AnnaLynne McCord Has Conquered Her Demons

Badass DoGooders Launch To Unite Good Humans

AnnaLynne McCord had no desire to play Naomi Clark, the uber-privileged “queen bee” of 90210’s West Beverly High. She’d just had a terrible experience during the shoot of Fired Up!, a teen sex comedy about two high school football players who go to cheerleading camp to get laid. Apparently, some of the actresses playing mean-girl cheerleaders in the film thought it best to stay in character while filming and made her life a living hell.

“I decided that I wanted to leave Hollywood and go back home,” McCord tells me.

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One of her best friends, however, convinced her to accept what would become her breakthrough role since it would grant McCord a larger platform to spread awareness of a subject near and dear to her heart: human trafficking.

“All of a sudden, I had a reason to do whatever it is I wanted to do in L.A,” she says.

Once filming wrapped on the first TV season of 90210, McCord visited Cambodia and met with human trafficking survivors in shelters. She started Together1Heart, an organization helping “women and children survivors of the sex trade,” has spoken in front of the United Nations about her anti-trafficking work, and is an ambassador of the NO MORE campaign dedicated to ending domestic violence and sexual assault.

During her time on 90210, McCord noticed something was wrong. She was “on edge all the time” and “experiencing constant PTSD,” culminating in an emotional breakdown while filming an intense scene where she gets into an argument with an unsupportive friend after her character is sexually assaulted. McCord realized she hadn’t processed her own sexual assault — at 18, by a friend, in her Los Angeles apartment — and came forward about it in a 2014 article for Cosmopolitan, years before the #MeToo movement kicked off. She’s since been candid about the child sexual abuse she suffered at the age of 11; her torturous Christian fundamentalist upbringing in rural Georgia, living in a trailer park; and being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID).

When McCord met up with an old friend from the 90210 crew recently, she told her, “Your eyes are different. You’ve cleared so much of your trauma. You’re so light now.”

I’m sitting across from McCord at a hotel restaurant in Downtown New York City. The actress and human rights activist, now 36, is promoting Condition of Return, a film about Eve (McCord), a young woman who commits a mass shooting in a church and is subsequently analyzed by Dr. Thomas (Dean Cain) to see if she’s fit to stand trial. The devil plays a role. And the film’s been granted an interim waiver from SAG, freeing her up to do press about it during the ongoing actors’ strike.

Over the course of our conversation, we discussed her journey from Georgia to Hollywood and all that she’s overcome.

What attracted you to Condition of Return?I initially read page one and was like, “I’m not doing this script.” Page one was the shooting. And then I was like, “I’ve played every kind of salacious, colorful character — but this is different because it’s so real, and so relevant to what’s going on in the world.” My initial pushback was I didn’t want to glorify this horrible atrocity that we keep experiencing in our country. The DOJ’s research has already said that potential future shooters are incentivized by the sensationalism of our lovely news media. But I don’t do resistance. I don’t do fear. That’s not allowed in this body. I had to unpack it, and I realized that if I was the mother of a child or the sibling of a brother or sister and lost someone in a mass shooting, would I want someone to do a film about it? And the answer was, “Yes and no.”

I started to lean into the “yes” of it and thought, if we’re able to have conversations about it like this one with you and look at it from a different angle in regard to this topic, then I absolutely want to do this film. The issue that I see is this agenda-driven, politicized conversation in regard to [mass shootings]. It’s a political currency to scream about guns, but for all the politicians that are yelling, I don’t see them actually trying to make change. The conversation, for me, is the mental health conversation. Of the 172 mass shooters explored in this research project by the National Institute of Justice, one hundred percent of the shooters were in a mental crisis at the time of the shooting. Ninety percent of grade school shooters were suicidal. We’re completely ignoring the real issue, which is the mental health issue.

AnnaLynne McCord as Eve in ‘Condition of Return.’

