MARA WILSON, ALL GROWN UP
Actress who starred in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire reflects on life
Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame Mara Wilson Penguin Books
Mara Wilson figures there is at least one librarian in every fanconvention audience she has addressed.
It’s because of Matilda, the bookloving little genius Wilson played in the 1996 film of the same name. Future librarians were drawn to the character, whether it be in the film or the original book by Roald Dahl.
So, when Wilson makes appearances, there will invariably be someone in the audience who had their life changed by Matilda.
“They found Matilda at a young age and were like, ‘Oh wow, somebody likes books as much as I do, somebody cares about these things as much as I do,’ ” says Wilson, in a phone interview with Postmedia. “That’s something that resonated with them. Matilda was one of their favourite books, they loved the movie. Because of it, they feel this connection there.”
Wilson made the film more than 20 years ago. She had other highprofile roles, including Nattie in 1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire opposite Robin Williams and Susan Walker in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street. But she is still most closely identified with Matilda, the precocious, telekinetic sixyear-old who uses her powers to deal with boorish and neglectful parents and the tyrannical principal of her school.
It had modest success at the box office, but was critically acclaimed, earned a devout cult following and seemed to announce the arrival of Wilson as an actress who could carry a film. Empire Magazine pronounced her “one of the few child actors who really can deliver the goods.”
The character changed her life as well. But Wilson has had a far more conflicted relationship with Matilda than those future librarians.
Wilson works through these feelings in A Letter, one of the chapters of her memoir Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame. Written as a missive to the fictional Matilda, the chapter outlines her experiences with the character and shooting the movie, a time period that coincided with her mother’s struggles with and eventual death from cancer. For years afterward, Wilson maintained a somewhat prickly relationship with her most famous character.
“I know it sounds ridiculous because she isn’t a real person,” says Wilson, who will be appearing at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo from April 28 to 30. “But she was this character that meant something to me and I think for a long time it was almost like having an older sister that I looked up to, but everybody likes the older sister more than they liked me or they would conflate me with the older sister. It didn’t feel like I was myself, I was always in relation to her. And I think I resented that for a long time. I didn’t want to talk about it. I knew everybody liked Matilda more than they liked me.”
On the surface, Wilson seems the poster child for where-are-theynow queries, having seemingly disappeared from public view by the time she was a teenager. But Wilson’s story is more complicated than the cliched tale of the former child performer who finds Hollywood to be a cold place when cuteness fades. Even at a young age, she said she wanted the breakup with Hollywood to be “mutual.”
“I suppose I was a bit of a control freak,” she says. “I wanted it not to be that I was ousted because I wasn’t cute anymore or that I didn’t fit the Hollywood ideal for looks — which I didn’t. I didn’t want it to be because of that. I wanted to leave and be in control of my leaving and taking my leave when I wanted to and when I could. It didn’t feel like that was going to happen. I suppose it was like a ‘you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you’ kind of thing,’ But ultimately, I’m glad I left. I’m glad I don’t do film acting anymore, or when I do it’s a passion project or something with a friend. I don’t miss that world, of
having to look a certain way, having to watch myself with the way that I look, the way that I eat, the way that I dress, going on auditions. I don’t miss that.”
In the book, she writes about her experiences as a child actress, but also the years where she decided to pursue her first love of writing, eventually attending New York University and becoming a playwright. There are cute anecdotes about loudly proclaiming her newfound knowledge of sex on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire, or the role the steamy nighttime soap Melrose Place — in which she starred in 1993 — played in shaping understanding of sex, for better or for worse.
In 2013, Wilson wrote a blog about being a child actress for Cracked.com called 7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy: An Insider’s Perspective, which went viral. She was approached by literary agents about writing a memoir.
“I wanted to write it because I wanted to explain where I had been,” she says. “I have people always asking me ‘ Where did you go? What happened to you?’ I felt like I had to explain what happened between the IMDb entries. Part of that was me wanting to reclaim my narrative, I suppose.”
Perhaps unknown to her at the time, all those hours spent on TV and movie sets were helping prep her for the life of a writer. So unlike your average celebrity memoir, Wilson as a writer — bold, fresh and funny — is front and centre.
“It really came into focus in col- lege,” she says. “In college I started writing plays and that made the most sense to me. I had spent most of my childhood eavesdropping on conversations on film sets. So dialogue was something that came naturally to me and it was something that I still love to write.”
These days, most of Wilson’s acting is restricted to voice work. That includes performing for the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, in which she plays someone called Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, and on the animated Netflix series BoJack Horseman. She has also written non-fiction pieces for Cracked. com, Jezebel and the Daily Beast.
All of which continues to give her a public profile, albeit one she can control. While she wrote a chapter about the 2014 death of Mrs. Doubtfire co-star Robin Williams in the book, she requests the topic not be brought up in interviews. Questions about her sexuality were also deemed out of bounds, although she came out as bisexual on Twitter in 2016 in the wake of the Orlando gay nightclub shooting.
At fan expos, she tends to attract fans from all aspects of her career, not just Matilda-obsessed librarians. There’s fans of her voice-over work, her recent writing and even Twitter followers.
“It’s always interesting to see what it is people know me from,” she says. “At this point in my life, I’m happy that they know and appreciate me for anything. I feel like I have a healthy level of fame, a level that I’m happy with at least. I’m never going to be a big A-lister and I’m totally fine with that. I’m totally fine with people liking and appreciating the stuff I do on this level.”