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BURBANK, Calif. — Actor Christian Slater’s long and successful career makes it seem like he never missed out on anything. But there is one thing that passed him by, he says: life.
When he was 27 he’d already worked 18 years. “My life about that time was working and stressing about working. That was pretty much what it was based on. I really didn’t know there were other things to do. I had no concept or clue,” says Slater in the commissary on the Warner Bros. lot.
“I would work and go home at night and live in this house behind gates, so I was very isolated, very closed off. And I didn’t really know how to maneuver within society. I just didn’t know how to do it. I felt very insecure and all these things,” he says.
“I had other people doing things for me, so what did I know? You start to strip away a lot of those things, and you show up for life and be a little more present and have some adventures.”
Slater’s father was an actor and his mom a casting agent. He’d started working at 9. And though he’s had some minor run-ins with the law, Slater is one child actor who managed to morph into an adult performer with validated credits like “Heathers,” “Broken Arrow,” “True Romance” and his new ABC drama, “The Forgotten.”
The series is based on real American volunteers who devote their time to researching unknown murder victims, John and Jane Does, who end up in the morgue without identification. Once the police have exhausted their resources, the team takes over helping to identify these nameless souls, but also helping to solve the crimes.
It’s another project in which Slater deeply immerses himself. But at 40, there’s more to him than the next performance.
“I’m still shy and I get nervous,” he ventures, “I’m definitely not walking around like Superman ... The pendulum swings to extremes. It’s a process of finding out where you feel comfortable and where the balance is.
“I don’t have a lot of friends. I have a few friends. I have people in my life I count on who are phenomenally loyal and have my back. When you have that, it helps you to feel safer, more secure and you’re with people that think in a similar way that you do. That’s a real gift. In the last few years I’ve been blessed with that kind of gift — to have people like that in my life.”
One of his wake-up calls was the birth of his son and later, a daughter. “That was a huge eye-opening, shifting moment,” he says, sipping from a Styrofoam coffee mug.
“Having kids, I think I started to look at my life and take some notice of it and started to ask myself, in a way maybe interviewing myself, ‘What are the things you’re insecure about, the things you don’t feel good about in yourself?”’
One of those things was his education. “I always felt a little embarrassed about that because I dropped out of high school. I didn’t take school seriously at all. I pretty much finagled and felt like I was getting away with murder my whole high school. And I always carried that around. And you can’t escape certain things; it weighs on you, especially when you know there’s something you can do about it.”
So Slater hired a tutor and studied for the GED, which he earned. “Once you have kids, obviously I want them to get a good education and have a good foundation. It is important, a good foundation, and I don’t think it was anything I took seriously because I was working. My kids are 10 and 8 now and I started earning a living at 9 so my focus was obviously elsewhere. It just was. But you can only run from things for so long.”
As the star of several action movies, Slater also felt he was faking it. So he began to study karate. “My next test will be the brown belt test, so I’m getting closer and closer to the black belt test, but my schedule and the way it goes gets in the way now of things I enjoy doing for my life.”
Divorced from his wife of six years, Ryan Haddon, Slater’s social calendar has always been filled with beautiful and famous women. But there’s no one right now, he shrugs. “I’ve no problems with marriage, it’s all about the right person, the right chemistry and working it out. Right now I’m just taking it easy in that regard. Right now I don’t really have time for that. I have crushes, but have no energy to take advantage of them,” he smiles.
“We all have the opportunity to give ourselves our own happy endings if we’re willing to take the action to show up and do it and participate and have that willingness.”
