Being a child actor, unfortunately, you just hear about it. When I was a kid, when River Phoenix died, there were all of those articles like, “Oh, drugs and the troubles of Hollywood.” People would ask me about it and I was like, “Are you kidding? I’ve seen more drugs at my high school back home than I do in Hollywood.” I don’t know, I think people are screwed up everywhere. Look, I think the traditional child actor is one of two things: it’s either “I want nothing to do with this ever again” or “I need this again! I need the attention, I need the love, I need the affection of the crowd.” I think the people who survive the best are somewhat in-between. Q: Is it comparable to being the most popular kid in high school, then you graduate and all of a sudden all of that adulation is gone?Ī: Sure. I don’t know if child actors are necessarily more screwed up than most people. Predicting if where you are at in high school is going to somehow where you’re going to be at 30 is kind of pointless. I think if most people just go through their high-school class, there are a lot of people who are depressed and get into drugs or screw up in any given group of people that you know at a young age. The worst example is someone like Jonathan Brandis, somebody who was from my era and somebody that I knew. We’re going to have to earn that.Ī: I don’t know, man. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to give my film an award. gives more publicity to our film because I have so many Twitter followers, or whatever. I’m not making anything that has anything to do with Boy Meets World, so it doesn’t lend credence or value to my projects. He’s part of the industry he’s successful in some areas so I’ll meet with him.” But once I meet with him and they know the show, I’m just a child actor trying to do something else. They go, “Oh, he’s actually legitimized in some ways. So I think that getting crew, for instance-people will meet with me. I think it’s easier to get my foot in the door, but it’s harder to be taken seriously once I’m there. Q: Does being a former child sitcom star make it easier or harder to break into filmmaking?Ī: That’s a really good question. Though, they did a great episode of Freaks and Geeks with D&D, where James Franco shows up and he’s the cool guy playing D&D and he ends up being great at it. Now everyone is like, “Oh, did you see that?” We shot ours a year ago. But now everybody is sort of saying that. Shiloh saw it and he said it was pretty different. Q: Does the Dungeons & Dragons episode of Community help or hurt what you’re trying to do?Ī: No, no. All of that self-hating geek insecurity was interesting to us. We suck, so Shiloh and I decided to sort of run with that as a short film and, obviously, add some magic. And we realized that we were the assholes in the situation because he was having a lot more fun, and we weren’t because we were so insecure about being perceived as geeky. We ran into a friend that we used to play D&D with, and we’re like, “We can’t tell anybody about this, but we should try it again.” None of us could remember the rules, so we invited a guy to come and he was pretty geeky. Now, we have scripts we just need to find somebody to give us some money to make a feature.Ī: Oh yeah. To make a full-length feature because people don’t watch short films. Q: What’s the ultimate goal of a short film?Ī: The ultimate goal is usually to get financing for a feature. Q: Is Rider Strong really your real name? We discussed a wide range of topics, including the origins of his quite unique name, the challenges of being a former child star breaking into filmmaking, Burt Reynolds’s temper on the set of Evening Shade, and why Boy Meets World is so synonymous with college dorms and the illegal use of marijuana. With Strong in New York City for the competition, we thought it would only be appropriate to subject him to his own set of 25 Questions to answer. It turns out, these days, Rider Strong (along with his brother, Shiloh) has just directed a short film titled The Dungeon Master-about a group of young adults who decide to relive their youth by playing a round of Dungeons & Dragons with what ends up being a way too invested dungeon master-which screened last month at the Tribeca Film Festival ( and can be viewed online here). Funny thing about the Internet: within four days, former Boy Meets World star Rider Strong had contacted me to, um, discuss the finer points of my sarcasm. Last November, in a 25 Questions review for the animated film Tangled, I made a somewhat flippant name comparison between the film’s lead character, Flynn Rider, and the actor who played Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World, Rider Strong.
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