458: Play the Part

Ira Glass

Bill Langworthy makes reality TV shows. He was one of the producers of The Hills. And he says that he's always been surprised, even after doing this for years, at how people end up doing things on television they would never do in real life, throwing themselves into the part so completely they even confuse themselves.

Ira Glass

So Bill never totally got why so many people would let themselves do so many embarrassing things on camera that they would never do normally.

Ira Glass

And after years of being in jobs like this and thinking all that, he went to a Dodgers game.

Ira Glass

He knew he didn't have to kiss her. There'd be no penalty. There was no contract. No money had changed hands.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio program, people who are driven to act very differently than who they really are, flipping their personalities, completely doing the exact opposite of what they normally do. You only go that far if there are very powerful reasons to do it.

In Act One, it is somebody doing this for money. In Act Two, it's somebody doing it for love. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Audacity of Louis Ortiz. Usually when you play a part, the expectations are pretty clear. There are lines. There's a script. There's a storyline you follow.

So when you're on the Kiss Cam, you kiss. When you're Hamlet, you stress out. You know what you're on stage to do. Our first story today is about a man who found himself in a part with huge expectations and no script whatsoever. He had to make it up as he went along.

It comes to us from filmmaker, Ryan Murdock. A warning to listeners that this is a story that's partly about race, and a racial slur gets used.

Ryan Murdock

2008 was a hard year for Louis Ortiz. He was living in the Bronx, but he lost his job as a phone technician for Verizon over a year earlier. So he was collecting workers' comp and playing in pool tournaments for extra spending money. But then things started to change.

Ryan Murdock

Louis is a Puerto Rican guy in his late 30s. He describes himself as an occasional voter. And he hadn't really been following the election.

Then, at some point, Louis went to his usual bar, The Williamsbridge Tavern, to shoot some pool. Pat Tebelis was tending bar that day. Louis sat down and asked for a Corona.

Ryan Murdock

Ever since he's been in the Army, Louis had had facial hair. For more than a decade, it had been the same-- full mustache, full goatee. He never would have dreamt of taking it off. But then Pat brought up something no one else had.

Ryan Murdock

So Louis walked a few blocks back to his one-bedroom apartment, found the clippers, found the razor, and got busy.

Ryan Murdock

Twin brother is actually a good way of explaining just how much Louis Ortiz really does look like Barack Obama. I've been filming Louis for months, working on a movie about him. And I've looked at his face for hours on end. I've studied the details.

From certain angles, the resemblance is hard to believe. His right side, slightly from above at 45 degrees, perfect. His left side, slightly from below, is just as good. From those directions, you'd have to take your time to tell him and Obama apart. Also from behind, you know, the ears.

There's even details that seem impossible. The hairlines are the same. Louis, just like Obama, has a mole next to his nose. On Louis, it's just on the opposite side. If he smiles, Louis gets that crinkly-eyed thing that Obama gets. And when he gets serious, he does that chin-up, squinty thing too.

But it's not perfect. The resemblance is at the level of maybe a double take. I've seen people wonder aloud, "Is that him?" And reach for their cameras before they realize it's not. Up close, in person, one second, he's Obama. The next, he's obviously Louis. Then he's Obama. Then he's Louis. It's weird. But back to 2008, back to the Bronx, back to the bar, back to Pat.

Ryan Murdock

Pat Tebelis, the bartender, had what he described to Louis as a little experience in the business, meaning show business. He'd been an extra, done some modeling, a commercial or two. Pat immediately set about mapping a plan for Louis, a plan that, to Louis, sounded far-fetched.

Keep in mind, this was a rough time in Louis's life. Again, he'd been fired from a job he'd had for more than a decade. He was in the middle of a lawsuit, trying to get his job back. His daughter had just returned home after a nasty custody battle with the parents of his late wife, Louis's late wife, who died of diabetes several years before.

So there he is, sitting across the bar from this guy he barely knows, who's basically telling him he'd hit the jackpot, that his life could be totally different if he just put in a little money up front.

Ryan Murdock

Louis had his doubts, but he scraped together money for a photo shoot and borrowed money to buy a suit, a new one, and one with pants. He got a list of agents, enlisted some friends. And from the back of the bar, they stuffed envelope after envelope with resumes and head shots.

