It’s a Wonderful So-Called Life

He said, “My agent just called me and was like, ‘There’s this really amazing script floating around, and there’s a really great character in it that I think you would be able to relate to,’ and she sent me the script. I sat in my room at my parents’ house, I remember it as yesterday, and wept. I wept because I just thought it was this beautiful, perfect piece of material, and I wanted it so badly. And the thought of not playing that character, not getting it, just was — it was unfathomable to me. I claimed it from the moment I closed the script. I was like, ‘That’s my role and I dare anybody to try and take it away from me.’”

Cruz turned up at the initial audition in a rainbow t-shirt and eyeliner. “I remember walking into the waiting room and nobody else was dressed like that, and I thought, you guys are losers. You obviously don’t want this bad enough.”

While filming the series, Cruz often had the feeling that its creator had somehow gotten into his head or been spying on his life for years. That feeling was never stronger than when he filmed the holiday episodes. Included in the embarrassment of riches that makes up the bonus features on the DVD set is a commentary on “So-Called Angels” by Cruz and series creator Winnie Holzman, and in it, Cruz discusses the profound impact the story had on him.

“This had actually happened to me less than a year from when we shot this,” he said. “I had been kicked out of my house because I had come out to my father the Christmas before this. I wasn’t ready to talk about it, let alone relive it.”

Cruz, who made the decision to come out to his family because he wanted to play Rickie as an openly gay actor, was deeply affected by his own experience and the response to Rickie’s storyline. He began working with homeless LGBT youth, and continues to do so to this day. “I’ve always said from the beginning that these kids who are kicked out of their homes by their parents, in that moment that they’re turned away from their homes they become our kids, and they become our responsibility because we’ve been there,” he told AfterElton.com. “This epidemic of children being thrown away from their homes because they’re gay or lesbian or trans or bi, it’s enough already.”

Of course, My So-Called Life was more than its holiday episodes, and more than Cruz or Rickie Vasquez. Even if it hadn’t included one of the earliest and most compelling gay characters in television history, the show would have spoken to the outsider inside every kid, queer or straight, who ever went to high school. The incandescent performance of a 14-year-old Claire Danes dominated the series, which also launched the career of Jared Leto. And the show didn’t come out of nowhere; it was produced by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the team responsible for thirtysomething.

But more than anyone else, My So-Called Life belongs to its creator and writer, Winnie Holzman, who participates in every commentary and nearly every interview on the DVD. The mother of a lesbian daughter, only 8 years old when the show was being filmed, she was deeply moved when Cruz told her how difficult it had been to film “So-Called Angels” so soon after his own family had rejected him for being gay — and even more so when he told her how the airing of the episode had led him to reconcile with his father.

“Two months (after shooting), when it aired, my father saw it on TV. We hadn’t spoken for a year,” said Cruz. “He called me after watching it. This episode is the reason why I have a relationship with my father today. I came out to my parents because of the show, and the thing that brought me back together with them was the show.”

One of the most striking things about the many interviews and commentaries on the DVDs is that this show, despite having only 19 episodes, is clearly still exerting a powerful effect on those involved with it. In speaking with Cruz, his sense of identity with Rickie is obvious, even after 12 years. To what extent did he help create this character that was so much like him?

“I wouldn’t say I created the character,” he said. “I think I infused him with as much life as I possibly could. Rickie doesn’t really say a lot, but I think at the time I was so aware of who this person was that I filled his silences with dialogue. I knew what he was thinking when he was standing in the scenes that he barely said anything in, and I just loved him and wanted to be in on the process of creating him.”

It was Holzman, though, who created Rickie, he said. Then he laughed and added, “She will tell you that she had a picture of who this person was when she was writing it, and when I walked in the door she was freaked out because she was like, ‘That’s him. That’s who I was thinking of writing it.’”