To play devil’s advocate — and no pun intended, given the film — but my theory on it is that a lot of school shootings are done by young people who feel cast aside by society and want to seem powerful or meaningful in some way. And, due to our culture of guns and masculinity in America, they think they can find that through large guns and by extension a mass shooting. I think mental health struggles are fairly universal, even though there is this almost existential stress you feel in America, and in Japan if someone snaps, there will be a mass stabbing with less fatalities because this person could not access a semiautomatic weapon. So, I think guns play a major role when we’re talking about the level of carnage.Right. Yes, the damage.

And in Australia, after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, the country cracked down on automatic and semi-automatic guns and instituted new safety checks on them, and they’ve had very few mass shootings since.And this is what I was hoping for: this conversation. What it’s become is that we can’t have this conversation without being like, “You’re evil! You want to take all my rights away!” For me, it’s the nuance that’s lost. Sometimes I fantasize about ringing up Elon Musk and being like, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I would like to create embryos with you, freeze them, and then go colonize Mars with our children!”

I don’t know if that’s the best plan.Well, I’ll just take the children and go! [Laughs] Can you imagine what the Earth looks like from Mars?

Your co-star in Condition of Return is Dean Cain, who’s a big gun guy. I’m guessing you two had interesting conversations while making the film.We did. It was sparked because we filmed the mass shooting scene, went home, turned on the news that day, and saw that the Uvalde shooting had happened. Literally that day. After that shooting, there were targets placed on the board members of the NRA, and Dean is on the board, so he had to warn me and the production, and we had to have security sweep our trailers for potential bomb threats. He started explaining to me his beliefs and showed me these videos of him training as a reserve police officer in Idaho and a Sheriff’s deputy in Virginia. I can tell in his heart he wants to serve and that his interest in guns is purely for protection. For me, I have a small handgun that never comes out of its little box. But I lived alone for a decade and grew up in Georgia. I understand the feeling of being a woman living alone and how scary that is.

The film is also about the role Christianity plays in people’s lives.I grew up super religious — you might even say “cult-ish,” because what I experienced was very constricting and Christian fundamentalist, so total fear. I was homeschooled from K-12 and never allowed to go to school. I wasn’t allowed to go to the doctor until I was 12 or 13, and that was to the dentist for the first time. I had to process a lot of this when I was an adult. I graduated high school when I was 15 because I did summer school and just wanted to get out of that situation, and I moved to New York City at 15. I was lying about my age and Craiglist had just come out, so I sublet. I went from cult Georgia to New York City. It was total culture shock. I ended up at a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment on 115th and 3rd. This guy tried to climb up the fire escape into my place — I think he was just crazy, but I was 15 —  so I went into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knives I could, and yelled, “Ahhhh!” I’ve always had to be street smart and a little bit of a survivor. But my dream was to go to Hollywood. I studied acting in New York and went to Hollywood when I was 18.

You were so young.I worked at the Saddle Ranch when I was 18. I was too young to serve alcohol, so I worked as a hostess and sold the bull rides and T-shirts. Now I understand it more because of my DID [dissociative identity disorder] and dealing with the mental health issues I have. I just thought everyone had different sides to themselves, but I was known as the girl who wore wigs — mostly black wigs. I sometimes felt like I wanted to be someone else. Someone tough. This guy comes up and he says, “You’ve got a really good look. I’m casting for a film.” And I was like, “That’s funny… would you like to buy a bull ride?” And he goes, “We’re casting for this film. You should really come in for it.” And I’m like, “Would you like to be a bull ride, a shirt or a hat?” And he’s like, “You know what? Who’s your agent.” And I gave him the name and he was like, “We’ll contact your agent.” And then I made him buy a hat from me. It was Randall Emmett’s producing partner, George Furla. I got a call from my agent the next day. They were casting for Day of the Dead, I got the part, and was off to Bulgaria. And then I got Nip/Tuck.

AnnaLynne McCord as Naomi Clark in Season One of ‘90210.’

