布莱克是家里五个小孩中排行最小的一个，他的父亲和母亲都曾经是演员。第一次在亮相是在电影《沙人》(Sandman)中饰演一位牙仙，那时她才10岁，这部电影由他的父亲负责导演。到目前为止，布莱克已经有了一百多次演出经验。当布莱克的哥哥姐姐们都已经成为演员时，布莱克的父母让她先把精力放在学校。布莱克在学校表现十分好，她是班上的班长，还参加了拉拉队。在高三开始前，布莱克和安贝-坦布琳(Amber Tamblyn)、艾丽克西斯-布莱德尔(Alexis Bledel)以及阿美瑞卡-费拉拉(America Ferrera)一起出演了《牛仔裤的夏天》(The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)。她的父亲在电影中出演布莱克饰演角色的父亲。布莱克的其他主要作品还有《我说你做》(Simon Says)和《录取通知》(Accepted)。
Gore Vidal, it is said, advised us never to pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television. Many have learned through brutal experience the spectacular unwisdom of the first admonition. I now have personal knowledge of the folly of the second.
I am making a brief cameo appearance on the CW series "Gossip Girl" this month. But I won't be able to see it, I'm afraid. I will be catching a flight to foreign parts. I'm thinking Godthab, Greenland.
You don't know Godthab? It's that blip at the tip of that giant iceberg of a country that appears on the electronic in-flight map as you wing back from London to New York. I've always been curious about Godthab — Greenland's capital, in fact, also known as Nuuk — but my impromptu trip is not mere tourism. Godthab seems like the kind of place where television options would be limited, and thus "Gossip Girl" would be absolutely unknown.
The story is as follows. Some months ago a note popped into my e-mail inbox with an intriguing subject line: "Gossip Girl/Television cameo." Human vanity being what it is, I opened and read an invitation to appear as myself on that glossy television series about naughty doings at a fancy-schmancy private school in Manhattan.
I have no pretensions to competence as a performer, no buried ambition to toss aside the critical hat and enter the messy scrum of the acting world. If you read a newspaper, you probably know that the newspaper business is not in the pink these days. Still, visions of a lucrative new career making cameo appearances — a festive, boozy lunch with the Real Housewives of New York City? an appearance as Friend of Transgendered Murder Victim on "Law and Order: SVU"? — did not dance through my mind.
In fact I share the general — and altogether respectable — horror of speaking before audiences of any kind. So my instinct was to decline, politely. But what would my nieces Carmen and Catrina say? Scarier still would be the affronted reaction of my gay friends addicted to the show.
While I would never claim much range as a performer, I was fairly confident that the role of self would fall securely within it. Also, as someone who makes a living assessing the achievements of people who have the courage to risk making fools of themselves every day — to be a good actor is to be fearless about emotional self-exposure — I knew it would be cowardly to say no.
And then there's that whole vanity thing.
Three days later I found myself being picked up at my door for my day of shooting at a theater on Grand Street on the Lower East Side. I had received my sides — that's actor talk for script pages — the day before. I was given three lines in a scene set backstage after a high-school theater performance.
Instantly dashed were my fantasies of delivering some Addison DeWitt-type acerbities, good-naturedly playing into the popular notion of the critic as a viper who cannot open his mouth without savaging somebody or something. The lines I was given were more anodyne. I briefly considered lodging a gentle protest but figured it would be a little immodest to request that my lines — all three of them — be guest-written by the staff of "30 Rock."
The first shock, after the small frisson of being chauffeured to the set (it was a van, but still), came when I discovered I would be given my own trailer for the half-day or so of shooting. My name was even on the door (scribbled on a bit of blue tape, but still). That's when things began to turn slowly and inexorably wrong.