At home, Louis was experimenting with what he started calling the look, practicing in the mirror, then more trips to the bar. It wasn't until sometime in late September that he decided to take it public in a big way, to take it for a real test run.

Ryan Murdock

This was a historic day for the Bronx. It was the last game to be played in the old Yankee stadium, and the park was sold out, filled to capacity.

Ryan Murdock

On Election Night, Louis, who three months earlier hadn't even heard of Obama, was in the Bronx watching the votes come in like a man with a lottery ticket, watching the winning numbers on TV. At some point, the race hadn't been called, but he put on his suit and headed out of the Bronx.

Ryan Murdock

This is sound from Washington Square Park, Louis's last stop on Election Night. He got there around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and the crowd was still celebrating. Ever since his big day at the Yankees game, Louis had adopted a sort of homespun guerrilla marketing strategy.

Mostly, it consisted of, put on a suit, find a place with a lot of people, and just show up. These appearances were for free. Louis got nothing, but he was hoping eventually they'd turn into money.

In just a few minutes of tape from Election Night, one after another, people stop Louis. They giggle and point. They use words like "awesome" and "amazing." And they're left with this weird contact high, like they almost met Obama. And they want a picture so they can fool their friends.

One astonished lady asked him, "What's your name, Obama?" At one point, the crowd mobbed Louis and actually picked him up, carrying him through the air, chanting, Barack Obama, Barack Obama.

[CHEERS]

Barack Obama was now President Obama, and Louis started getting serious. He signed on with an agent, then two. And to get gigs, one of his agents asked Louis to make a pitch tape, something to send out to people who might hire him.

Ryan Murdock

For the tape, Louis wrote the script himself, and filmed it in a stairwell. It's cheap and lo-fi. Louis has his suit on, and he's trying hard, but it's awkward. He's not sure what he's supposed to be doing. At one moment, he turns from side to side in the empty stairwell, waving at imaginary crowds. And then he makes his best attempt at an Obama impression.

Ryan Murdock

And this brings us to Louis's biggest problem. He can't seem to manage a convincing Obama oppression for more than a "thank you" or two. Louis looks more like Obama than any impersonator I've ever seen, but there's a key difference between a look-alike and an impersonator. And that difference is huge in terms of money, the potential money Louis could make doing this.

I mean, maybe you've seen Reggie Brown or Fred Armisen, guys who do President Obama on late-night TV a lot. They look way less like Obama than Louis, but the impression carries it. But Louis's agent sent out his pitch tape anyway. And pretty soon, he got a call. He landed an audition for HBO for Flight of the Conchords.

Ryan Murdock

Flight of the Conchords was a hipster comedy about a band from New Zealand, not really something Louis would watch. But soon, he was in his suit, waiting for the producers to call him in.

Ryan Murdock

The Flight of the Conchords role was actually perfect for Louis, because they weren't looking for someone to play Obama. They were looking for someone to play an Obama impersonator. In the show-- season two, episode seven, if you're curious-- Louis doesn't appear until the final scene. Here, the joke is that the prime minister of New Zealand thinks he's meeting Obama, but everyone else knows it's not really the president. It's Louis, who in a way is sort of playing himself.

Ryan Murdock

Day by day, Louis started picking up more work doing Obama. Gradually, it started to feel less like a string of uncertain events, and more like one thing was leading to another. Louis even started calling himself the Puerto-ack Barack. Before he knew it, he was booking high-profile jobs overseas.

There was a big-budget movie in Japan, a comedy where Louis, as Obama, negotiates a fictional peace treaty.

Ryan Murdock

There was Australia, where Louis was cast as the lead singer of a band, a super-group of Nobel Peace Prize impersonators called the Nobel Funk Off-- Louis as Obama, and various other impersonators as band mates, including Go-Go Gandhi, Nelson the Mandela, Martin Luther the King.

This group performed, at one point, for the real actual Dalai Lama. You heard that correctly-- Louis met the Dalai Lama. But Louis's first taste of international work was in Korea, where a company flew him all the way to Seoul to shoot a commercial for a cable service called SkyLife.

Ryan Murdock

The commercial was set to look just like the Inauguration-- podium, teleprompters, Louis in a dark winter coat, and a bunch of non-Asians who'd been rounded up to sit in rows behind him.

