ALL GROWN UP

Child Star Reveals Why She’ll Never Return to Hollywood

The “Matilda” star left onscreen acting behind in 2000.

Mrs. Doubtfire, Matilda, and Miracle on 34th Street star Mara Wilson has no intention of returning to the big screen.

Wilson, 38, told People that she is happy as a voice actor, particularly for audiobooks.

“I love that you can be anything,” when voicing a book character, she said. “I love that you get to play all the characters.” The unwritten rules of Hollywood are a bridge too far for her to ever return, she revealed. “There aren’t always roles for women of my specific age and my specific looks and demographic and everything.”

The actress hit the height of her fame between the ages of six and nine, during which she starred alongside the biggest actors of the time, including Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin, Peter Fonda, Sally Field, Danny DeVito, and more.

The Mrs. Doubtfire star, who chronicled the pitfalls of growing up in the public eye in her memoir, Where Am I Now?, said that she no longer sees herself in Hollywood as an adult. She left acting behind in 2000, at around age 12, following the release of Thomas and the Magic Railroad.

“I would really have to change myself a lot to be able to fit into Hollywood’s mold,” she told the site, “and I don’t really want to do that.”

When voicing characters for audiobooks, she isn’t beholden to the industry’s onscreen roles. “For me, audiobooks and voiceover are places where you can be anything,” she said. “I’ve played criminals, I’ve played a nun, I’ve played Tinkerbell… To me, it feels like theater because it’s not as literal as being in a movie.”

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Wilson also talked to the site about her excitement for her next project, voicing Animorphs and Everworld author Katherine Applegate’s new book, Wombat Waiting. “All I ever wanted to do was tell stories, write stories, and perform stories,” she said, noting the similarity between her own love of stories and that of her famous character, Matilda. She connected with the story’s young protagonist “right away.”

“I think that it makes sense to me that my job now is storytelling,” she concluded.

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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