Brooke Shields Is in Her F*ck-It Era

Brooke: I stopped reacting and changing my behavior, and I started just trying to be in the moment. I knew the one thing that I could do was focus on my studies, and I picked interesting, difficult topics. I didn’t try to prove myself. I just tried to study my hardest. I was a nerd, and I was made fun of for how much I studied and didn’t party, and they wanted me to be a party or trainwreck, and I was like, “It’s not my DNA. I don’t have that.”

Samantha: But you wanted to go home.

Brooke: I wanted to go home. I missed my mom. I’ve never lived without my mother. I had never not had a call sheet. All you have to do is show up, and be nice and a good girl, and be accountable, and then they will reward you for it. It works. You don’t have to grow, right? In college, I realized, “Oh, I have opinions.”

After college Shields decided to continue to pursue acting, but she struggled to be taken seriously. She had product deals and endorsements—moves that are now practically expected for starlets on the rise but were then seen as at odds with a rigorous acting career.

Brooke: So, intellectually, college was my first freedom moment. Then I went kind of dark. I was like, “I’m clearly not good enough. I clearly have never had talent. I don’t know why I thought I did. What am I going to do about it?” So I was like, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to study.” I studied, I studied, I studied; I took acting classes with Sandra Seacat. I did these things, and I was miserable.

I was sitting on a mat looking at a fucking green light finding my shadow side. Everybody wants to find Brooke Shields’s shadow side. They wanted to unleash this. I’m like, “You guys, you’re not going about this the right way,” but they were the institution and that was what I was going to be validated by.

And it was dangerous. You can’t do that to people who are impressionable 20-year-olds. My mother drove from New Jersey and said, “You’re stopping this acting class, you’re eating a full meal, you are losing your mind, and we’re worried about you, and you’re coming back and you’re spending the weekend in New Jersey, and we’re going to watch movies and eat Chinese food.”

Samantha: What age were you then?

Brooke: I was 22. And I had to make money. So then I’m having to fly to Japan to do an Italian Nescafé commercial, and there was nothing that was right, and my mother never stopped drinking, so it felt like a free fall, but I knew I was like, “You better pull that cord, man, because you’re going to go down with this whole program.”

Samantha: You were the breadwinner for everybody.

Brooke: I had four women working in an office and they would give me stacks of autographs to sign every day, and my mom was like, “These are your fans. You need to be good to your fans. You need to give it all away. Give it all away. They’re one person. They love you. You’re theirs. You symbolize that. You talk about virginity. They’re scared little girls. They look up to you. You’re blah, blah, blah,” and you’re holding this burden. You’re like, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” All the while, you have no fucking idea who you are. I hadn’t even lost my virginity because I never let myself go in any way.