Ryan Murdock

And that was how, in a 19-hour plane ride, Louis went from being someone with a bunch of problems he needed help with, to being someone who had people catering to his every need. For example, Louis has MS. Most of the time it doesn't bother him, but he gets tired easy.

In Korea, with the jet lag, the busy schedule, he was drained and exhausted and didn't know what to do about it.

Ryan Murdock

The big jobs did come with big paychecks. The Japanese maybe paid the most, $10,000. By the time all of this was in full swing, Louis was making enough to pay off some bills and debts, and do little things like take his girlfriend out to dinner. But the money also went quick.

Louis started investing in his new career. He enrolled in acting class, bought another suit, and got his teeth whitened. He even started flirting with the idea of having surgery to close a small gap between his two front teeth, one of the little giveaways that sometimes ruins the Obama look.

But even the big ticket jobs weren't really enough to get Louis out of the financial hole he was in, and they tended to be few and far between. Early on, Pat Tebelis, the bartender, had advised Louis, in order to launch this whole new career, this Obama business, that Louis should take any job. There was no telling what could lead to his big break.

And it was advice Louis took to heart. Most of the jobs were the small ones-- emceeing awards ceremonies, political picnics, union rallies, cameos on television. But there were also things that were even stranger, further off the expected path.

Ryan Murdock

Here's the full premise of the music video Louis was hired to be in. President Obama's helicopter gets shot down, and he's captured and tortured by Arab terrorists. Then the rappers, Waka Flocka Flame and French Montana, show up in full camo, guns blazing, and rescue him.

[MUSIC - "CHOPPA CHOPPA DOWN" BY FRENCH MONTANA FT. WAKA FLOCKA FLAME]

Because Louis looks so much like the president, the footage from this shoot is very weird to watch. Take after take, Louis is tied up in a chair. There's fake blood all over his shirt. One guy in Arab clothing is pressing a knife to his throat. Another guy is holding a taser and a blowtorch a few inches from his arm.

The whole time this is going on, the director is yelling at Louis. But he's not calling him Louis. He's calling him Barack.

Ryan Murdock

Just look at me, Barack. Get mad, Barack.

Ryan Murdock

That's my producer, Ben Calhoun, asking that question.

Ryan Murdock

Louis stumbled around for over a minute, a minute and 22 seconds, actually--

Ryan Murdock

--before finally telling us the one job that crossed the line for him.

Ryan Murdock

The jobs Louis felt most conflicted about, though, are not the strange things he was asked to do on camera. It's the live appearances. And he did a lot of them. Actually, a lot of the small jobs were ones in which Louis was paid just a little money to show up in person in a suit for a couple hours, kind of like having a living cardboard cut-out of the president to take pictures with.

Ryan Murdock

Louis showed me pictures from one of these jobs. The number of a bar named Rathbones had hired him to show up and take some pictures on Saint Patrick's Day. The bar was a big hangout for New York firefighters, and there were lots of them there that day. Louis says he figured they'd done a parade, because many were wearing FDNY shirts.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Ryan Murdock

There's video of all this. According to Louis, the crowd was a few beers into their day, and they were pretty much hostile from the start. In the video, as Louis walks in, you can hear guys say something about black Irish. Louis looks uncomfortable, nervous.

He stands with his back against the wall and attempts a presidential wave and smile. Somebody yells, beat it. And then the crowd starts to boo.

[CROWD BOOING]

Here, the video suddenly cuts out. Louis says what followed was an hour of people throwing things at him, shoving him, and shouting.

Ryan Murdock

At one point, Louis was behind the bar serving beers, where things seemed a little safer, with some distance between him and the crowd.

Ryan Murdock

By motion like that, Louis means that the guy tried to shove Louis's face into his crotch.

Ryan Murdock

At first, Louis had friends from the phone company dress up like Secret Service, with earpieces and sunglasses, just for dramatic effect. But after a few bad episodes, Louis got genuinely scared for his safety. Before going out, he would tell his friends to stick close and be ready to actually protect him.

Ryan Murdock

But even with the hecklers, even when these jobs went badly, even when the jobs were hard to come by, the look was an escape for Louis, this weird superpower that he could use any time he wanted. I've watched Louis in front of a crowd of third graders, in a school near his apartment in the Bronx, where they asked him to give a speech.

