Becca Brown, a former child actor who is perhaps best known for playing the badarse bassist in School Of Rock alongside Jack Black and the cast of ridiculously talented kids, has written a revealing essay into how the film and the Hollywood machine essentially ruined her childhood.
A child actor succumbing to the pressures of fame, show business and/or overbearing parents is a classic Hollywood tale as old as time, but reading first-hand accounts of that sort of experience will never cease to be gutwrenching.
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In a brutally honest essay titled ‘Confessions Of An Obsolete Child Actor,’ Becca Brown reflects on the time she was cast alongside Jack Black in School Of Rock when she was 10 and rollercoaster of negatives and positives that came with being a child actor.
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While Becca is “grateful” for School Of Rock, the close bonds she formed with her castmates (“We all fell in love with each other pretty much instantly,” she writes), all the musicians she inspired, and how Katie unexpectedly became many people’s first queer crush, she does admit to having “some very complicated feelings” about the entire experience.
Prior to School Of Rock, Becca writes how she was bullied by other kids for being the “weird classical music girl” and how her parents “were the textbook definition of toxic stage parents” who would spoil and give her “all the validation and attention in the world,” all while she was pushed towards becoming the family’s musical “prodigy” against her will.
After School Of Rock, Becca recounts how she was subsequently bullied for being in the movie which forced her to change schools several times, and her parents pressured her into auditioning for more movie roles. The toxicity of her post-School Of Rock life went beyond her tumultuous high school and family life as she was forced to deal with disgusting men sexualising her.
“On message boards (what a time 2003 was), grown men would sexualize me, commenting, ‘The bassist is going to grow up to be hot’ and ‘Can’t wait ’til she’s 18.’ My mom would read the comments online for hours on end, relaying all of the negative ones to me.
“When I was in sixth grade, a strange man in a trench coat came to my school and tried to take photos of me, and absolutely nothing was done about it. For the first time, I felt unsafe existing. When my parents brought this to my school’s administration, the principal said, “I guess that’s the price of fame.'”
This all resulted in Becca using “drugs, alcohol, sex, food, and self-harm” as way to escape “all of this pain.” While she has since become sober and is finding happiness doing comedy, acting, and music on her own terms, Becca writes how it is “f**king hard” to maintain her sobriety but she manages to do it in her own way.
“And still, no credit or feat is as cool as the fact that I have been in recovery from alcoholism and addiction for two years (and frankly, it’s f**king hard to maintain sobriety, but sometimes the idea of a TMZ headline reading ‘That one girl from School of Rock dead from overdose at 27’ is all it takes to keep me from a relapse).”
But despite having such complicated feelings about School Of Rock, Becca writes how she is still grateful for the experience, how she formed relationships with the cast, how she understands how her parents have unresolved trauma of their own that was projected onto her, and how she is recovering “from that pain every day.”
Becca Brown’s essay on how School Of Rock essentially ruined her childhood is a very intense yet eye-opening account into the pratfalls of being a childhood actor. It may be a bit much for some, but it is definitely worth a read, which you can do right here.
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