Judd Apatow’s passion for mentorship cost him a laptop.
The comedy mega-producer loaned his computer to “Freaks and Geeks” alum and mentee Shaun Weiss after the actor left rehab. Weiss played Sean in the one-season NBC series.
“Judd Apatow put me in a rehab place. He was giving me a chance. That was the other thing that was really heartbreaking, too,” Weiss said during the “Dopey” podcast (via Page Six). “He was really being my mentor and teaching me how to write and giving me different jobs and assignments that really cultivated me as a writer. He got me a job writing jokes for the Oscars; he just gave me all these gigs, grooming me for better things.”
Yet Weiss, who also starred in Apatow’s 1995 film “Heavyweights,” pawned Apatow’s computer to score drugs. The laptop was the same one on which Apatow wrote the 2005 movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” according to Weiss.
“It was a PowerBook, but like, decked the fuck out,” Weiss said. “It was probably like a $5,000 laptop at the time. One you can’t even really buy.”
He was addicted to methamphetamine at the time and living in a public park. “That was hard, that loss,” Weiss said. “Now I was crossing the line, when you take your fucking laptop and pawn that shit, you’re not a writer anymore.”
Despite Apatow “being incredibly gracious,” Weiss argued with the director.
“It was basically alcohol that did this. We basically had a conversation one time and I was saying ridiculous things to him and I was raising my voice,” Weiss remembered. “And he just said, ‘If you don’t stop now, how you’re acting, I’m not going to help you.’ He basically warned me, ‘Stop now, don’t proceed any further,’ and I did not stop. I got even worse … [saying] ‘I don’t ever want to talk to you again,’ which was ridiculous.”
He added, “I never tried to contact him at all since that moment.”
Weiss summed up, “Do you think he knows that I’m sorry for what I did? I feel like he knows that I’m sorry and I feel like what good does it do me to. I feel like that’s a mess that I fucking made.”
