Alison Pill: Hollywood Parents Don’t Let Their Kids Be Child Stars

“It is brutal for self-esteem. I only understood how brutal later in life.”

That’s how Alison Pill describes her experience being a child star — words that echo a comment the late Hayden Panettiere made about her own time as a kid in the industry. “It’s the most brutal experience,” Panettiere, who died in August at 36, said during an interview earlier this year.

I’ve been writing for 16 years about how Hollywood has failed child actors with deadly, shameful consequences — there is no cause that means more to me than the plight of children in the industry. 

But as much as I’ve written about the subject, it has never broken through with as much force as Pill’s searing op-ed in the New York Times. Published last week in the wake of Panettiere’s death, she wrote:

No matter how good the union safeguards get, no matter the policing of grooming behavior, none of it will change the fact that acting while so young strips us of our childhoods and leaves us to suffer the consequences — alone. The specifics may change, but the unethical cycle we’re stuck in will not. At least not until the industry, the audience and the culture recognize that we all partake in something extractive, exploitative and nonconsensual and do something about it.

“You don’t know that something is necessarily so out of the ordinary or hard, or it’s just how life is — it’s how you make sense of the world,” Pill tells me about her experience as a child performer. Born in Toronto, Pill began her professional career at 10, first appearing with Toronto Children’s Chorus. By 11, she was on television and then, at 12, found regular work as a voice actor. Since then, the 40-year-old actress has appeared in multiple acclaimed projects, ranging from features like Milk and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to television series The Newsroom and Devs. 

Being a child actor, Pill says, didn’t instill a “good kind of perseverance that you can gain through sort of grit and push through by hard work.” Instead, the judgment from others inherent to becoming an actor — going through auditions, being turned down because of how you might look instead of your skill — causes serious development issues. 

“Because so much of it is entirely out of your control — and not in a luck way, but in a sense that suits a thousand miles from your home just made a blink-of-an-eye decision — I think that can result in an idea that everything is meaningless,” she tells me on Rushfield Lunch. “No one knows what they’re talking about, no one cares about you, talent doesn’t matter — and looks only matter sometimes in certain ways. It is hard to discern meaning in the kind of meaningless everyday rejection that is a part of any actor’s life.”

As I’ve argued, and Pill knows firsthand, Hollywood isn’t naive about this. “Everyone in the industry knows,” she says. “I think it’s telling that very few people in the industry allow their children to in any way be involved in acting. I mean, that just speaks for itself as to what they think the harms could be. There’s very few nepo actual babies; there are nepo late teens. I think that is a hint to this knowledge of the exploitation involved.”

Still, Pill admits that her feelings about being a child actor are complex. “There were moments of incredible joy, and I don’t know — would I have fared better without being a child actor? I don’t know the answer, and we’ll never know.”

But the numbers are hard to ignore no matter how many in Hollywood put their heads in the sand. Panettiere, Lilo & Stitch actress Daveigh Chase and Michelle Trachtenberg all were child actresses who died within the last 18 months. The list of child stars who have struggled with addiction, substance abuse and depression is grimly long.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions here. Pill suggests there is “low-hanging fruit” in voiceover work because kids get to act but without losing the ability to grow up free from the judgment and attention of Hollywood. “It can be around school hours; they stay in their location; we don’t know their faces; they could chop off their hair and dye it, you know, skunk colors. I don’t know.”

In my recent column on child acting and Hollywood’s grotesque failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens, I suggested that perhaps an ethical use of AI would be to create replacements for child actors. 

Pill, however, quickly shot that down.

“Absolutely not,” she says. “For many reasons — one of which is the only thing that is vaguely worthwhile, that has value in child performances, is capturing and, in some ways, exploiting, the magic of kidness, where these people who have a different sense of reality than grownups do, a different sense of right and wrong, a different sense of questioning, a different sense of creativity. Those are magical.”

During our chat, she cited Steven Spielberg’s work with child actors, including in Hook, as an example of how there is often “magic” in the performances. “The essence of childhood and this beauty and this magic comes the closest to being worth it,” she says. “The idea of us putting in some robot face that is a kid but not quite — I think devalues human existence to a degree where all art becomes meaningless.”