All The Days Of My Life (so Far). Alison Sweeney
Wasn’t I cute?!
When I was about six years old, I appeared in a McDonald’s commercial. In it, four other girls and I were sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant, eating French fries and giggling. Not too demanding, right? Well, at least not until the director ordered one take after another after another—requiring us to eat one handful of French fries after the next. You can imagine what happened. I was almost sick to my stomach by the end of the shoot. Now believe me, I think McDonald’s has the best fries around. But I ate so many of them that I was feeling pretty ill that night at home. I don’t think I had another French fry for about a year after that! Can you blame me?
Then there was a memorable commercial for Chewy Chips Ahoy. I was eight years old, and it was a two-day shoot, filmed by a lake more than two hours out of L.A. My “call time” was something crazy like 5 A.M., and I remember my mom having to wake me up at 2 in the morning to make sure we got there on time. I had only one line in the commercial, but there were a lot of different scenes—one of me eating cookies at a picnic, another of me eating cookies with my on-camera mom somewhere else in the park, and so on. You get the picture. Plenty of scenes. Plenty of cookies. If I had a cookie craving at the beginning of the day, it was gone by early afternoon.
When I was asked to appear in a second Chewy Chips Ahoy commercial, I guess I had forgotten just how demanding it can be to devour cookies virtually nonstop for a day or two. We did fifty takes of that second commercial—yes, fifty—each one requiring that I take a few bites of a Chewy Chips Ahoy cookie. This time, however, the director must have had visions of stomachaches sabotaging his commercial. So, he insisted, “Instead of swallowing the cookies, as soon as I yell ‘cut’ spit them into a bucket.”
You’ve got to be kidding! At first, I resisted. But the prop guy kept warning me, “You’ll wish you had.” It didn’t take me long to realize that he was right. I probably ate only five cookies that day—and spit out 45 more! Fortunately, the bucket never appeared in the commercial itself. It was pretty disgusting.
Nabisco promotes their cookies with the phrase “Ooey gooey warm ’n chewy.” At the time, I’m not sure if I would have described it quite that way. They are delicious cookies—however, after hours of eating (and spitting out) cookies, I must have worked myself into a sugar frenzy that took a week or two to wear off!
The message, my friends, is that even a dream job like eating cookies may require biting off more than you can chew. The same goes with feasting on ice cream cones all day long. In one commercial, three little girls and I were supposed to walk through the park, licking ice cream cones. Sounds great so far. But it also happened to be a very hot day, and the director knew the ice cream wouldn’t survive a single take, much less a day’s worth of shooting. So he ordered the ice cream back into the freezer, and replaced it with “mashed potato cones,” with the mashed potatoes dyed green! Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? It wasn’t exactly a child’s crème de la crème dessert. But I made the best of it. As it turned out, we taped about forty takes, licking green mashed potatoes and pretending to enjoy every morsel. Now that’s acting!
Child Acting 101
I’m so lucky to have always had an amazing and supportive family. From the earliest days, they encouraged my interest in acting without pushing me in one direction or another. My mom was always there to drive me to auditions, but she certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of the pushy stage mom. She let me take the lead, and she always said that if I didn’t want to go on auditions anymore, all I had to do was say so. With all that driving my mom had to do, going to and from auditions across town every other day, she would have been happy for me to call it quits at any time. She certainly never let the acting get in the way of my schoolwork or my friendships (although I was never a child who had lots of friends anyway).
From the beginning, my family has not only supported my dream of acting, but they’ve also kept me grounded along the way. They’ve always made sure I’ve stayed humble—never letting my ego soar out of control, no matter how well my career might be going, and never allowing me to feel crushed by the devastating lows that are almost an inevitable part of being an actor.
Of course, I’ve seen other parents driven by motives of their own. I grew up with kids who were literally supporting their families with their acting paycheck. Pretty sad. If that’s why a kid is acting—if it’s the parents’ dream and not the child’s—it’s not going to work. In my own childhood, I loved every minute of auditioning and acting. But it can be a pretty terrible life when it’s not the life you want.
So how do I respond when parents approach me and ask, “How can I get my kid into acting?” When parents seek my advice, I tell them, “If your child really wants to give it a shot, go ahead and see if she likes it. But if she doesn’t, you’ve got to follow her lead and let her back off. If she starts to complain about not getting to see her friends or if she’s falling behind in her schoolwork, then it’s time to reevaluate.”
Bitten by the Acting Bug
It’s almost a joke, but it’s true: No matter what your age, if there’s anything else in the world besides acting that you could see yourself doing, perhaps you should consider doing it, or at least having it at the ready as a safety net. Breaking into the acting business is very difficult, and the chances of making a living at it are so slim (the city of L.A. wouldn’t have any waiters were it not for all of the out-of-work actors!). On the other hand, if acting is in your blood (like it is in mine), and you just can’t do anything else, then I encourage you to chase your dream. I completely understand when young people (and adults) tell me that acting is something they have to do.
Of course, the acting business can knock the wind out of you without any warning at all. Sometimes, you leave an audition convinced that you did a great job, only to learn that you didn’t get the part because they wanted a red-headed kid instead of a blonde, or they were looking for someone taller or shorter than you. They might have been seeking an actor with freckles, or someone without them. It’s also possible that your acting performance just didn’t impress them, and if that’s the case, brace yourself. Casting directors can be brutally honest. They might tell your agent or manager everything they didn’t like about your audition, with the hope that it will help you do better next time. Maybe so, but it can be tough to hear criticism, particularly when you’re a kid. If you’re making acting a career, however, you have to be able to hear the negative comments, and find something constructive in them.
Believe me, I’ve weathered my share of audition disappointments. Of course, I’ve also been very fortunate to land some great parts (think Sami Brady!). But during those times when I’d crash and burn at an audition, it was nice to have someone nearby to help lift my spirits. Enter my mom. She was always great, even when someone else got the part. Not long ago, she told me that when I was a kid, she’d be so disappointed for me, but all she ever said was, “Honey, they don’t know what they’re missing out on.” She’d find a way to make me feel good about myself.
I know that 98 times out of 100, even the most talented actors are rejected for roles. But if you have a passion for acting, you learn to persevere, confident that successes are on the horizon. You learn to accept the disappointments because they’re part of the business. If you beat yourself up over them, it’s harder than ever to bounce back. I’ve gotten down on myself from time to time when I really wanted a part, felt I was absolutely perfect for it—but just didn’t get it. I give myself a day or so to be truly bummed about it, but then I try to move on. There will be another audition. There will be another wonderful part. And I can hardly wait to give it my best shot next time.
Of course, particularly when I was younger, there was something else I had going for me in terms of self-preservation. As I’ve mentioned, I loved auditioning, as though it really didn’t matter whether or not I got the part. I loved meeting new people. I loved getting all dressed up. Of course, it also didn’t hurt that I’d occasionally get to leave school early for an audition.