There’s something that often happens when you meet someone new in L.A.—after the hellos and hugs and small talk, there’s the name dropping. It’s like a test you must pass to fuel the conversation, to pitch your big idea, or just to make a friend.
After more than three decades in Hollywood, Aleen Keshishian knows all the names. But when her famous collaborators, clients, and pals bubble up in her stories, it’s not to establish her cred or to impress; these are her people. And so when she discusses the films and TV she’s loved and helped usher into the world—and all the script rewrites and costar drama that came with them—some rather recognizable people tend to crop up.
In the most technical sense, Keshishian is a talent manager. In 2016 she left Brillstein Entertainment Partners to form her own shop, Lighthouse Management & Media. Now as then, it’s her job to advise clients on whether to take that risky role or when to say "thank you, next" to a finicky director or even just how to evolve in a business that loves to typecast. She’s part career coach, part confidante, and part secret weapon. So dear is she to her clients—who include Laura Linney, Selena Gomez, Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Batemen, Josh Gad, Mark Ruffalo, Kathryn Hahn, Gwyneth Paltrow—that they’re often as fierce of advocates for her as she is for them.
To wit, in an email about Keshishian, Paltrow wrote:
Given her line of work, Keshishian is as gracious as she is discreet. Still, in an interview with Glamour, she was game to share hard-won lessons about work, great bosses, big failures, and the ever-elusive “balance” that women are still urged to seek even in one of the most relentless industries on the planet.
I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and started acting at a children’s theater. (Adam Sandler was in it with me; we still joke about it now.) Then I directed plays in high school and college, and worked as an intern for a casting director in New York City. While I was there, my boss told me Juliet Taylor is the best casting director in the business. So when I got out of college, I applied to be her intern and eventually became her casting assistant. I cast a couple of films—for Lisa Cholodenko, Tamara Jenkins—tiny movies (I found old papers where it showed I was paid $250 to cast one). At that point I was thinking, I'm going to be a casting director. But then there was an incident that convinced me I should be a talent agent instead: A 12-year-old Claire Danes auditioned for the lead role in a Tamara Jenkins film. After three or four callbacks, she didn’t get the part. She was so good, and I found myself really devastated. She cried when we gave her the bad news, and my heart just went out to her and I thought, I want to be an advocate for talent.
It’s very difficult to know what your passion is when you’re 15, 25, and what you are passionate about changes as you get older. Rather than having to know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, it’s much easier to say, What do I want to try? What do I want to see if I’m good at, see if I want to spend time working really hard at? You don’t really need to know where you’ll end up. You just have to follow your passion at that time.
When I told Juliet Taylor, “I think maybe I should become an agent or try to be an agent,” she said the hours were really intense. (This was back in the '90s; we didn’t have cell phones.) I said, “I am ready to do that.” And then Sam Cohn, the owner of ICM, the biggest agency in New York City at the time, called Juliet and said he was looking for an agent. I went in for the interview thinking I’d be his assistant. I was all prepared to say, “In six months I want to be promoted.” Instead, at the end of the two-hour interview, he said, “Okay you’re an agent.” I told him, “But I don't really know what you guys do day-to-day.” And he said, “Listen, your job is to take one artist and introduce them to another artist and help to create art. That’s your job.” That always stuck with me as an incredibly noble assignment.
On my second day as an agent, I got a call from a casting director for The Professional. He said, “We’re doing screen tests with a bunch of girls, and there’s a young girl that has no agent, will you meet her?” She was also going to meet a very reputable agent at William Morris. There was no comparison between me, who had no clients, and this other agent, who was very established. But we met with her and her parents first, and I brought Sam to the meeting with me. They canceled the meeting with the other agent and she became my client. That was Natalie Portman, and we worked together for over 20 years.
As a manager I have fewer clients than an agent has, so I really want to feel like this is somebody that I want to wake up fighting for. I have to fall in love with the person. I have to really believe in their talent. Some artists I’ve worked with from the very beginning of their careers—Paul Rudd I’ve worked with for 25 years. Laura Linney since she graduated from Juilliard; Natalie since she was 11. But then there are other people like Jennifer Aniston, who had already done Friends and was a massive international star. Selena Gomez—five years ago she was already an established star, with Disney TV shows and successful singles. Her mother and stepfather had managed her and had done a wonderful job. She said, “OKAY, I’m ready to do this on my own, and these are the things I want: I want to be in the fashion industry. I want to have more say in my music. I want to work with really good people in movies. I want to work with great talent.” She was very clear. And when I met with her, I thought, I know exactly how to help her achieve those goals. So she just did a Jim Jarmusch film; she worked with Timothée Chalamet and with Paul Rudd. She worked with Adam McKay and Brad Pitt on a film, not as the lead, but as a supporting artist in a project where [she’s] going to learn something and work with A-list people. And I think that is the key—making sure you’re working with the best people all the time.
Hollywood can be a very ugly place; in general, for sure, it’s a man’s world. I was very lucky in that my mentors were people like Bernie Brillstein, Sam Cohn, Juliet Taylor—all of these people had so much respect for me as a human being. If you’re working for people that treat you well and that you admire and respect, you can probably better navigate shark-infested waters.
Everyone has been sending Jennifer Aniston television ideas since Friends, and nothing, frankly, has been exciting enough and good enough. But when the producer of The Morning Show came to my office, I thought, This is how Jen should go back to television. For an actress like Jen, who is incredible at drama and comedy, you’re looking for a part where she can show all those facets of her talent. And Jen and Reese Witherspoon have known each other since Reese played Jen’s little sister on Friends, so the idea that they would both star in it and produce it became really exciting.
