The Curious Case of Freddie Prinze Jr.

This post is largely my reaction to watching this piece of shit movie called Down to You, which stars Mr. Prinze and Julia Stiles. Understandably, I am pissed off. Granted it was 1:30 in the am and I had my baseline insomnia. But still… what a fucking disaster. Someone actually sat down and wrote this horrid dialogue, probably thinking that it was clever.

All of this got me thinking about Freddie Prinze Jr. He hasn’t really done anything lately, has he? So I checked out imdb. His resume is less than impressive, but I’ll leave that judgment to you. He did star in a couple of Scooby Doo films and had his own sitcom alongside Brian Austin Green (with the witty title of Freddie). I guess that makes him a “star”, right? He was relatively successful in a fiercely competitive field. For most of the 90’s he made a good living doing something he loved: acting. And I use this term, “acting”, very loosely here b/c I’m not convinced that what he does qualifies. He got to bang Buffy the Vampire Slayer and make millions of dollars. Not a bad life, eh?

But that apparently wasn’t enough for Freddie. He quit acting, if you didn’t know. He said, "I'm going to stop acting in the next few years because it's just too weird. You have to constantly be willing to live in a scary, emotional place, which is why actors are in therapy all the time”. Wow. That sounds very… reasonable. Maybe there’s something more to this pretty boy? After a little more research, I found out that he’s now a part of the “creative team” of writers for the WWE. So he’s gone from headlining major Hollywood films to penning scripts for Hulk Hogan’s next match. Oh, the humanity!

You might think that Freddie has taken a mighty fall. If you take the time to read his blog, he seems very happy. He talks about his family, the Holidays and mundane stuff like that. That is what makes Freddie Prinze Jr. a genius. He’s living his life with his job as a sincere second. I think that it’s very admirable, especially now when many people define themselves by their profession. Sometimes I’m introduced as, “My friend, the doctor”. Or maybe I’ll mention an old friend to my Dad and he says, “Isn’t that the Jew who did his MBA at Kellogg”? So this complex and interesting person is reduced to A.Being Jewish and B.Having an MBA. And maybe people still talk about Freddie in the context of his Hollywood career, but he doesn’t seem to think of things that way.

As a corollary I remember a program on NPR of an interview w/ James Watson. He’s one of the main guys who discovered DNA. He won a Nobel prize for it in 1962. He described the elation and pride he felt upon making this world-changing discovery and receiving the ultimate recognition for it. Dr. Watson stated that he was truly and completely happy at that moment. The interviewer next asked him, “How long did that feeling, that happiness last?” Watson’s reply: “About a week”.

I doubt that Prinze listened to the same show, but he appears to have learned the main lesson: You can’t let your work define you. You can’t rely on work to bring you happiness. Even if you’re the best of all time at what you do, that’s not what’s important. I’ve met so many Type-A, go-getters in my medical career. And I feel sorry for them. It’s not that I’m lacking in ambition, I just think that the more they push themselves into medicine, the further away they get from really being happy. This statement probably holds true for a lot of professions; lawyers, mechanics, teachers. Maybe even writers for the WWE. Freddie Prinze may be a terrible actor, but he sure comes off as a pretty decent guy.