Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, David.
Hi, Rosabelle. How are you?
I'm good. How are you?
I think I've got my podcast voice on.
Oh, do you? I didn't even notice. I was too distracted because I'm in a weird place.
Emotionally or geographically?
I'm inside the offices at Te Papa, but everyone's being really quiet, so I'm trying to speak quietly too.
For our international listeners that may not know what Te Papa is, what is it?
It is our national museum. And I'm down here launching a different podcast to Flightless Bird tonight. So I'm just working at one of the desks. I know. You could say it's a betrayal, but I'm not actually featured in the podcast. It's different.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Mara Wilson share about being a child star?
Respect would.
I don't, do you not respect would? What's the main, you get the ring on a table, don't you? Yeah, it ruins a table.
It ruins. Does it ruin? This is a business. We use this on other shows. I do this thing where you look at your table, there's three coasters sitting around and somehow you still manage to not get it on a coaster.
I do like having a lot of different vessels of liquid around as well. Sure, that's why you have three. That's why I have three. But yeah, I find it much better to just put it directly on the wood. Something about that.
Something about ruining the wood that you're putting it on? Ruining your beautiful set. Do you use coasters at home? I actually recently. Only use marble countertops.
Only marble in my house.
I live in like sort of a porn star style. Only black marble for me. No, I actually bought some coasters for the first time probably six months ago. Good for you. And I'm trying to use them. Yeah. But I got to say, I've lived in this place for three years now. There's a few wooden surfaces in there. I'm not noticing like a lot of rings.
I think the rings from not putting things on coasters is maybe a myth.
No, I mean, I've definitely gotten rings on things from people. Have you? Yeah. There's rings on this. You want me to lift this up and show you? Who did that?
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Chapter 3: How did Mara Wilson's childhood experiences shape her views on fame?
Do you want to like a side plot to this? Sure. I have an unsymmetrical face. So one side of my face is longer than another. So I'm a bit wonky.
is that why you like cock your head i'm always turning i see cameras i'm always sort of angling a bit away because if you see me straight on you'll be horrified wonky so what's happening is my teeth are connecting on one side more than the other because it's wonky just like the gravity of your body my gravity of my body just like sucking my jaw down no but the horrific thing is she said if you wanted to if you were going to do this and get a perfect like bite
We'd need to go to a surgeon, break your jaw, reset it, and then do the orthodontic treatment. I said, fucking no, you're not breaking my jaw. Come on, I will invest a bit in my mouth so that I'm not grinding my teeth. You're not breaking my fucking jaw.
That's an insane thing to suggest, a doctor to suggest.
Yes. No. And it was, I was legitimately shocked. I Googled them. They're legit. They're the real deal. It's just something I hadn't even thought of it because my bite is different on one side to the other. I was just shocked. It's not often I've been sitting in like a medical establishment and being shocked by what someone suggested to me.
I didn't realize that there's growth and changing happening. I thought once your adult teeth come in, that's it.
You know, I thought the same thing. Apparently men, and I think this probably explains a few things, you know how old men have massive ears and massive noses?
Yeah.
They keep growing. And woman apparently like hits puberty.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do child actors face in the industry?
Basically you stop then if you're a woman. Men, we keep growing in like really weird, like unseemly ways. And so my face has like changed more on like one side than the other, which is why I've got this uneven bite.
Well, this is a good segue. I'm curious where this is going. You said after your 40s starts happening. How old are you? Okay, I know where you're going with this.
Where are we going? No, there was a big problem. And I'm a bit annoyed that no one fact-checked this, including my own brain. So I looked when Nickelodeon was debuted. 1979 is what you said. And so my brain went 1979. That was three years away from when you were born. Away from when I was born. You went the wrong direction. I went the wrong direction.
So I stated very confidently that I was three.
Which means you would have been born in 1979.
76 76 right making me pushing 50 yeah right yeah and so i was nice a lot of people wrote in saying my god david you're so young you're so like youthful this is crazy you're not pushing 50 and correct i'm not i'm 43 but pretty a pretty dumb thing to sort of forget when you were born
yeah but i i see what you see what i did i see what you did i went backwards instead of forwards yeah it's confusing now that we're in 2026 so like we used to have you didn't have to go over i know i completely 2000 yeah i know so now it's like 26 on top of yeah 12 for me or 18 for you yeah it fucks you up right yeah
yeah but it was yeah i stated it so confidently in the episode i always assume in like all these episodes i'll be getting quite a few things wrong but not my own age and not in the first like five seconds of the show i will say calvin asked us how old we were the other day and both natalie and i got it wrong
That's really good. Well, he tried saying we were a year younger than we were. And we were like, no, that's not right. We're this age.