I’ll never forget how Bradley Cooper played a soap actor on that show who breaks his neck trying to suck his own dick.[Laughs] One day, Bradley was like, “Do you want to go to lunch with me?” So, we went to a cafe down on Melrose and he was so antsy and animated. I was 19 and trying to be supportive. I don’t think I spoke the entire time. He was like, “They always want me to be the funny guy the entire time!” I was thinking, “You’re actually kind of funny… right now.” He had just done Wedding Crashers and everyone loved him in that and people were expecting him to be that way every time. And then he reached across me and was like “Can you give me that?” And it was his dip cup. I was like, “Can we go?” I was thinking, I haven’t seen this since I was in Georgia living in a trailer park.

What was it like navigating Hollywood at 18, 19?You’d get calls from agents basically being like, “Hey, this guy’s kind of sleazy so you need to be aware and protect yourself— but also, still take the meeting.” Leaving home at 15 and dealing with abuse for years, I’d had all these mechanisms I’d created to protect myself so it wouldn’t happen again. I had a really intense exterior, so [Randall] Emmett didn’t mess with me. I did have a meeting one time where the producer was really friendly, we were talking about his dog and my cat, and then he snatches my phone and starts going through my photos. I was trying to get it back and he was holding it up in the air, like, “Ooooh, are there any sexy photos on here?” Finally, I wrenched the phone out of his hand and was like, “Don’t ever fucking contact me again.” And I walked right out. Because I don’t give a shit. I grew up with nothing.

You’ve been very open about the trauma you’ve experienced. Do you feel like your propensity for playing villainous characters, for stepping into the shoes of the perpetrator, was a part of processing that?Realizing that the perpetrator isn’t fully a villain was the catharsis point, so a thousand percent yes to your question. I realized that in Hollywood, we often tell stories of heroes and villains, but those stories are a lie. There are people who do horrible things and people who do great things. Everyone is a human being, and they were all two years old at one point and didn’t want to hurt anybody. What happened to them? The system fails you sometimes. The person who sexually abused me was a pastor. You don’t usually do something like that without having something like it done to yourself. I’ve witnessed this during my 15 years in the field. It’s cyclical.

I wouldn’t mind churches who have abusers in their ranks being back-taxed for their years of abuse, and have that money go into a fund for survivors. There should be restitution. I had to spend a lot of time and money to heal, and it costs thousands and thousands of dollars. I’m grateful that I became an actress and made enough money to be able to pay for all the care and treatment I needed, and I have a job that allows me to do that. Most people can’t leave their job for six months to do IOP — intensive outpatient programs — to get themselves back on track. My character in Condition of Return didn’t get the help she needed, and she went down a dark path.

What you’re saying reminded me of the “Putin Poem” video. I’m curious how you dealt with all that backlash.I dealt with it when I came out in 2014 with my story of being sexually assaulted. It was before the #MeToo movement, and a bunch of people were saying I was “asking for it” and that I “wanted to get raped.” All these things you can’t even fathom. I was being interviewed and they asked me if I wanted to address all those messages, and my response at the time was that I was so heartbroken that these individuals were saying those things about themselves. It’s all projection. But with the “Putin Poem,” I rarely if ever do anything unintentionally, so I had a supreme amount of intention with what I wrote, which is why I never took it down. Someone tagged me with a message saying, “We need more AnnaLynne! This bitch never took it down! #WrongAndStrong.” I actually loved it because it was so funny. [Laughs]

I use a lot of child language when dealing with people who have experienced sexual abuse, so that language is so commonplace for me that it didn’t seem the way that it was perceived. I mean, my friends were like, “It was so cringe.” My friends were sending me all the memes. There was one where I was pushing a baby carriage with Putin in it. [Laughs] That cracked me up. I didn’t take any of it personally because I know exactly what I meant. The language for me still resonates because you don’t get dictators when you have love as a child. The only thing that really bothered me was that my mother didn’t check in on me to see how I was doing — and that there was so much focus on what I was doing and not the actual invasion.

