My Sister's Keeper' star may be a kid, but she's a total pro
By RICK BENTLEY
It's easy to think of 13-year-old Abigail Breslin as being a seasoned acting veteran.
After all, "My Sister's Keeper" director Nick Cassavetes calls her a "70-year-old woman in a 13-year-old's body."
But there are plenty of signs the Oscar-nominated actress is just a typical teen, too.
She can't wait for the next "Twilight" film to come out. She didn't get to finish reading the script for her new movie "My Sister's Keeper" when it first arrived because it was her bedtime. And whenever co-star Cameron Diaz cooked for the cast, all Breslin wanted was chili-cheese fries.
"I clean my room, make my bed. I have to dump the garbage twice a day. Feed the dogs. Feed the cats. Feed the turtle. Feed myself," Abigail says while talking to the press about "My Sister's Keeper." She pauses to think about what she has just said. Then she adds, "I do a lot of feeding. I occasionally make cookies, which feeds everybody."
Kim Breslin, Abigail's mom and manager, says its important for Abigail to do the normal things children her age do so that she will know how to play a kid.
After hearing her mom's comment, Abigail sarcastically jokes: "So I only do kid stuff for research. I wouldn't want to do all the fun stuff. I just have to."
Even Diaz was surprised by how Breslin can be very mature and still be a kid.
"What was amazing about working with Abby was that I realized one day on set you see her and she is this little girl. But she's got so much power in her I went up to her mother and said, 'She is a warrior,'" Diaz says. "She can take all of these adult, complex situation and ideas and put behind it more strength than you see with most people."
Diaz was surprised during one scene when Abigail was crying even though she wasn't on camera. Diaz told the young actress the tears weren't necessary. Breslin's response was, "It's OK. I got it."
In the case of "My Sister's Keeper" Breslin dealt with some heavy emotional moments. Her character goes to court to get her parents to stop using her as a medical supply depot for her sick sister. If she wins the case, her sister will die.
A few years ago Abigail had to deal with the death of her grandfather after his fight with cancer.
"I think what was hardest with my grandpa was that we all knew what was going to happen. That is something that happens in this movie. Everyone in the family - even if they don't want to admit it - knows what is going to happen. You take from what you do know. My character loves her sister so much she is willing to go to any lengths to help her. That was what I liked about the movie," Breslin says.
Though movies such as "Nim's Island," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Definitely, Maybe" have made her a star, the average life of a kid keeps popping up. Breslin has to spend time with an on-set tutor when she is working on a movie. The rest of the time she is home schooled.
Balancing work and school will continue. Breslin has a half-dozen movies in various stages of production. Per her desire to do different types of roles, Abigail's next film is the animated "Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey" and then she's in the dark comedy "Zombieland."
"I like to play characters I have never played before," Breslin says. "For me, if I was to play the same character over and over, it would get old."
My Sister's Keeper' star may be a kid, but she's a total pro - Kansas City Star
My Sister's Keeper's Abigail Breslin hangs tough
By Ian Caddell
LOS ANGELES—
Thirteen-year-old Abigail Breslin is not yet a household name despite having accomplished something that several more famous child stars of recent vintage have been unable to achieve. She has won an Oscar nomination, an honour that evaded high-profile child actors like Dakota Fanning, Macaulay Culkin, and Lindsay Lohan. Breslin scored her nomination for 2006's Little Miss Sunshine.
Three years later, she has appeared in seven movies and has three live-action films and two animated movies scheduled to be released in the near future. The first of these is My Sister's Keeper, which opens June 26. In it, she plays Anna Fitzgerald, an 11-year-old who was conceived to help her older sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) survive leukemia. Anna rebels against the use of her blood and body parts without her permission and goes to court seeking emancipation from her parents (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric).
In an L.A. hotel room, Diaz tells reporters that Breslin's success as a child actor is owed to the fact that she is “a warrior”. Later in the day, Breslin tells the Straight that she is unsure of how to react to what she assumes is a compliment. “I don't view myself as being that tough,” she says. “I think of myself as being more of the observer. I guess I try to be a warrior, but I have always felt that people laughed at me when I have tried to be tough. They say, ‘You can't talk to me like that.' But I think my whole family is pretty strong, and I have learned to be that way.”
Watch the trailer for My Sister's Keeper. Whether or not Breslin can continue to be the first choice of directors casting for young girls will depend on the image she projects to child audiences. Until recently, she and her mother, Kim, who reads the scripts first, have been fairly conservative in choosing projects, a list that literally includes an all-American girl in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. She says she likes to take risks, and that is evident in the choice of Vengeance: A Love Story as one of her upcoming films. In it, she plays a girl who has been gang-raped.
“I like characters that are strong and take care of themselves,” she says. “I think that is really important, but I also want to have them be different from others that I have played. I think that it is fun to be a different person all the time. That doesn't mean I hate myself. But some of the stuff that Anna goes through in this movie I don't know if I could do. I don't know if I could be that brave to go to court. But I always try to play people who are strong and brave, and, hopefully, I have learned how to be strong on my own through those characters. I want to try things that I have never done and do new stuff because it's more fun. The one thing that is always similar is that they are people I would want to know.”
There is a career risk that comes with a child star taking on a role that fans are not interested in seeing him or her play. Fanning was 13 when she played a rape victim in Hounddog, and interest was so limited that the film was only released in a few markets. Kim Breslin says that the roles that she and her daughter are most interested in pursuing are those that allow her to grow both as an actor and a person. “I know what Abby likes, and when she talks to me about what she wants to do, she makes it clear she does not like to be a victim. That is not to say that she can't be in a position where someone is hurting her, but in the end she likes her character to be intact and not to have been destroyed by something. While I don't know why she makes that choice, I support it because that is a great way to portray a young girl.”
Breslin probably won't give up her life to an acting career. Instead, it appears she will be taking the route previously chosen by her Nim's Island costar Jodie Foster, who took time off from her career as a child star to pursue a college education. Breslin says that although she hopes to continue acting during summer vacation, she has already chosen the university she will attend, her roommate, and even the location of their apartment.
“When I turn 18, I am going to college. Me and my cousin Jan have already picked out what street we will live on and the colour scheme for our apartment, and she is going to Columbia and I am going to NYU. It's all set.”
My Sister's Keeper's Abigail Breslin hangs tough | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com