You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (5 page)

Now, just to clarify, I was not a Bear. That would have been too good to handle. I played the role of a little girl who was so afraid of bugs that the Bears flew down from their cozy clouds just to lend a hand. They came to teach me about all the wonderful things that creepy-crawlies could do and showed me that there was nothing to fear. I learned how to enunciate clearly and use my voice instead of my eyes. I learned that voice-overs always need to be “bigger” than film, where you can use your whole body to portray a feeling. It all felt a little over-the-top, but the fact that a cartoon Care Bear hugged a cartoon me was the stuff of dreams.

I continued to do some other types of voice-over work, more cartoons, and commercials. I was hired to re-do another girl’s dialogue because the producers hadn’t been satisfied with her work and they wanted me to “clean it up.” I sat in that same little box of a room and dubbed
her lines, matching them to her moving mouth. I have no recollection of what the project was, but I do remember having a line about Brian Boitano. When it was done, it looked pretty cohesive. The producers had accomplished their goal, which was to get rid of the original actress’s stilted delivery and make it sound more natural.

While it was nice to have a gig, I felt awful for that little girl. She was about seven years old, just like me, and I wondered how she would feel when her family and friends gathered around the TV to watch her big performance. Would she be confused or embarrassed when she saw herself open her mouth and heard my voice came out? Would her family comfort her? Would they make up a story about why the producers had to re-do her lines? Would her friends ask why she sounded different and would she have to explain why I was brought in? Would she want to act again or would she feel so humiliated that she would just quit?

Until that moment it had all just been playing Barbie dolls and dice games. Now, I had taken something away from someone. I was a traitor. A little bit deeper than that was another thorny feeling: if she was a bad actor and I was brought in to fix her work, what did that make me? I must be good. I swelled a little, feeling like I could be relied on to sweep in and make it all better. It made me wonder if this was how the world worked—were accomplishments so limited that I could only have something because someone else didn’t have it? Did success always depend on my ability to grab it out of someone else’s hands? Was victory always going to feel so dirty? It was my first adrenaline hit from the entertainment industry and it felt like a double-edged sword. That sword and I would get to know each other quite well.

It was a common occurrence for working kids to receive little treats after they behaved well for the casting directors, much like performing seals being thrown dead fish. For many young actors, auditions were followed
by trips to the mall where candy and stuffed animals were tossed at them as rewards for well-memorized lines and professional chit-chat with producers. Even at the time, the blatant bartering between parent and child seemed creepy. This was different territory than getting a gold star sticker for making your bed. With money at stake, the focus shifts and that tension was obvious.

Bribery was not necessary for me because I really liked auditions. They were fun chances to go new places, learn new things, and get out of school. I loved reading scripts and learning how writers created story arc and character development. I liked memorizing lines, pulling them apart, reordering them and putting them back together. I played with words like some kids played with Legos. Milkshake rewards were superfluous.

Casting session waiting rooms were usually filled with other little girls with their mothers (or the occasional dad) who accompanied them. It looked like the sidelines of a soccer game, except instead of cheering for goals, everyone was rooting for speaking parts. Some parents were pushy, obsessively brushing their prodigy’s hair and making them recite their lines just once more, and not so fast this time. It was cringe-worthy. The kids rolled their eyes and tried to push away the hands that were trying to smooth down their bangs or pinch their cheeks to cause a “natural” pink glow. Sometimes the moms themselves were done-up with fresh perms and elaborate eye-shadow, as if they were prepared to jump in front of the casting director themselves, should the need for a mother-type character suddenly arise.

In contrast, my mom attended my auditions in her standard outfit of jeans, a baggy t-shirt that was suitable for home renovation work, and no makeup. She would walk past the empty folding chairs, choosing instead to sit cross-legged on the floor, usually near a ficus plant, where she would flip through an old
Reader’s Digest
. At one audition filled with particularly fancy moms, I took notice of my mother’s hair. A few days earlier she had been tugging at it in the mirror, saying she needed a cut.

