I’ve just been bingeing Six Feet Under (again—what a great show it was) and I marveled at the baby-turned-toddler twins who played the (single character) Maya who joined the show in mid-course as a newborn and ends the show as a three-year-old (or so). It’s really quite stunning the way she plays the part but I’m curious how that works.
Obviously, casting twins to play one character helps, but I wonder how they get her to do the specific things the show needed—eat, nap, laugh, be affectionate with the actors who played her parents. Mostly though I wonder about the psychology. Do they explain to a virtual baby that she’s going to pretend now that Peter Krause is her daddy, though he isn’t, and he’s going to say the same things several times in a row, and she should look at him but not say anything while he’s talking, etc.? A baby can’t really process the concept of acting, or making a TV show, can she? She has to bond with the actors somewhat, doesn’t she, in order to accept being handed off from one to another without freaking out, or clinging to the first one, or crying, or any of the normal reactions babies have to being handed off like a sack of flour?
I get that there are tricks, tricks that I’m probably not picking up on. I’ve noticed that when baby Maya has a line to say (“Bye” or “Daddy” or something of the sort) she often has her face turned away from the camera, or is off-screen, and obviously they’re looping in her dialogue, but it must be frustrating to get a baby to do anything at all. I suppose they have to re-shoot many scenes in which she doesn’t do exactly what the script requires of her, but mostly I wonder about what the baby/toddler is able to process about the weird stuff she finds herself doing over and over, and these fake relationships she has with “Daddy,” “Mommy” and “Grandma.” How do they avoid screwing up the kid for life? Or is it all just “play/ pretend/make-believe” and these kids grow up without being confused or scarred for life?
First, you cast children who have a calm temperament and high tolerance for strangers, and then you try to work within their existing schedule. If a baby needs to be fed or put down on camera, you wait until it actually needs to be fed or put down to film that scene. You try to write the script so a child that young doesn’t need to do specific things, they can just be there.
It occurs to me that the Tosh twins (I think that’s right) must be about 20 years old by now. I wonder if they, or other baby actors, have discussed publicly their emotional experiences. I suppose that Peter Krause and Rachel Griffiths and Lili Taylor invested a bunch of off-screen time with the twins to make them feel comfortable being handled, fed, put to “sleep” and so on. Maybe it’s not that different from other baby-sitters, caretakers, and family other than parents taking care of them, so maybe not as confusing as I thought at first.
When babies get auditioned, they get taken from the parents and the casting director sees how the baby behaves with strangers. I’ve heard that the idea is that almost all babies look cute, but a baby that doesn’t like strangers will cost money by slowing down the production. They also look for older babies who look tiny.
There used to be (and maybe still is) a scam about “your baby can be on TV and make a lot of money.” The scam was that they sold you expensive pictures for the babies headshot. Reality is that babies don’t use photos because they change so fast anyway.
This reminds me of this anecdote from the making of Breaking Bad:
In a late scene of “Ozymandias”, Walt leaves his family and takes Holly with him. However, when Holly repeatedly says “mama”, he realizes his family has no attachment to him anymore and returns Holly. This wasn’t scripted; Walt was supposed to just stare at Holly before deciding that he had to return her. Luckily the mother of Holly’s actress was standing nearby, prompting the girl to cry for “Mama” repeatedly. Bryan Cranston worked with it, creating a far more powerful scene.
I remember reading about how Monsters Inc was made. The two-year-old whose voice was used for Boo (the human girl) was the daughter of someone on the production staff. And to record her dialog, they just had someone follow her around with a portable recorder.
This made me think of this blooper from Modern Family for two reasons. They had to change the original babies as they grew up because they stopped liking acting. The blooper at 6:15 in the below clip was from the first day of work for the new Lily.
I have a twin and my parents took us to an audition for a commercial when we were babies/toddlers. Note, I do not remember this myself, but my mother said the casting director asked us to “roll a cup and put it up to your ear” to see how we could take direction.
My brother did it without question, but not me. “No” I apparently said. “That’s silly”.
NEXT!
My brother to this day (50+ years later) busts my balls about how I ruined his nascent acting career…