Louis was nervous, but when the kids saw him, they saw the leader of the free world, this historic figure. One girl couldn't stop crying. He originally began impersonating Obama for money, to make a few bucks, and it turned out to be so much more than that.

Ryan Murdock

Unfortunately for Louis, his problems got worse. Louis' new career was tethered to Obama's, and as the president's first term wore on and his approval rating slid, the look-alike jobs slowly disappeared. Eventually, Louis decided to put the Obama stuff on ice, go down to Florida and be with his daughter.

The plan was, he'd go there and wait for his job situation with the phone company, with Verizon, to sort itself out. He said he was looking forward to being Louis the phone guy again.

I went to see him. My first day there, we went fishing in the fenced-in man-made pond outside his parents' apartment complex. And he explained to me his deal with Verizon. Louis had been fired in late 2007. According to him, a string of events led to a heated argument with his boss. Louis stormed out, closed the door pretty hard, kind of slammed it, and the window broke. Louis was fired.

He filed a wrongful termination lawsuit. And in late 2010, his case went to arbitration. If it went his way, he'd get thousands and thousands in back pay.

Ryan Murdock

His lawyer called in late November. When Louis picked up, she didn't sound excited. Louis asked, "Should I be sitting down?" And she said, "Yeah." At that point he knew the arbitrator had sided with Verizon. Louis was now empty-handed, no job back, no retro-pay, not much of anything.

Ryan Murdock

This is Louis's daughter, Reina. She's 15, a great basketball player, a serious student, funny, and just a really nice kid. Back when the Obama stuff heated up, and Louis was traveling a lot, he sent Reina here to live with his parents.

They hadn't seen much of each other since. But now the two of them could be a family again. Every day at 5:30 in the morning, Louis would drive Reina to school. And at night, they'd hang out after she got home from basketball practice.

Ryan Murdock

Louis spent his days in Florida, while Reina was at school, figuring out a plan to piece his life back together. He'd gone to a phone company in Florida, but they said they weren't hiring. At some point, he got in touch with his agent, who told him how successful other Obama impersonators had been, that there was still money to be made. With campaign season approaching, demand would probably be high.

But his agent said he'd need what he lacking the first time around, a better impression. Specifically she said, work on the voice.

Ryan Murdock

So Louis started watching Obama speeches on YouTube, listening to them on his iPod over and over, practicing the cadence, the timing, and the delivery.

Ryan Murdock

As you can hear, Louis really is getting better. And once again, the Obama stuff is starting to feel like Louis's best and only option. But Louis thinks New York is a better place to take another shot, to start getting Obama work again. And that means leaving Reina.

Ryan Murdock

The way it's turned out, right now both the president and Louis are both looking for second chances, both looking back at the last three years, thinking about what they've accomplished and what they still need to do. Recently, Louis was laying out to me his big plans for 2012. Whatever reservations Louis has about leaving Rayna again, that's exactly what he's doing.

He's doubling down on the whole Obama thing. And he's back in New York. He said he's hopeful. He's feeling good.

At some point, I ask Louis, if he could somehow choose, choose between being a great, successful Obama impersonator, or going back to being Louis the phone guy, if he could choose, which one would he pick? He hesitated, seemed to give it some real thought, and he told me, if he could be anyone, if it was totally up to him, he'd go back to his old life, working for Verizon, and be the phone guy, and be himself.

Ira Glass

Ryan Murdock. He is still filming for his movie about Louis. It is called The Audacity of Louis Ortiz. He's looking for more funders on Kickstarter. His website, where you can see just how much Louis looks like Obama, audacitythemovie.com.

Coming up, feigning interest in what your spouse is saying, and how that can save your marriage. That is in a minute, from Chicago Public radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Play the Part, people faking who they are, pretending they are the opposite of their real personalities because they feel they have no other option.

We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Wife Lessons. Kristen was a speech therapist at a school where she worked with some kids who had autism. Some had Asperger Syndrome.

Ira Glass

Not to trivialize how serious Asperger's can be, but the symptoms include emotional distance, inflexibility, missing social cues. A couples counselor once told me that every woman who hears about Asperger's for the first time thinks her husband has it.

