Molly Shannon Details the Hollywood Scam She Used to Score Her Role on ‘Twin Peaks’
Molly Shannon is looking back at her early days in Hollywood!
In her new memoir Hello Molly!, which is set to be released on April 12, the actress revealed that long before her role on Saturday Night Live, she and her friend Eugene Pack used to pretend to work for playwright David Mamet in order to get roles.
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“We were trying to figure out how we were going to get in the door as actors,” Molly explained. “How were we gonna bust in? It was too hard to just slip your picture under an agent’s door. A random headshot? No one was ever gonna call.
“Then we hit on an idea. Eugene had studied with David Mamet. He was (and is) this giant, hugely successful guy, very respected — a big-time playwright and screenwriter — but Eugene knew that he wasn’t a guy who was in Hollywood much. He just liked staying in Vermont and New York,” she continued.
The pair decided to call casting agents from under the guise they were working with David, relying on resources from the American Film Institute library to help them with research.
“We went to the American Film Institute library and looked up managers and agents that we thought would be good for us in this big, thick agency book,” Molly said. “We also looked up actors who we thought were like us, found out who managed them, and decided to go after these people and try to get them to sign us by pretending to be representing Mamet. I called it the Mamet Scam.”
She explained that she would call people up and say, “‘This is Liz Stockwell calling from David Mamet’s office.’ I was David Mamet’s right-hand girl. I was a ray of sunshine. A fun, positive gal.”
She added, “We started meeting everyone — agents at ICM, William Morris. I wanted to be on Twin Peaks so Eugene called the casting director, Johanna Ray, and I actually did get cast on Twin Peaks. Through the Mamet Scam.”
Once she met Johanna, Molly was instructed to meet with David Lynch: “Which was exactly what I wanted to have happen. Because I would drive my wreck past her casting office and say, ‘Oh, I really want to be on Twin Peaks. I love that show!’”
She went on to play social worker Judy Swain in the second season of the show, marking her first ever TV appearance. Molly went on to use to the scam for “about six months” in total.
“The way we saw it, we were doing them a favor,” she wrote. “They were meeting good, young, up-and-coming actors.”
However, not everyone was a fan of Molly and Eugene‘s technique. Molly recalled running the Mamet Scam on Molly Ringwald, who she set up a meeting with.
“When I sat down for my appointment, she glared at me and said, ‘I just wanted to see what a liar looked like in person,’” she recalled.
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