A Hollywood Actor Refused to Reveal His Name

So I went on an adventure to find it

It started as an ordinary movie night.

We sat together on the couch, fired up Netflix, and loaded the first feature that looked promising. It was movie night—our Wednesday night ritual as a family.

We picked an action-thriller that wasted no time getting the full attention of our adrenals and keeping us on the edge of the sofa for a two-hour ride. The protagonist is played by a highly popular actor whose name is . . .

And that’s where my story begins.

Not having bothered to note the opening credits, the name of this actor—who’s starred in numerous films I’ve seen before—just wouldn’t appear on the screen of my brain. The more engaged I became in the film, the more I wanted to remember the actor’s name, but it wouldn’t click, even after twenty minutes of attempting to remember it.

I wrestled through the rest of the movie with the faint whisper of his birth label on the tip of my tongue, but it just . . . wouldn’t . . . come out; like a yawn that presses uncomfortably against the back of your throat and yet refuses to deliver its relief.

It was driving me crazy.

When I shared my frustration with the rest of my family, who also couldn’t remember his name, they did what we all usually do in that circumstance.

They googled it.

“Ooooh! Yeah . . . that’s it,” my wife declared, and turned to share the answer, but I covered my ears and started singing Happy Birthday To You out loud so I wouldn’t hear it.

“Don’t TELL me!” I insisted.

I was determined to complete the journey I had started inside my own brain, the holy quest for a piece of knowledge that I knew I already possessed and didn’t want to recover with search tools other than my own.

“I know it’s in there,” I lamented. “I’m going to remember it by myself!”

My wife was amused at what seemed like unnecessary resolve for an inconsequential result, but somehow, it felt very consequential to me—though I wasn’t sure why.

We retired for the night and the next day I embarked on this inner adventure. It was like a mental hobby I picked up in small breaks of thought, poking around in the recesses and nooks and crannies of my own psyche, turning over all the usual stones like: the other movies I’d seen him in, the actresses and co-stars he’d played alongside of, letters of the alphabet I had a hunch were part of his initials.

I came up with nothing.

I sifted, prodded, and begged my brain to cough up the missing person I was so determined to find, but no luck.

I needed another approach.

“Fine,” I decided, “I’ll pretend like I don’t care and in a moment when my mental guard is down I’ll launch a surprise attack on my brain-vault and snatch it out from under the nose of my information security officers!”

My strategy involved placing a note on the bathroom sink, so when I got up in the middle of the night to pee I’d see the prompt, which said, “and the name is . . .” hoping the answer would leap over the sleepy narrowed gap between my conscious and unconscious mind.

And that almost worked. I could feel his name dancing on the tips of a few remote neurons, and yet, I still couldn’t pull that name-sword out of its stubborn stone.

As the days passed, my playful challenge was feeling more personal. I’d alternately bear down with all the force of my concentration, and then walk away, completely let it go; approach again, circling my skull looking for a hidden trapdoor. I’d threaten to not let myself sleep or eat until my mind-vault cooperated.

A week passed.

And not without plenty of compassionate offers from my family to end my suffering. “No,” I stubbornly insisted. “Don’t tell me. PROMISE you won’t tell me!”

Two weeks passed.

I persisted, I dug deep, I regularly visualized the iconic actor’s face, and despite the clear recall of his handsome profile, the name bubble wouldn’t pop. It wasn’t until the third week that I considered a new approach.

Patience.

I had stood so close to that name over the course of the weeks, side by side in the hush of night, feeling its breath in the shadows of my thoughts, it was with me, and yet I couldn’t command its appearance.

Slowly it dawned on me that if you want to hunt a rare animal, you must be prepared to make friends with its habitat, not threaten to bulldoze its home to the ground. I would need a friendlier relationship to my mind. And so I resolved to wait with gentleness. It was an entirely new skill. The ability to want, but without aggression. The capacity to pursue a goal without seeing immediate results.

And so that’s the path that I followed—breathing, relaxing, waiting patiently and with a kind of humble faith. I apprenticed to this lost art of contemplative trust.

Surely my pre-internet forebears must have known and cultivated these qualities out of necessity. How else would the wisdom holders of centuries past have been able to produce their scholarly works, their revelatory texts, if not by having the ability to search within and allow wisdom and knowledge to flow forth from the depths of unforced rumination?

The predominant span of human history has produced breathtaking examples of higher knowledge without the benefit of an instant search. Instead, devotees of truth seduced insight and understanding from the ethers of the universe by being willing to hold a question for more than a minute, more than an hour, or a week—perhaps nurturing a single vital inquiry over a period of years.

Can you think of a single question that you’d be willing to hold and protect for years while you waited for any hints and clues that might come your way?

Can you imagine a question so rich with your interest that you’d be willing to extinguish your birthday candles several times over before you were graced with its appearance?

Twenty-three days after watching our movie I woke up to early morning birdsong with a sense of peace in my body. I saw the image of the man who had played the main character in the film we had watched, Gray Man. Unprompted, two delicious words appeared on my lips as I lay on my back in bed. Ryan Gosling.

A gentle and oh-so-satisfied smile lit my face.

The remembrance of a simple name came not only with deep satisfaction, but with a renewed appreciation for patience with my own mind, and for trust in the power of a question that is neither hunted, nor abandoned, but rather befriended, and received with open arms when the time is right.

“How silly!” you might say, “such a fuss over a tabloid name.”

Perhaps.

But it has left me wondering what other even greater riches may be lurking in the depths of my mind should I have the necessity to seek them out and the patience to wait for their unveiling.

I grant you, attempting to retrieve the name of a Hollywood actor and inquiring into the very purpose of your life likely involves independent spheres of consciousness—but what if the retrieval dynamics are the same?

What if you already knew the answer to the most important question that lives in your soul, but you’ve assumed the answer doesn’t exist because it didn’t arrive at your first command?

What if you asked it again?

And again after that?

What if you asked it over and over, with an open heart and an open mind?

What if the immensity of the answer that wants to reach you is just waiting for you to clear a vast enough space for it to land?

And what if such a space could only be created by an expanse of patient waiting that is unimaginable in a fast-food world?

Would you be willing to spend a few weeks paying attention to your own mind instead of your phone if your fundamental question about whether your existence is justified here on planet earth could be revealed to you—once and for all?

Or would you rather just go get that double-cheeseburger, ask if they can hold the onions, and get an immediate answer from a 16-year-old before you clear the drive-through window?

Well? Are you thinking about it?

Or are you too busy trying to remember the name of the female lead who played opposite Ryan Gosling in La La Land?

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I’m a devoted advocate of personal storytelling and hope to inspire you to look more deeply at the ordinary moments of your daily life and share your experiences.

The magnificence of personal storytelling is that we usually miss meaningful details and moments of our experiences in the living of them. Storytelling is the willingness to go back and retrieve those abandoned, unacknowledged instances of beauty that were missed as we rushed through the first time.

By default, humans do not live from a transformational context—we live from a survival context. Our attention is dominated by questions like "Where is the food?" "Is there a threat here?" "How do I get out of here alive?" or "What can I grab on my way out the door?" more than it is, "Where is the food for my spirit in this situation?"

It’s not too small a claim to say that personal storytelling is an exercise in retrieving the soul and the significance of its path through time and space.

Your stories matter.