So anyway, they had this joke at work about their husbands all having Asperger's. And then one day it occurred to Kristen-- wait a second, maybe in her case it was not a joke. After all, at the time things were going pretty badly with her husband, Dave. They'd been best friends in high school, started dating in college.

But once they were married and had two kids, they were in conflict a lot. Any little change in plans would set Dave off, like they would plan to leave a party at 9 o'clock, and Kristen wasn't ready to go until 9:15, and it didn't seem like a big deal to her. Dave would throw what he would call a man-tantrum, and stew about it, obsess about it, not speak to her for days, or a week.

And in these incidents, she was frustrated with him, he felt misunderstood by her. It devastated them both, and it confused them. It stumped them. It really stumped them for years, five years.

And then one day she found this quiz online, this online quiz to help the parents of one of her students. And this quiz was supposed to test different disorders like autism and Asperger's-- 150 questions. Lots of them, like, do you find it necessary to sit in the same seat all the time? Or do you dislike changes in routine? Lots of these questions reminded her of her husband.

He remembers what happened next this way. Things had been pretty chilly between them for a long time. It was around 8 o'clock at night. The kids had been put to bed.

Ira Glass

So he comes down to the basement, and Kristen starts administering this quiz to him.

Ira Glass

Kristen found it just as comforting. All the things that seemed to be destroying their marriage, she could see now that they were not his fault. And she hadn't realized just how hard things were for him in everyday situations. So they went to a doctor and they got the diagnosis confirmed. David had Asperger's.

Typically, people with Asperger's have trouble reading social cues, they have trouble interacting, they're usually obsessive in their routines or interests. And then, armed with this diagnosis, Dave set about fixing whatever it was possible to fix. And he did this with the deep obsessiveness of a deeply obsessive person.

He understood, OK, there's clearly a gap between his instincts and the way that other people acted. And he wanted to close that gap by imitating them. So he started keeping this list. Whenever he stumbled onto some kind of behavior that he wanted to change, any behavior that was causing friction between him and Kristen, he would write it down. For instance--

Ira Glass

Now, if that just seems unbelievably basic, you can see why he and Kristen had been fighting for five years, and why he needed a list. He started to call all these little scraps of paper that he was doing this on, he started to call it, "The Journal of Best Practices." Other items on the list-- don't sneak up on her, better to fold the laundry and put it away than only take what you need from the dryer, give Kristen time to shower without crowding her.

Ira Glass

Kristen says that, all of his life, Dave had gotten by by imitating the way people around him behave. And he had a real talent for noticing little things that people did and then copying them, and now that really kicked in hard.

Ira Glass

So David's trying all these things to try to change his behavior. And overall, it works. The first thing that he notices is that there is an absence of resentment between him and Kristen. And things just get better and better.

And then his problem is, he's obsessive by nature-- like, that's his whole diagnosis, right? And he starts wanting regular performance reviews from Kristen. He puts together these PowerPoint slides for these reviews. And a year and a half into this, she has had enough of the "Journal of Best Practices." And she has to tell him, we have learned what we needed to learn from this.

Ira Glass

David is still faking his way through things today. He listens to Kristen's problems at the end of the day, and he waits until it's time for him to say, that sounds hard, and then he says, that sounds hard. And it's gotten pretty comfortable.

Ira Glass

I was playing a draft of this story for three of the This American Life producers. And I got done with it, and all four of us kind of admitted to each other that, in our own marriages, either we've been instructed or we have instructed our spouse the exact same thing that Kristen told Dave. Just listen to me complain about my day, or whatever it is, and then here is what I want you to say.

And in those moments, when you go through the motions for the person that you love, and say what they want you to say because they specifically said that's what they need-- we have all had the experience in our marriages-- that does the job. That works just fine.

David Finch has written a book about all this called The Journal of Best Practices. His wife, Kristen, says that women are constantly asking her for the link to that questionnaire that she gave her husband. So you can find that out our website, thisamericanlife.org.

[MUSIC -"SWEET INSPIRATON" BY THE SWEET INSPIRATIONS]

Ira Glass

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream all of our old shows for absolutely free, subscribe to our podcast. And we have posted right now, a listener's survey. It would help us find more listeners like you if we knew who you are. So I hope you'll consider taking a minute to fill it out. Again, that's thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who starts his new sexual harassment in the workplace training video this way.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.