And then they pitched it to the town, and Apple and Netflix were the two places that were the most passionate about it. We all love Ted Sarandos, [the chief content officer of Netflix]. He’s as great as they can be, so they had a very good chance of getting it. And then Apple I think really wanted to launch their platform with something big. So they just offered everything, and they won. Then they made a very smart move in hiring Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht from Sony Television. And Eddy Cue [Apple’s senior vice president of services] spoke to Jen and Reese and said [Apple] really wanted to not only give autonomy to the artists, but were also ready to disrupt the way television is consumed and the way it’s made.
Some of my clients would prefer not to be the first to do something—it’s harder to say yes to someone who has never done it before. But Jennifer and Reese are completely comfortable with being the first. They’re trailblazers. And so they got very excited about the idea of being the first big show Apple is doing. And Apple has been, and continues to be, so supportive of everything that they’ve wanted to do with this show. They enlarged the budget to be able to pay for Steve Carell, whom Jen and Reese really wanted and who had not done a television show since The Office. And they hired showrunner Kerry Ehrin. And all of a sudden they had an incredible cast and crew.
I always say to my clients, “Your career is really like surfing. Just because you’re having success after success, don’t think your career is going to keep going up forever.” There are going to be low points. A successful career is when somebody can withstand all of that and not become completely unnerved by failure. No one—no one—can have every single movie, every show, every photo shoot be successful. The world isn’t perfect. And I tell my clients, “You cannot be afraid to fail; you can't not take on a part in a movie that you’re dying to do because you’re worried that the movie might not succeed.” You just can’t.
There are times when you know something will be very, very good. When Paul Rudd or Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow did the Marvel films, we knew that, OKAY, you could literally trip and fall, and the movie is still going to be successful. But that’s the exception to the rule. Other than that, you don’t know when a project is going to be successful. You can have hunches and you can read a script and say, “Okay, I think this is spectacular.” But there’s no way of being 100% certain. You have to feel like it’s okay to fail.
Yes, there are some incredible benefits to being famous, there are some really fun, glamorous experiences. You can get into a restaurant when they say it’s full. You get free designer clothing. You can meet anyone you want to meet. But I don’t find my job to be glamorous; I know all the stuff that went behind the big moment—the call from my talent the night before they start shooting a film, saying "I don’t want to do it anymore," or "the script is not ready or hasn’t changed the way it was supposed to," or "I’m not getting along with my costar." And then there are the disappointments of how a film is received, reviews not being great, a studio not putting in the marketing money behind a hit. There are the long hours, the exhaustion, and also the sheer frustration of being in the public eye. Right now I can just walk to the Grove in L.A. I can have an ice cream. I can go window shopping. If you’re really famous, you just can’t do that, and people are constantly going to be writing about you, saying you look ugly, or fat, or pregnant, or sad. When you can’t do something meaningless, like go to the grocery store, it becomes kind of isolating. It can be lonelier than you think.
I think about my college years when I had no money and would literally walk 90 blocks in New York City so I didn’t have the pay for the bus or subway.
Now I’m much more spoiled. I’ll fly on private planes; sit in the front row at the Oscars; go backstage at a concert; meet Meryl Streep, who is probably the most incredible human being you’ll ever know. But what I’ve realized is that I was just as happy then as I am now. The most fun you can have comes from things that are not about being rich and famous—having a meal with your close friends, watching a movie in your PJs or sweatpants, and eating popcorn in bed.
I’m a little bit of a nerd and I work very hard. I work seven days a week from morning until night. Sometimes I’m up at 6 a.m. reading a script. Sometimes I’m on the phone with a client at midnight. I also have a husband and two amazing kids; the best thing in my life is my husband and my kids, 100%. I have friends and a social life, so I have a big life.
I’ve only started to find some balance in the last few years. Up until then my life was definitely not balanced. Work came first, always. It’s only recently that I have made a genuine effort to meditate every day, to try to walk my dog with my husband, to go to important things that my kids are doing, and to make sure, even if I’m on a business trip for 48 hours, that I can do one thing that I might want to do, like have lunch with a friend. There’s a lot of guilt when you handle other people’s lives—it’s almost like, psychologically, I feel guilty if I do anything for my life.
So that balance is something that I’ve really been working at. I do think when I do take a little bit of time for myself, it makes me better at what I do.
When I was thinking about starting my own company, it was my clients who told me I needed to do it. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston said, “What is wrong with you? Why are you not the owner and boss of your own company? You have a better client list than most agents and agencies, and you work harder than anyone.”
Sometimes we as women are told, subtly or not, "Oh, that’s super hard, you shouldn’t do it." And I think there’s some sexism there. If I were a man, no one would think twice about my leaving a job and starting my own company. It was only when I did it that I got calls from people that I don’t even represent, some incredible female stars who said, “You go, girl. So proud of you. So glad you’re doing this.” I got this great plaque from Katy Perry that says, “I’m not bossy, I'm the boss.” I didn't realize until I did it that there really aren’t that many companies that are owned solely by a woman.
My dad always said to me, “You need to be independent. You need to take care of yourself. And if you find an amazing person you want to build a family with, great! And if not, you can do that on your own. Don’t ever feel like you need to find a man to feel complete. You’re amazing the way you are.” My mother was the same. She always said, “You can do anything your brother can do.” Once I tried to pee standing up and she said, “Okay, maybe not that.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Follow Wendy Naugle on Twitter @WendyNaugle.
