Former kid actors look back on their career beginnings
PASADENA, Calif. — While the rest of us are trying to figure out what to do with our lives, there are some who know from birth. Many young actors grew up with stage mothers pushing them to fame. But the most successful are those who chose the field for themselves at an early age.
Actor Fred Savage, who guided us through “The Wonder Years,” is now a full-fledged grown-up and co-starring in “Friends from College.”
Savage says the idea of acting was all his. “I was 6 and there were auditions being held at the local community center where I grew up in Glencoe, a suburb of Chicago. So me and all my friends, we all went. It would be fun. Then the director called me a couple of times. I got to go downtown, I wanted to go. I didn’t get anything, but I liked going.
“All my friends were on traveling baseball or hockey teams and I didn’t have a thing. So this was kind of cool. Then they called me for a Pac-Man vitamin commercial. My mom said — we didn’t know anything about the business — ‘You’ve been to two of these already and not gotten anything, maybe it’s a waste of time.’ I said, ‘Oh, let’s go, let’s go!’ That was the first job I got. Every job and every audition that followed, it was that same enthusiasm and excitement.”
Elisabeth Moss, who jetted to fame as the determined Peggy Olson on “Mad Men,” and is navigating a new world in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” says she wanted to be an actress from the get-go.
“I never think of myself as a child actor. I don’t feel that different from when I was 6. I loved acting and that’s that. I wanted to do it, and there was really no question about it. I did ballet from 5 to 15, so I went back and forth between those two. And at 15, I decided to just go with acting because it was more fulfilling for me.”
Aaron Paul, the frenetic meth cooker from “Breaking Bad,” and now starring in “The Path,” thinks acting was in his DNA. “I feel like I’ve been acting ever since I was born. I knew at a very young age I wanted to do this. I was doing little short plays since I was a little kid, and I just loved being in front of people and doing make-believe. That’s kind of what I sought out as a young kid; just pretending, playing, and I never wanted to stop.
“When I turned 12 years old and was introduced to films like ‘Stand by Me’ and ‘Goonies,’ I saw those as kids pretending, doing makebelieve on such a grand scale, and I just thought to myself, ‘Well, if they can do it, why can’t I?’ A young kid from Boise, Idaho, I just wanted to chase after it.”
Sarah Jessica Parker (“Sex and the City,” “Divorce”) also started performing as a child. “It’s enormously thrilling to act. It’s hard to describe why because it’s like a feeling. It’s hard to find words to articulate.
“I remember when I first experienced it, because I wasn’t strong academically in school. And children hate not feeling good at what they have to do; it’s a terrible feeling. And I did ‘The Little Match Girl’ when I was little for NBC. I remember when the cameras rolled and I was acting, I felt euphoric. I didn’t know anything about acting, and still don’t know very much. It’s hard to explain. It’s why rock singers love to sing. It’s great to be someone else, to behave in different ways, to say things you wouldn’t normally say, to be cruel or silly or sad. It’s so weird and so thrilling.“