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Chapter 5: How does Mara Wilson feel about the portrayal of child stars in media?
Which we talked about in the slime episode, but I keep thinking about that as well. There's so much weirdness when you introduce... It taints the image, for sure. Completely.
But yeah, that is also why we wanted to talk to a child actor because us talking about it is not helpful. We weren't child actors. We don't know what that was like.
I was actually one of the worst actors at my school. I tried to be in a Shakespeare production and I was so, so shy. Mouth went like painfully dry. Yeah. It was a Midsummer Night's Dream. I can't even remember what my character was, but I was very minimal. Just panic. Just like awful being on stage. Yeah. Couldn't think of anything worse.
And hey, we're going on stage. Yeah. March 29th. Yeah. April 2nd, April 4th. Maybe David will recite some of Midsummer Night's Dream. Midsummer Night's Dream.
All that flashbacks.
I'll freeze up.
Oh my God.
But yeah, let's talk tomorrow.
Yeah, this is Mara. She was in an HBO doc called Showbiz Kids, which you should watch. But this is her on our couch a couple of days ago.
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Chapter 6: What are the psychological impacts of fame on child actors?
And I'm like, my dad was a maintenance engineer at a TV station.
They hear NBC and they're like, oh, we know how you got in.
Exactly. Exactly. I'm like, nobody gives a shit about engineers. And my dad will tell you that himself. Whenever they change owners, people will say to my dad, like, are you worried about this? And he goes, does the cockroaches care? Do the cockroaches care who owns the building?
Yeah.
And people always forget. They think it's like these power players all the time, but they forget the thousands of people who work on film sets. So I grew up with children of, you know, editors and people who did practical effects and, you know, children of first 80s and things like that. Burbank, where I lived, was more of a lower middle class, you know, even working class area at the time.
It is not anymore. And there were people who were actors, but they were very low level actors. They were they were journeyman actors. They weren't making a lot of money. So that was what it was. And I think I know that my grandfather worked in PR at one point. And he, I think, was like, hey, they need families for this toothpaste commercial.
My parents were like, OK, we have five children and it would be nice to put some money away for college. So they appeared in it and they wanted real families. And I've watched the video and they did two real families. And one of these are these kids. California blonde, you know, hippie white Aryan family, like playing guitar together and singing.
And then there's my family, which opens with my mom yelling at my brother for hitting one of my brothers. And you see them get hit and you see them yelling on the camera. And I'm just like, oh, great. We're that family. And I didn't know this till I was an adult. I was in it as a baby. So really, that was my first commercial.
But one of my brothers after that was like, you know, he was very he was very charming, very talkative. And he was like, hey, I'd like to do more of this. So he did more, but he got really burned out of it. He burned out on it really quickly. He was like, I don't like this anymore. I want to do something else. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How does Mara Wilson describe her transition from child star to adult?
For someone that doesn't understand the junket circuit, what is it about that that is particularly harrowing, do you think?
Like, you know how intense a job interview is? Imagine having 20 of them in one day while you're jet lagged and you're not quite sure what city you're in.
Yeah, so essentially you're sat in a chair while in the other chair about 30 journalists are brought through and one up to the other, basically. Sit down, hello, questions.
Yes, they do. It's going to be the same questions all day long that you're going to be very tired of. And then there's going to be like one question that they spring on you that's completely inappropriate or bizarre.
Yeah, just to get that little bit of audio.
Exactly. And so you're in a strange dark room basically having, and it feels like a job interview. And so people will say something sometime. They'll be like, why did they give such canned answers? Or they'll say, why is this actor acting like they're out of their mind?
They kind of are.
Because they are.
Especially when they're seven.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Mara Wilson give to aspiring child actors?
I had creative outlets that were not just acting. So I always loved writing and I had that. I ran away from Hollywood to do community theater and like improv and show choir.
Was that sort of was that a protective mechanism? Do you think getting out of acting? That was a decision you made.
My parents were like, you should take some time off now and go to school.
What age did that happen?
Probably around middle school, high school. My dad kept saying, you know, go to college, then maybe come back. Maybe you can direct. Maybe you can produce. Maybe you can do that. And at that point, I was kind of it's funny. I feel like the same way that people rebel against their families. I was kind of rebelling against film. I was like, fuck film. I'm a theater person.
I'm going to live in New York forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so every now and then people are like, oh, would you be in a movie again? And I'm like, yeah, if it was fun or if it, you know, was something I really believed in or if it were with friends. Like, I know a lot of people who like to make creative stuff with their friends, but don't necessarily. Yeah, it is.
My friends, my friends who work on Welcome to Night Vale say, make things you like with people you love and you'll never go wrong.
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