No growing pains for teen duo
Matreya Fedor, Gig Morton reunite for TV movie My Mother’s Future Husband
The dreaded awkward stage hasn’t been so awkward for teen actors Matreya Fedor and Gig Morton.
The Vancouver actors have reunited for the TV movie My Mother’s Future Husband after earlier sharing the small screen for three years in the YTV series Mr. Young, which wrapped its final season last spring.
“I always figured that the age I am now would be my awkward phase because of the rules of the industry,” says 16-year-old Fedor, who co-stars opposite U.S. actor Lea Thompson in the new project as a teen looking to set her widowed mom up with a new man.
Seventeen-year-old Morton, who played her classmate in the high school sitcom Mr. Young, plays her best friend in the new show.
Industry rules stipulate that minors on set can only work 10 hours a day, with an hour for lunch. As well, that time includes three hours of school tutoring. A chaperon, usually a parent, has to accompany the child.
All of which means that productions frequently cast young-looking adults to play their teen characters.
“I didn’t think I was going to work for two years at least, but I’ve been able to book a couple of roles since Mr. Young,” Fedor says.
She was 13 and Morton was 14 when they were cast in Mr. Young. After that show wrapped, Fedor spent this past summer filming a recurring role on the recently wrapped new series Cedar Cove, and then was cast in My Mother’s Future Husband, being produced by Vancouver’s Legacy Filmworks for the family-themed U.S. UP TV cable network.
The movie wrapped its shoot this week in North Vancouver, where we talked to the pair at Lonsdale Quay.
Fedor is finishing Grade 11 online, both on set and at home. It’s a routine she’s used to since starting her acting career at six. She caught the showbiz bug when her dad, who works as a lighting grip, took her on set during the filming of the 2002 TV movie It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. “That was pretty cool,” she says. Fedor’s first acting job was a Strawberry Shortcake toy commercial, and her first movie was as the youngest in a family of zombified alien victims in 2006’s horror comedy Slither.
“That was the best, I had so much fun. I loved the slime and the goop and everything.”
Halloween was always a big deal for her. She kept a full-on alien costume she had to wear for another role in TV’s Supernatural, and wore that for a couple of trick-ortreat nights.
She remembers the time she played Ryan Reynolds’ preteen daughter in the 2008 thriller Chaos Theory as the first time she got to sit in the front seat of a car.
The new role in My Mother’s Future Husband marks another first — Fedor had to take a crash course in guitar and had to sing on camera for the first time. “I had five days before I was playing on set. I know a couple of chords and I can play this song they wrote for the movie.”
She says she still thinks of herself as a kid.
“It’s easy to forget that, when I’m working with adults, and my friends are all going to school,” she says.
Now she’s learning how to drive, and her mom is getting her to look at and fill out all the work-related paperwork on set.
Morton, meanwhile, managed to finish his last two years of high school in one year, and he also wrote a California high school equivalency test, both of which allow him to work as an adult in both countries.
He was training in dance and doing roles in community theatre back home in the Comox Valley when he started coming over to Vancouver for acting roles as a preteen.
Morton still lives in the Lower Mainland with his family, but for this day on My Mother’s Future Husband he drove himself to work.
“This is the first thing I’ve done where I’m working as an adult,” Morton says. “Adult hours — I don’t mind it at all, I enjoy being on set as long as I can.”
Now, Morton says, school means regular sessions with an acting coach between auditions. “I can never learn too much.”