translated from Spanish: Growing up under the lights: film reveals the difficult life of children actors

In Hollywood alone every year about 20 thousand children are taken by their parents or managers to an audition, of them, only 5% manage to keep the role desired. That’s one of the data that reveals “Showbiz Kids”, a documentary that premieres today on HBO and that tells the story of child actors. The critic has applauded the documentary made by Alex Winter (“The Amazing Adventures of Bill and Ted”), who as the interviewees in the film was a child actor. This is because of the different way he addressed an issue that has been groped for decades from the point of view of the misery and tragedy that has involved many cases. But in “Showbiz Kids” Winter proposes to give a sensitive perspective to the subject through the story of various cases told by its own protagonists. So, for example, Mara Wilson, the girl who became famous for starring in “Matilda” (1996), says she was the one who told her parents that she wanted to act, while Wil Wheaton, who made her television debut at just nine, says it was her mom who moved by her own frustrations led him to that world. Evan Rachel Wood (“Westworld”), meanwhile, says she comes from a family of artists who always demanded her to do “a great job” and Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of fellow actor Will Smith, discusses what it has been like raising children who are almost as famous as their parents. Obviously the film also has what is easy to imagine: economic exploitation of children and parents who were not attentive to often abusive situations. The documentary also features testimony from Cameron Boyce, who defines himself as a “Disney boy” and who, after participating in the film, died in 2019 at just 20 years old after being diagnosed with epilepsy. One of the celebrated aspects of “Showbiz Kids” is that its director made the decision not to have opinions from third parties, as psychologists, to evaluate the stories of their protagonists, but simply let them talk and reveal how the early lights marked them.

Original source in Spanish