When she was 11, she reluctantly played her final significant role in the 2000 fantasy adventure picture Thomas and the Magic Railroad. “The characters were too young. At 11, I had a visceral reaction to [the] script…Ugh, I thought. How cute,” she tells The Guardian.
‘Burned out’
But her departure from Hollywood was not solely her decision.
Wilson, a young adolescent, was going through puberty and outgrowing the “cute.”
She’d been “just another weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair, whose bra strap was always showing.”
Backstage at @OkaytoSayTX supporting #mentalhealth awareness and destigmatization! pic.twitter.com/IqfFkuRiPj
— Mara Wilson (@MaraWilson) March 8, 2018
“At 13, no one had called me cute or mentioned the way I looked in years, at least not in a positive way,” she says.
Wilson was forced to deal with the pressures of celebrity and the difficulties of transitioning to adulthood in public. Her shifting image had a significant impact on her.
“I had this Hollywood idea that if you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless. Because I directly tied that to the demise of my career. Even though I was sort of burned out on it, and Hollywood was burned out on me, it still doesn’t feel good to be rejected.”
Mara as the writer
Wilson, now a writer, wrote her debut novel, Where Am I Now? “True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame” was published in 2016.
The publication addresses “everything from what she learned about s3x on the set of Melrose Place, to discovering in adolescence that she was no longer ‘cute’ enough for Hollywood, these essays chart her journey from accidental fame to relative (but happy) obscurity.”
Having a rad time at #90sCon! pic.twitter.com/WMEEPpIBRr
— Mara Wilson (@MaraWilson) March 11, 2022
She also authored a biography called “Good Girls Don’t” about her life as a child performer trying to live up to expectations.
“Being cute just made me miserable,” she writes in her essay for the Guardian. “I had always thought it would be me giving up acting, not the other way around.”
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