I’m willing to put all that effort into. At least, not yet.”
-Sex: “Your place or mine?”
-Equality: “To quote Scott Aukerman – big ups to folks of all stars and stripes.”
-Death: “You know what they say, life’s a race and everybody wants to come in last.”
-His prolific Twitter Profile: “To be honest, I forgot I still had that thing. I pay some 20 year-old Media Arts nerd to manage that thing for me.”
We had to be about 15 drinks in when the lights came on to signal that the bar was closing. Sean, demonstrating that he really is a caring guy, walked me out. As we parted ways, planning to meet-up the next day for another interview session, Sean leaned in. I have to admit I was hesitant at first. Is it unethical for a journalist to be with their subject romantically? Or maybe this is the best way to truly pick-apart the psyche of your subject in an article. He leaned in a little more…
The next day, Sean picked me up in his 1998 Forest Green Subaru Outback. “How Missoula, I know,” he quipped when I commented on his car. Sean drove me around Missoula the majority of the day, pointing out places in town that meant something to him. As we made our way down 4th Street, Sean pulled over in front of a dilapidated ramshackle of a home – the paint was peeling, the yard was dead, and there was garbage all over the front porch. “This is where Holocene started,” Sean explained, “Before it was Missoula’s favorite play in The Palace [in October 2014], it was just a group of friends making theatre on a porch. This house has a lot to do with the world that Hugh [Bickley] created.” Sean stared at the house for a while, reliving the days of his youth gone-by before taking me off to our next destination.
One of the most fascinating things about Sean is that he knows all the words to the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton," something I discovered as we drove around and he sang along the entire time. As we reached the show’s finale – a heart-breaking song titled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” – Sean had taken me to a road in yet-completed development in the South Hills. “I once went on a really weird New Year’s date and he took me here. It’s much prettier at night. You can see the whole city, twinkling like a million ships on a vast dark ocean.” As he was talking, Sean pulled out a small glass pipe and began packing it with, what I’m told the kids call, ‘wacky tobacky.’ “We got high, looked at the lights, then got Taco Bell and watched some movies. Hit?” He offered me the pipe, but I declined, as I don’t smoke drugs. This whole day felt like something out of a John Green novel – a quirky, hipster-ish, very cute fellow with a soft “bad-boy” attitude waxing poetic to the plain lead, your faithful reporter.
As we returned into town, Sean took me to a local pizzeria: Little Caesars on Brooks, which now serves Bacon-Crust pizza for $12, available all-day or Hot-N-Ready® from 4-8 p.m. “Do you like pepperoni?” Sean asked me with a smirk that seemed to convey a double entendre in his question. I, of course, agreed. Sean stepped up to the counter, a slight swagger in his hips, and not only ordered two Hot-N-Ready® Pepperoni Pizzas, an order of Little Caesars Crazy Bread® with the Crazy Sauce, and a two-litre of refreshing Cherry Pepsi-Cola. He paid for the entire thing, not once asking me to reimburse him – I was touched by how sweet that gesture was. We took our food and ate outside.
At first, I was hesitant to eat Little Caesars pizza, but as I took the first bite, my mouth was consumed in a veritable orgy of flavor. With the Italian-American dish of pizza, the crust is the hardest element to nail down – however, this crust was the perfect balance of crunchy and chewy, moist and tender, and not-at-all like damp cardboard. On top of the crust was a layer of succulent marinara sauce that was spread evenly across the entire pizza and definitely didn’t have large patches with globs of sauce while leaving other areas of the pizza devoid like some sort of marinara desert. Piled on top of the sauce was a thrilling combination of, what Little Caesars describes as, “100 percent Mozzarella and Muenster cheese” that, in this writer’s honest opinion, was melted to perfection then left under a heating lamp until it was rendered into a plastic-like sheen on the disc of pizza I was consuming. Lodged in the “cheese” were dried up mounds of leftover cow and pig entrails that the government has classified as legally meat. It was, perhaps, the best $5 pizza I have ever consumed.
We ate in complete silence, I kept trying to bring up the issues I originally wanted to cover with this interview: What were the challenges in creating an award-winning one-man show? What is life on the road like as a touring actor? Have you faced any repercussions from your public coming-out article at the beginning of the year? How has fame changed you? But Sean was silent on all counts. Every topic I’d bring up he’d merely shrug and continue to eat his pizza. The tone of the evening had changed; he was no longer the excited and outgoing young actor that I was here to shadow and interview for a week. Now he was melancholic, depressed even. His eyes were dark and seemed sunken in to his skull, I noticed frown lines cut deep into his eternally youthful face, and his brow was furrowed.
