Film can be exciting, but more often, it's tedious.
People think I'm smarter than I am.
Sure, I love to read, and I love to learn, but I was always nerdy that way.
People like to make children into little grown-ups.
People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.
I can't even count how many times I did interviews with people and they asked me if I had a boyfriend. Keep in mind that I was, I guess, mild to moderately famous from ages 6 to 13. Of course I didn't have a boyfriend then. I didn't even have a camp boyfriend then.
When you're an actor, your body isn't your own. Your body is part of a tool that you use. Everybody else there is using you as a tool, so they have access to those things, too.
I was never a prodigy. I was never a child genius.
I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.
I've been accused of being pretentious and insufferable, and I don't really know what I can say about that. I never got good grades in school, but I did read the dictionary for fun. That was just the kind of stuff that I liked to do. I can't apologize for that.
I knew I didn't want to put anything down in writing about the first time that I had sex. I knew that I didn't want to do that.
A lot of child actors think they need to re-invent themselves, especially young women. Usually what they do is they adopt a sort of overt sexuality. It's fine if they want to do that, but a lot of times I think they feel obliged to do that, and that is something that I don't think anybody should feel obliged to express.
People want to bring kids to their level, and they want to make it seem like kids have this thing. It's seen as funny to them.
David Sedaris wrote in one of his books that people like to make children into little grown-ups, which to him is about as funny as a dog in sunglasses.
I thought I started acting at 5 or 6, it was really when they were interviewing real families for a toothpaste commercial. They interviewed our family.
When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That's the long story short.
Whereas when I was a teenager, other teenagers didn't want anything to do with me. It was even like that in college to a degree. People of that age don't want anything to do with their childhood, because they had put away childish things, and they're trying to distance themselves.
Children change a lot in terms of personality. Camaraderie that you feel with somebody might not be there a year later. That group might not have the same chemistry. So I completely understand why they're rushing into it, because they probably feel like they have to.
I remember my friends and I looking forward to puberty because it seemed exciting at first.
I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.
Puberty was definitely difficult for me.
I would go to the craft services table and have Oreos or whatever, and a grown woman would come up to me and look at what I was eating and sigh and go, "I remember the days when I could eat like that." And I never knew what to say that, because I was 9.
I had so many adults around me reminding me that I was a kid. I also had a lot of adults saying things to me like, "When I was your age..." and sort of idealizing it. I didn't like that they idealized it.
I was very aware of being younger than everybody on set.
I don't have any plans to pursue film acting. It's not my thing anymore, if it ever was. Yes, I do still act sometimes. But when I do, it's with people I know and trust, people who respect me as a person and appreciate what I have to offer.
