How Losing My Cousin Inspired the Film That Changed My Life

I always wanted to be in movies for reasons that sound embarrassingly shallow until I explain them.

I didn’t grow up dreaming about cinema as a sacred art form. I wasn’t seven years old talking about lens choices or the emotional architecture of The 400 Blows. I was a bullied kid on the autism spectrum who watched movie stars step onto red carpets and saw something I wanted more than anything: acceptance. Friends. Love.

That was the magic to me. The love people have for movie stars. The gravitational pull. I watched those movie stars and believed, in the private math of a lonely kid, that fame must be what acceptance looked like.

For most of my life, I wanted to be seen because I thought being seen would mean being understood. If everyone loved you, I thought, then no one could leave you out.

It’s a very understandable thing to believe when you are young, different, and trying to survive the daily humiliation of not knowing exactly why the world seems easier for everyone else. I had a cousin, also named Landon, who was 24 years younger than me. At 16, he felt the same loneliness and isolation that I had felt at his age. He was undiagnosed autistic, lost in the world, and struggling for purpose.

Hollywood, as it turns out, is a pretty funny place to try to heal your wounds when you feel out of place.

It’s an industry built almost entirely out of attention, rejection, silence, and people saying, “We love this,” right before ghosting you forever. After my fourth television booking, I realized the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t book jobs — it was that I wasn’t getting enough chances to audition. Autism made networking feel like a language everyone else spoke fluently. So I stopped waiting for permission and started writing, pitching, following up, and trying to get into rooms that always seemed to exist for everyone except me. I kept chasing the thing I had mistaken for belonging.

My worst day in Hollywood was becoming a finalist in a very big TV studio’s diversity writing program. They told me my writing samples were among the strongest they had read that year, but when they asked what my greatest weakness was, my answer gave them a reason to reject me. I told them that because of my autism, networking and building relationships in unfamiliar social settings didn’t come naturally to me. They noted that by volunteering such a struggle, I was sabotaging potential success. I had applied to a diversity program believing my neurodiversity was part of what made my perspective valuable. Instead, I left feeling like the part of myself that made me different was also the part I was expected to hide.

I knew the odds were against me, but I refused to give up.

My cousin Landon ended up being the catalyst for my career, tragically.

He was a genius. I do not use that term lightly. There wasn’t a single subject he couldn’t speak on intelligently. He was kind and thoughtful, but now lost. His one singular goal in life was to play in the NFL. He was an extremely talented athlete, but after injuring his knee, he knew that dream would never come true. While he had so much promise and potential to do anything he wanted, this was his pick. That injury took away his future, in his eyes.

I went to visit him at one of his darkest hours and begged him to come stay with me at my house four states away. I knew he’d probably say no, but I also knew he didn’t have anyone in his life who understood what it felt like to be twice-exceptional and autistic. I had spent years learning how to navigate a world that rarely made sense to me. It hadn’t been easy, but I had found ways to build a life despite the loneliness, the misunderstandings, and the constant feeling of being different. I wanted to give him something I never had at his age: someone who could honestly say, “I know what this feels like, and it can get better.”

Three days after I got home, I received a call from his mom saying he wanted to take me up on my offer. He flew out, and we spent a week together doing quite literally anything he wanted to do. It was the greatest week ever. We golfed, ate too much sushi, and talked till 2 a.m. every single night. I thought he left in an amazing headspace.

A few days after he got home, he died by suicide.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I kept wondering what he had been carrying, what he had hidden, and whether there was anything else I could have done to avoid that outcome. Those questions stayed with me until one weekend, when I sat down at my computer and wrote my movie Go On in a single 36-hour marathon.

The film follows an emotionally isolated man who unexpectedly finds connection with a stranger. It wasn’t Landon’s story. It was mine — my attempt to wrestle with the question that had consumed me since losing him: What if someone had reached him at exactly the right moment?

People ask if Go On was catharsis. They ask if writing it helped me process my grief. I honestly don’t know that it did.

What I do know is that the characters in that movie hide things from one another because they don’t know how to say what’s wrong. They joke. They deflect. They change the subject. They talk around the thing instead of through it. They desperately want to be understood but have no idea how to make themselves understandable.

That wasn’t invented. My cousin hid things from me. I hid things from him. We respected each other very much and still somehow managed to miss each other in important ways.

After his funeral, I sat down and wrote: “Exterior forest – Day.”

I had no outline. No ending. No plan. I simply followed two people trapped together in purgatory. Every conversation became a version of conversations Landon and I had. Every question was one I wished I had asked. Every moment of humor became another attempt to make somebody laugh because I didn’t know what else to do.

Eventually the movie raised $760,000, won awards, played festivals, and put me on red carpets I had dreamed about since I was a lonely kid watching celebrities on television.

For years I believed being seen would make me feel understood.

Go On taught me those are not the same thing.

The truth is, I wasn’t chasing fame. I was chasing the feeling that I had finally earned my seat at the table — that somewhere, someone would look at my work and decide I belonged. Every milestone eventually became normal. The feeling faded. Industry acceptance always remained out of reach, so I kept chasing it. Maybe that’s the curse of ambition. Maybe it’s just who I am.

The nights I miss are the ones before I ever wrote Go On — eating sushi until two in the morning with my cousin, talking about movies and whatever else crossed our minds. The movie changed my life, but it exists because of the worst loss I’ve ever experienced. They say to write what you know. I just wish this wasn’t the story I knew well enough to tell.

The post How Losing My Cousin Inspired the Film That Changed My Life appeared first on Katie Couric Media.