How Mara Wilson outgrew Matilda

The child star looks back in a memoir

Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood & Accidental Fame By Mara Wilson Penguin 272 pp; $22

For Mara Wilson, the question of “Where are you now?” is an almost daily one, because when people meet her, they don’t see the 29-year-old New York writer she’s grown into — but the daughter of Mrs. Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street’s Susan Walker and, most of all, Matilda Wormwood, the precocious six-year-old with secret powers and a love of big books.

In other words, they’re infatuated with a character Wilson played at the distant age of six, crafted by Roald Dahl and lovingly brought to the screen by Danny DeVito in 1996. In other words, they’re in love with someone she isn’t.

“There was a time when I definitely wanted to push it away, but you can’t,” Wilson tells me backstage at the Global TV studio on a whirlwind press tour for her first book, a memoir called, what else, Where Am I Now? “You have to accept it, because it will follow you through your life. You either choose to be proud of it or joke it off. And I fortunately was in a movie that means a lot to myself and so many people.”

But, as much as she’s proud of the role, she has a caveat. “The most troubled relationship I’ll ever have is with a fictional six-year-old girl,” she admits. “For a long time, it was like having an older sister who overshadows you. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s like coming to appreciate your big sister, all that she did for you, all that you learned from her. That is where I am now.”

In her refreshingly earnest autobiography, Wilson dedicates an entire chapter in the form of a letter addressed to Matilda directly, in which she lets out all her “resentments” as well as the things she’s thankful for because of Matilda, from being able to bring joy to fans’ lives to being the final work her mother saw before her death to cancer, mid-filming.

“I don’t remember much of 1996, and what I do remember is painful,” she writes to Matilda. “My mother was gone, my world had changed, and I felt unmoored. The filming of Matilda felt like it had happened in another lifetime, or in a dream. Ironically, it was during this time, after I’d finished playing you, that I related to you most. You knew what it was like to feel alone.”

Wilson suddenly went from feeling as if she were this prized character she had adored before she’d even been cast, to one she resented, as strangers would encounter her on the street and be disappointed with who they found in Matilda’s place — an actor, far from their imagination.

“I grew up and you didn’t,” Wilson writes. “I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be Mara, but everyone knew me as Matilda. You wouldn’t let me go. What if you were all there was to me?”

Wilson used the money she’d made in her relatively short-lived acting career to attend the noted Idyllwild Arts Academy and then New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she put on her own one-woman show and began to do regular stand-up comedy gigs around the city.

In 2013, she hit her first small (new) break with her play Sheeple at the New York International Fringe Festival, and soon began to develop a whole new name for herself online, exclusively for her writing.

Now, Wilson has bolstered her original fan following to a whole new one on a platform that a decade ago would have been her worst enemy, but is now her greatest weapon: Twitter. With over 300,000 followers (“more than my hometown”) Wilson has a newfound public persona: smart, sassy and humorous. From making bold feminist and political statements to controversially coming out as bisexual, Twitter has served as Wilson’s megaphone — without the face of Matilda, but the voice of Mara. But it also means even less of a filter than what she had to become used to on the street.

“It’s already pretty cruel in the real world, but on Twitter, I get messages telling me I’m ugly every single day, and that I’m insufferable once a week,” she says, noting that it’s her close-knit family that has always kept her grounded, an oddity for child stars. “You have to shrug and move on. The stuff I did get as a child was bad enough, but everyday? I can’t imagine it.”

Wilson sees Twitter as a way to promote voices of fellow actors, comedians and artists she respects, ones she considers “bigger” talents than herself, citing fellow NYU graduates Donald Glover and Rachel Bloom.

“I try to amplify their voices,” she says. “I have a captive audience and there are people I know who are much more talented and brilliant than I am, and will never get the audience I have because I have this built-in fan base.

“Tom Stoppard said actors are the opposite of people, because they’re not afraid to embarrass themselves in front of large groups of people, as that is where they feel safest. As a middle child, I always wanted an audience. Robin Williams (Wilson’s co-star in Mrs. Doubtfire, and the subject of an emotional tribute in her book) was like that. He was obviously more talented than I am, but he came alive when he had an audience. Far more performers are like that than you’d think.”

This, she says, is why she’ll never leave the creative world behind. But if there’s anything holding Wilson back, it’s her tendency to be self-deprecating — but in such a self-assured way, she almost doesn’t seem like it — regularly placing her peers on a scale above herself, in talent, looks and star power.

But if Where Am I Now? and its biting wit and charming self-awareness is anything to go by, she’s very easily running in the same league as the Lena Dunhams, Rachel Blooms and Ilana Glazers of the world. In fact, she even made an appearance in Glazer and co-creator Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City this past season.

It’s a sign of where things could go for the former child star and lifelong storyteller, who promises this book won’t be her last. And if her social media following is to be trusted, her ardent new fan base will be right behind her. It’ll be Mara Wilson — and not Matilda Wormwood — who’ll get the last word this time.