“But I just hate going to that haircut place. There are too many mirrors
and it smells weird. Why don’t you just do it?” She suggested to me.

We dug through my plastic pencil case, dumping out chewed up erasers and leaking markers and found a pair of scissors with bright orange handles. And I cut her hair in the TV room. Clumps of curls fell to the floor and the cats batted them around. I squinted and looked at her from different angles, making minor adjustments like the hair stylists on set did. When it was done, it didn’t look terrible. Dark, curly hair is mercifully forgiving. It didn’t look like a nine-year-old had cut it. It looked more like a twelve-year-old had cut it.

It seemed unlikely that any of the pushy, primped moms asked their daughters to cut their hair with a pair of safety scissors. My mom was just different. There was no grasping, no pushing, no clamoring for attention. There was just the profound sense that this was simply what we did, because sitting at an audition for Sears was a totally normal thing to be doing on a Tuesday afternoon.

My mother seemed to live in a backwards world where unusual things, like collecting photos of my entirely alive father to be used in a shoot to represent “the dead dad,” put her in this state of confident ease. Anything mundane, like making me a dentist appointment or cooking dinner left her looking uncomfortable and uncertain. She was built for adventure and unusual circumstances, but nothing in her life before me would have indicated that. Mom lived most of her life in the town she was born in, down the street from the hospital where her father took his first and last breaths. There was no precedent for her endless capacity for the extraordinary. But if there were ever a crisis or strange goings-on, my mother was the one you wanted by your side, smoothing things over and enveloping you in her coolness. Her confidence led me to never question our life. I would have been more likely to wonder if clothing was really a public necessity.

One of my first starring roles was in a kids’ TV movie where I had to fight ghost pirates. I was nine years old and received sword fighting lessons on the deck of a pirate ship in the icy waters off the coast of Nova
Scotia. We worked mostly nights; filming would begin at 10 p.m. and finish up well after sunrise. I liked feeling like a vampire, falling into bed at the hotel as regular people were just emerging from their rooms, in search of coffee and muffins.

The TV movie was called
Trick or Treasure
, and it received good reviews. I was praised for my performance, which the press called “beguiling,” and they threw around words like “genius.” They quoted my cast mates who reported that I was a “fantastic professional who never made an error,” and they told anecdotes about what I was like on set. They noted specific things that I had said or done and even though it was positive, it all felt like gossip. It was suddenly clear that I was constantly being watched. My behavior was being closely monitored so that it could be recorded for the world to read in the
TV Guide
.

By the way that other people reacted to the press, it seemed like I was supposed to feel something like pride. I didn’t. I wanted to hide. It was uncomfortable to have people looking at me or talking about me, even if they were saying nice things. In clichéd Canadian style, I had been raised to be humble. We considered birthday parties to be a little boastful and grandiose. In my family, pride was considered to be the greatest imaginable sin. I think my parents would have been okay with me being a drug dealer, just as long as I didn’t brag about how many clients I had. So, how was I supposed to react when my dad’s work colleagues had a t-shirt printed up for him with one of my glowing reviews on it?

I was confused about who I was supposed to be. My family always told me to just do my best, but my best seemed to be getting me the kind of attention that conflicted with the reserved values I had been raised with. Later in life, I was on an airplane and was dismayed to realize that the in-flight movie was one of mine,
Beautician and the Beast.
I was in a middle seat in coach on the red-eye flight and didn’t look anything like the actress on the screen. She had perfect hair and makeup and was even wearing a tiara in one scene. The real life sweatpants, puffy eyes, and frizzy hair didn’t correlate.

I put the blanket over my head and prayed that the people next to me would be more interested in the
Sky Mall
magazine than the movie. I tried to fall asleep in the scratchy wool tent I had made myself, but I ended up listening to people as they watched the movie. I hoped they were laughing at the right parts. I was invested and mortified, in equal measure. It was a dichotomy that became very familiar and impossible to reconcile. But maybe that was just the price of being in films. Wasn’t everyone’s life complicated and full of tradeoffs?

