SHE’S ALL GROWN UP
Making peace with Matilda, Mara Wilson blazes a new trail
Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood & Accidental Fame Mara Wilson Penguin
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.
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 says in the middle of 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 she has a caveat. “The most troubled relationship I’ll ever have is with a fictional six-year-old girl,” she says.
“For a long time, it was like having an older sister who overshadows you. But as I’ve got 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?”
Even as she concludes the letter by accepting Matilda into her “family,” it’s the pages that come after that solidify Wilson as very much her own person, wizened and mature beyond her years — incredibly similar to Matilda and yet not, simply because she’s had the privilege of growing up.
By the end of the ’90s, Wilson had left her acting career behind, but not entirely by choice. Although she says she was disillusioned by it and longed for a more satisfying career and a real childhood, the industry fought back.
Filming one of her last projects in 1999, at the age of 12, the director pulled her aside for a “private conversation,” and then bluntly informed her there was “a difference in (her) body.” She was instructed to wear a bra, one that, to Wilson, was “meant more for binding my chest than supporting it.”
“Puberty had arrived, and I was the last to know,” she writes, later describing how with each audition, she’d either be “too grown up” for a part, or no longer “cute enough” for it.
“I wasn’t too thrilled with Hollywood at the time anyway, but I did feel rejected,” she says. “A lot of people wanted to frame it as either ‘Mara Wilson was too ugly to be in Hollywood anymore’ or ‘Mara Wilson got depressed after her mother died and left Hollywood.’ But it was a mutual breakup.”
But she didn’t leave acting entirely behind. She attended 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 standup 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 with 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 more than 300,000 followers (“more than my hometown”) Wilson has a new-found 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 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 every day? I can’t imagine it.”