Celebrity parenting not so glamorous
Based on what we read in the supermarket tabs, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie look as if they live a glamorous kind of family life.
They work, they travel and they carry their children – who number six now – with them everywhere.
Josh Hamilton can tell you, though, that such a lifestyle isn’t as easy as it seems.
Hamilton doesn’t live at the highest levels of celebrity existence. But he does dwell in at least the ionosphere of that rarified world.
Just turned 39, Hamilton is the kind of actor who drifts back and forth between movies and the New York stage. A New Yorker born and raised, he is perhaps best known for his role in Noah Baumbach’s 1995 independent film “Kicking and Screaming.”
Those who attended February’s Spokane International Film Festival should remember Hamilton as the star of John Jeffcoat’s “Outsourced,” which was named as the festival’s best feature. Hamilton plays a guy who loses his Seattle-based job but then agrees to go to India and train his replacement.
Hamilton has been doing promotion for the DVD of “Outsourced,” which will hit the shelves in September. That’s why he was on the phone last week, discussing various things – including the problem of combining his family and professional life.
Following the birth of his son 17 months ago, Hamilton learned what all new parents do: Having a child changes everything.
“It’s not like anything else,” he said. “People ask, ‘What’s it like being a dad?’ There are no words for it. It’s the biggest before and after that I’ve ever had in my life.”
One thing he stresses is that even living in pricey New York (Brooklyn, to be specific), he and his wife haven’t noticed that being parents has changed their financial status.
“For the first couple of years, they really don’t cost all that much,” Hamilton said with a laugh. “All you really need is a box and a blanket, you know? The milk’s free …”
What changes, he said, is your ability to balance want versus need.
“The bigger issue is how you allot your time, how you choose work and what’s worth spending time away from your family and what isn’t,” he said.
Take the simple choice between acting on stage as opposed to working on a film. Hamilton made “Outsourced” in 2006, he just finished a run of Eric Bogosian’s play “1+1,” and in the fall he’ll embark on a yearlong theater project that will take him around the world – from New York to Singapore, New Zealand and London and other stops in between – to do repertory productions of “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Winter’s Tale.”
“It’s something that my actor friends and I talk about all the time, trying to figure out the best way to handle it,” Hamilton said.
When acting on the stage, he said, “First of all, you miss (your children’s) bedtime, which, you know, is a pretty special time. And what’s really hard is being on a theater schedule. … I can’t just come home and fall asleep. I’m up until 1 or 2, and that doesn’t really lend itself to getting up at 6 or 7.”
But being on location is also difficult.
“Once they’re in school, the question is, ‘Is it better for the kids to stay in school and be away from you, or is it more important to take them with you?’ ” Hamilton said. “But if you’re going to be working 15-hour days, does that make sense anyway?”
Good question. Hamilton filmed “Outsourced” before he was a parent, and he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) spent a leisurely three months taking a meditation workshop, working on the film and traveling.
So when he begins the yearlong stage venture, will he take his family with him?
“As much as I can,” he said, adding: “Though I don’t know about Singapore. We’re there only about a week, so I don’t know if the plane flight will justify the length of time.”
Even over the phone, Hamilton’s sigh was obvious.
“It’s an age-old struggle,” he said. “I guess everybody’s got to find their balance.”
Even, we can presume, Brangelina.