What do you call a mid-life crisis that happens at age nine? I don’t know if double-digits are traumatic for every child, but I had a total breakdown the week before my tenth birthday. What was happening with my career? I’d been at this for six years now but I didn’t really know where it was all going. Would this be my life forever? I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, but the whole acting thing felt sort of like it had just randomly fallen in my lap. What if I changed my mind and wanted to be a veterinarian? Was there still time? I laid in bed and peeled back the cuticles on my fingers until little drops of blood appeared, leaving crimson stains on my security blanket.

I had pretty much hit the ceiling of the entertainment industry in Toronto. I had been in commercials for everything imaginable, and at times my ads aired back-to-back: Oil of Olay face cream following right after Ivory Snow laundry detergent. I had been on every TV show that filmed in Toronto. Every casting company in town knew me and directors had labeled me “One Take Jake” because I tended to be well-prepared and didn’t often need multiple chances to get the shot. The nickname made me feel dependable. Being famous was never the goal, but it was meaningful that adults found me to be reliable and professional. It
seemed there was little more work to be done. Maybe this acting thing had run its course and it was time to learn to be happy being a girl who attended school regularly and took up horseback riding.

Shortly after my double-digits crisis, I was shooting an episode of
Friday the 13
^th
The Series
. I had been re-hired for a guest starring role, they just hoped their audience was not observant enough to notice that I had been someone totally different two seasons prior. The boy playing my brother, Robert Oliveri, had been living in L.A. and doing that thing that L.A. is known for: waiting around to be an actor. He recommended that I come to California to meet his manager, who was looking for “new people” and apparently I fit the bill for being both a “person” and “new.” I seemed like someone who could wait around to be an actor, too.

We might have had a family conversation where we discussed the impact and decided that this was the right move, but I don’t remember it. Looking back it seems like a huge step: pulling me out of school for three months, traveling to another country, and separating our family for a while. Yet, at the time it felt inevitable somehow. It was as if I had gotten the brown belt in karate, so why would I not move on to the black belt if the chance was being offered?

So, in the spring of 1990, my mother and I headed west. My father was a labor negotiator for school boards, so he stayed home and planned to come out to visit when he could. It was the first time we had ever been to Los Angeles, and it felt epic. Flying into LAX, we descended through the thick orange smog that hung in the air, into a town where apparently every single house had an in-ground swimming pool. This place was crazy.

We checked in to the Holiday Inn in Burbank for our ninety-day stay, which is the suggested time required to become somebody. One of the flimsy dresser drawers became a kitchen pantry and we filled it with saltines and Skippy peanut butter. Framed photos of my dad and the dog sat on the nightstand. Mom had read a pamphlet about creating an earthquake evacuation plan, so we left water bottles and rubber-soled
shoes by the door. That was the extent of my preparations for life in California. We got ready to wait, for earthquakes or a Hollywood career or whatever else might come.

Mom purchased a Thomas Guide, a spiral-bound atlas with 200 pages mapping out L.A.’s knotted mess of streets and freeways. She’d sit up late at night, flipping through the endlessly winding back roads and overpasses. Within days, she had turned herself into a California native, navigating our white Thrifty rental car, attempting to avoid the omnipresent traffic jams. Outside the car window, the palm trees swayed, framing the wide streets and the hookers who hung out on Hollywood Boulevard.

Old movies had led me to believe that Hollywood itself was going to be glittery and lovely, reminiscent of Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe. I thought everyone was going to be wandering around in silver gowns with long cigarette holders and calling people “darling.” The crack dealers were unexpected. However, the rest of L.A. was pretty predictable, including the large billboards of Angelyne, the classic Hollywood bombshell with blonde hair and abundant talent overflowing from her top.