Once we returned to the car, Sean began to drive me to the place where I was staying. "Hamilton" played softly in the background, but he didn’t seem to notice. His lips were moving, as if he was forming a thought that didn’t feel comfortable in his mouth. “Did I waste four years of my life? Studying theatre?” he asked me as I was getting out of his car. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I mean, I love performing, I love what I do. But still… I’ve seen some real sh*t theatre, and it just – it just makes me question my entire life, you know? I can’t handle the attention. Signing things, posing for pictures, making public appearances. What the f*ck am I doing?” I found myself speechless. This was the Sean that you, my faithful readers, wanted to meet and learn about. A moment of true vulnerability, no performance, no flirtatious glances. But it was a brief moment, fleeting, and he drove off into the night.
After that, it was virtual radio silence from Sean for two days. What had once been a simple assignment had grown into something more. This journalist found himself falling in love for the first time with the subject of one of my articles. I began to grow concerned for Sean’s mental health. He had casually mentioned a heartbreak he had gone through that left him devastated, and his recent financial struggles. Was he going to do something drastic? To distract myself, I went to see "Deadpool" at Missoula’s Carmike Cinemas. I found this R-rated superhero romp, a passion project from the entire creative team, to be the most interesting and fresh Marvel adaptation in recent years. If you haven’t seen "Deadpool" yet, I highly recommend an IMAX showing for the full immersive experience.
Late Thursday evening I finally heard back from Sean, it was a simple text message that contained only his address. As I made my way across town, I was struck by how beautiful Missoula can be on a February night – the lights, the bridges, the river that runs through it – it's no wonder that this sleepy little town has a strong arts scene. It is hard not to be inspired when you simply look around and realize how lucky you are to be alive right now.
I arrived at the brick apartment building off Orange Street and ascended the stairs. The front door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it open. Inside, I found a spacious, three-bedroom apartment that was surprisingly devoid of furniture. In the middle of the living room sitting on the floor was Sean surrounded by empty bottles of beer. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all week. Passed out on the single couch was Zach Krell, 22, one of Sean’s roommates and star of the University of Montana’s upcoming production of All In The Timing. “Now you’re getting the full Sean experience,” Sean said.
There is a rule that all journalists must follow – if the subject of an interview either opens or closes their discussion with the phrase “This is off the record,” then everything that was said can no longer be published. Sean must have, at one point, been a member of Journalists United For Fair Ethical Reporting (J.U.F.F.E.R.) because he knew that rule and took advantage of it. With the “Off the Record” Rule in place I can only paint our in-depth, personal, and highly emotional discussion with the broadest of strokes.
We talked about the struggles of growing up in rural Idaho, having close relatives move overseas, struggling to breakout in the theatre scene in Montana, and the slow process of beginning a career writing for television. I learned that Sean has always been deeply afraid of extra-terrestrials and believes that listening to Green Day in middle school is what made him gay and hate the government. He admitted to the Zodiac killings and helping Dick Cheney make money off the Iraq War. I also learned that he is very talented in the art of kissing – both rough and giving, with just the right amount of tongue.
Sean was in the middle of laying bare his soul to me and getting me to open up to him in return, when we were interrupted by a bespectacled fellow carrying a towel and a ginger cat. “Hi, I’m Adrian, one of Sean’s roommates. Don’t mind me, I’m just taking my third shower of the day,” he then disappeared into the bathroom. Sean took this as a cue to escort me to his bedroom.
That was my final evening with Sean before I had to return home to continue writing stories about drinking games and pasta. We made the most of the night, but in the morning it was time to depart, time to write this very article. What had started as a simple piece about one young actor’s meteoric rise to fame from crossing 7,200 views on YouTube, had now become something much more. Sean is not just a talented puppeteer and master of voices, but he is also a generous lover. He was giving, and caring, and created an emotional bond through the merging of flesh that this reporter had never experienced before. I was unable to get the type of interview I had hoped for, an interview with words from the mouth, but I left with a new type of interview – an interview with a deep connection from the very core of another human’s soul. I will be chasing that unification of two persons very essence for the rest of my life, but all I will have are the memories, fading with each passing day. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
