GROWING UP IN PUBLIC
Child stars at higher risk in digital age
Matilda star Mara Wilson wasn’t yet a teenager the first time she searched for her name and found sites that falsely promised nude photos of her, not to mention people discussing her body in sickening detail. Later, she found images of her feet floating around cyberspace.
“I actually came to laugh it off,” Wilson, now 30, said recently. “And it’s really sad, when you’re 14 or 15, that you’re laughing off that you’re on a foot fetish website.”
Kids in Hollywood have always faced dangers.
But the challenges are shifting and broadening with the rise of the internet and the popularity of social media. Child stars are being bombarded both with praise and criticism from the media, blogs and anonymous strangers.
There’s no consensus on how to talk about child actors, so they’re often treated like adults. The problem with that line of thinking is coming into focus with the kids from Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things. Thirteen-year-old Millie Bobby Brown’s wardrobe choices, for example, were endlessly and sometimes uncomfortably scrutinized during the press tour for the show’s second season. When a former NBC Universal executive tweeted a red carpet photo of Brown in a leather dress with the caption, “Millie Bobby Brown just grew up in front of our eyes,” Wilson, among others, hit back, accusing him of sexualizing a young girl.
“A 13-year-old’s body is never your business unless you are that 13-year-old girl,” Wilson said.
And boys aren’t immune. Just look at the 27-year-old model who suggested, via Instagram, that then-14-year-old Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard “hit me up in four years.”
Meanwhile, fans have publicly pined for a romantic relationship between the actor and Brown, posting photoshopped art of the pair together. And Wolfhard, whose popularity has grown even more since he starred in It over the summer, was attacked on Twitter by people who called him “rude” because he didn’t stop to greet fans and sign autographs when a crowd assembled outside his hotel.
These days movie and television contracts might even stipulate social media activity as part of a publicity commitment, and studio teachers — the people who protect and advocate for children on sets — are worried.
“So they’re doing that sometimes without supervision,” said studio teacher Sharon Sacks. “I think that’s the next big thing that has to be monitored.”
Sacks has worked closely with Ariel Winter, along with the other child stars on Modern Family, for the past nine years. Winter told the Hollywood Reporter that before she was a teenager, strangers were posting that she was “a fat slut” and “a whore.”
“I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to lose some weight, dye my hair, change how I dress ... Maybe I’m doing something wrong.’ But it didn’t help,” she said. “I actually got more hate by trying to change.”
It’s not just trolls who are using grown-up language to discuss young stars. TMZ peppered Wolfhard with questions about kissing Brown for the camera.
“Children are not really seen as children in show business, they’ve always been seen as a commodity, a worker: ‘We pay you all this money, we expect you to behave like an adult,’” said Julie Stevens, a director and former child actor who has worked as a studio teacher since the 1990s.
Meanwhile, some parents “just close their eyes and their ears because they don’t want to ruin an opportunity for their child. Or maybe their child’s the breadwinner for the family — who knows?”
Should anyone feel badly for a kid that’s raking it in on a hit show? Certain states, including California and Louisiana, require 15 per cent of a minor’s income be deposited into a trust that can’t be touched until the actor turns 18. But parents have control of the remainder, which means it isn’t uncommon for a young star to reach adulthood and find they don’t have the money they thought they did.
Stevens says she knows former child stars whose parents didn’t even bother to file income taxes on their salaries.
“So when they turned 18, the IRS came after them and took anything they had, which wasn’t much because their parents spent most of their money,” she said. “They had to settle and hire lawyers. It was a horrible mess for a lot of them.”