What was it like working to prevent human trafficking while also processing your own abuse?I always ask the question when I’m doing the work that I do: “How many little girls dream of being in a situation where they’re selling their own body?” I was selling my body in relationships, for love. I thought, “Maybe you’ll love me if I let you have this,” because I was taught that I got approval from an important man when he was doing things to my body. So, I thought that’s what love was. I didn’t understand. It wasn’t an exchange of money, but it was transactional. I was desperate to be in love, and I didn’t know anything else. I was into really, really dark things. I was into BDSM. And they were all directly related to my problems. I started to see that fetishes — which are different than kinks, since fetishes are something you need to get off whereas kinks are something you’re curious about — I couldn’t go to that place pleasurably without harm happening to me because of all the abuse that I’d suffered. When you think about that and apply it to what’s going on in the world, and all the sexual exploitation of children, you have to think about how many adults now were harmed as children. There are so many powerful adult men who tell me, “You’re the only person I’ll ever tell this to…”

If somebody sexually abuses you as a child, who do you become? I became nasty. I became energetically abusive, verbally abusive, a pathological liar — all as survival mechanisms. But those coping mechanisms were killing my relationships and killing my career. I was sabotaging myself. I was undermining myself all the time. I was offered American Horror Story: Asylum, which would have been amazing, and put emotional distance between myself and it.

AnnaLynne McCord as Pauline in ‘Excision.’

I saw you in Excision at Sundance back in 2012 and came away really impressed by your performance. That is a pretty messed up movie.I was constantly getting, “You’re a model — you’re 90210.” They thought that was my brand. Excision was a fuck you. I told my team, “I want a Charlize Theron in Monster moment.” And the director wouldn’t meet me. Ricky was 26 years old, just out of Tisch, and had done a short film of Excision. I finally got a lunch meeting with him and he was not buying it. I even brought old Kodak photos of when I was a weird kid. Still wasn’t buying it. Then he says, “Pauline shaves her head.” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ll shave my head.” And he was like, “No, you won’t — you’re on 90210.” And I was like, “Have you heard of wigs?” And he was like, “No, you won’t.” We were at a Houston’s steakhouse in Century City, and there was a steak knife, and I grabbed it and started sawing off my hair at the table, and he went, “STOP! STOP! WAIT! OK!” By the time I got to the parking garage he’d already offered me the movie.

Given what happened to you by a pastor, what was it like to shoot the scene in Condition of Return where you burst into a church and shoot one?It was so triggering. It was a whole thing, and I didn’t realize how bad I was still. I was sitting in the foyer watching this procession of people filing into the church, thinking about all of them smiling and laughing, and I remembered all the times I was young and went through those doors. I was thinking, “You’re choosing to believe that this place is a safety in the world.” And in a lot of ways, religion have offered safe haven. Especially the beautiful prophets, like Yeshua — I refuse to call him “Jesus” because everyone screws up my name, and his real name was Yeshua — he had beautiful things to say, and they bastardized his story. And destroyed the feminine aspects of his story.

What’s next for you after Condition of Return?I was in L.A. meeting my agent the other day and was like, “I want to do Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or some Cameron Diaz joyful moments in my career for a little while. I think I need a break.” And she was like, “Alright!”

How are you doing these days?You know, it’s been such a journey. The memories came back five years ago, and a decade prior to that I met with a counselor and thought I just needed to fix myself from neck to head, and that it would take three to six weeks. I thought, I’m good, I just have these tics in my body, these weird things that happen at night, and restless sleep. And she was like, “Your legs go numb after having had sex with your partner and you lay awake all night while they’re sleeping because your legs feel like needles? That’s not normal.” And I was like, “I guess it’s not, is it?” If you have a high pain tolerance, you should ask yourself why. I used to wear it as a badge of honor, but then you realize, “I don’t get proper rest because I’m traumatized at night because that’s when things would happen, and your body feels unsafe all the time.”

These things were terrifying at the onset but beautiful to discover because if they’re in your body they can be erased. I was given a life sentence when my doctor diagnosed me as bipolar, but I don’t have bipolar symptoms anymore. They’re gone. The origin for all my bipolar systems was all the trauma I sustained, and I’ve cleared my mind of anguish, resistance, and shame. I’ve spent the last five years eradicating my body of trauma. I’ve been through every drawer in the house of my body and put it in the Goodwill pile until there was nothing left. I got eight beautiful hours of sleep last night. I used to get two to three.

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