After enjoying the critical laurels from The Green Mile this weekend, John Clarke Duncan will no doubt reflect on some of the low points of his Hollywood career. Like the time he was down to his last $20 living in a scuzzy Hollywood motel.

"I was eating Chicken McNuggets once a day, because I was trying to let that $20 stretch," he says.

"I knew I was going crazy because I lay down there on the bed, a little shabby bed with a broken up TV that gets maybe one or two channels, and they have these big cockroaches that come out late at night ... and I wouldn't try to kill them, because they were the only friends I had."

Duncan says he threw in the towel, called his mother in Chicago and asked her to send him a ticket back home.

"I said, 'Mama, it's not working here in L.A. The ground moves, I'm broke, I'm hungry, I need to leave.'

"My mother was always the type of person who would spoil me, and I was thinking she'd say, 'C'mon home, baby,' " Duncan says.

"But she said, 'You're out there. Pull up your bootstraps, get tough. If you come back to Chicago, you probably won't get this opportunity again.'

"She said, 'You will never know for the rest of your life if you could have made it or not. I'll talk to you later.' And she hung up. And I stood there with tears in my eyes."

Duncan happily reports that Mama did, indeed, know best.

"Next week, I got a security job working on these lots out here in Hollywood for $10 an hour," he says. "And the rest kind of fell into place."


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