Part of an occasional series of oral histories, as told to Anne Ford

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My first feature film was The Landlord. It’s on Netflix. It’s about a guy who owns an apartment building that’s infested with demons. I did all of the corrective makeup, and I had a very, very small cameo. I played a junkie who gets eaten by vampires in a crack den.

Yesterday for a film—it’s a short horror-comedy called Text—I had to rip a guy’s eye out of his face. So I built a little eyeball. It was a plastic sandwich bag ripped open, stuffed with cotton balls, and then painted like an eye. I created the optic nerve with the end of the sandwich bag.

There was a second portion where you had to go out to LA and compete in a beauty pageant there in front of an audience. That I did not do so well in, and I wound up not winning the contest overall. I’m not great on the stage—I get very, very nervous—so I don’t really remember what I did, other than my talent. I went up there in a little tutu like I was going to do a dance routine, and just as I was about to start, my heart exploded and I fell down. I just laid there bleeding for like 30 seconds. It was fun.