8 Seven Freckles and Five Band-Aids
EIGHT
Seven Freckles and Five Band-Aids
I don’t think Mom or I really knew what to expect when I landed the role of Princess Dot in A Bug’s Life, Pixar’s second film after Toy Story.
We thought it would be a different kind of challenge than I was used to, but we certainly didn’t believe it would be a two-year odyssey that would stretch my acting chops in brand-new directions.
When I was cast, I was seven. By the time A Bug’s Life hit the theaters, I was nine.
One thing became clear to me the minute I stepped into Pixar’s recording studio.
I was Princess Dot. I had seven freckles on my nose, and she did, too.
Princess Dot was spunky, and spunky was my trademark.
This was all by design; Dot might have been animated, but I was the person who’d show her all her moves.
First, the animators matched Dot’s vocalization to the way my mouth shifted and changed.
Then the reverse happened: during the parts when Dot’s mouth didn’t quite fit the dialogue, I had to go back and rerecord, molding my words with her mouth’s movements.
It was like playing the mirror game with an animated insect.
Almost immediately I discovered how difficult and tedious voice work could be.
While I was used to filming an entire scene—often over the course of many takes—I recorded Dot’s dialogue line by line, always doing multiple takes of each line.
In tone and pitch, each line had to be consistent.
I did this slowly and methodically over the course of many months.
With Dot, I also had to create a range of expressions using only my voice.
No facial expressions to relay fear or anticipation and no movements to show excitement or boredom.
Just the exaggerated sounds of a child who’d learned how to read the year before.
My voice came alive in ways I didn’t dream it could—even with my most basic lines—but I had to will that to happen.
I wasn’t simply reading a script. I was voice acting, and it was arguably the hardest work I’d ever done.
Standing behind a mic in a cold, quiet recording studio, I was keenly aware that I’d be acting all alone.
In every commercial and on both soap operas, I’d been able to play off my fellow actors to find my character or make a line hit exactly the way it was intended to.
Dot was by herself, searching in the dark as she tried to nail all the right notes.
The directors were nothing but kind to me, but every day I felt like I was trying to show them what I was capable of, proving myself with every enunciation, nuance, exclamation, and stressed syllable.
Words mattered in a way they’d never mattered before.
Words were pretty much all I had in that chilly, silent room.
There’s such beauty in voice work, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Think about it: if you took the dialogue out of a live action film and put it into an animated film, that movie would be unbelievably dull.
Voice actors make a film come alive with only one part of their bodies, and you better hope that body part doesn’t change over the two years it takes you to record the script.
(I was seven, so even though I had a few years before full-blown puberty, I still had to make my pitch higher toward the end of recording.) But I loved Dot and voicing her made me dive right into my creativity and imagination.
As Princess Dot, I could be curious, silly, noisy, and over-the-top.
Don’t get me wrong: voice work was hard, but it was also a much-needed exercise in keeping me on my toes and stretching me to dig for emotion.
When we wrapped up the project, someone in the crew approached me with a present.
“Is this for me?” I asked.
“It sure is,” he said.
I tore apart the wrapping paper and ripped open the box. When I looked down to see whatever was inside, I started to laugh.
“It’s Dot!” I yelled. “There she is!”
The crew had given me the original, handmade clay model of Dot. From that day on, I vowed never to kill a bug again.
Not long after A Bug’s Life premiered, my agent at the time gave Mom a call.
“I’ve got something huge that’s right up Hayden’s alley. She is made for it.”
My agent was both wrong and right.
Jerry Bruckheimer—yes, the Jerry Bruckheimer, the Top Gun super producer—had plans to make a film called Remember the Titans, about a newly integrated Virginia football team that recruits a Black head coach to replace the long-standing white coach.
It was set in 1971, when racism was boiling over in the newly desegregated South.
Based on a true story, Denzel Washington had been cast as the Black coach, Herman Boone, while Will Patton played Bill Yoast, the white coach who was about to lose his job.
Bill’s daughter was a feisty tomboy named Sheryl.
She was the spiritual, comical center of the film, who helped bridge the town and team’s racial tensions through humor, heart, and determination.
While the true drama of the film centered on dismantling systemic racism, Sheryl’s worldview was simple: she believed football was one of society’s great levelers.
She didn’t understand or subscribe to racist beliefs; she just saw a game that she and everyone else rallied around.
As far as she was concerned, let the best team win, whatever their players looked like.
My then-agent set out to get me an audition, and it didn’t go well.
“She’s not right for the film,” the casting director said to her.
“I’ve seen her tapes, and she’s the JonBenet Ramsey type.
” JonBenet’s tragic death had happened about four years before, yet she was still the poster child for child beauty queens.
“She even looks like JonBenet with that curly hair,” she continued.
“Regardless, I’ve seen Hayden act, and she’s no tomboy. ”
They didn’t know me, and my agent wasn’t having it. She called the casting director again and again, determined to get me that audition. Finally, she wore her down. The casting director said yes. Mom booked us a flight to LA, and I began reading the script.
Two days before our trip, I headed to our swim club because school was out and so was the sun.
Mom brought along what she considered her new magic bullet in the war we waged with my blond hair’s dark roots: Sun In.
Mom had even been spraying Jansen’s hair, which—added to the awful mullet she liked him to have—made him look like he belonged in a 1980s boy band.
But not me. Sun In held the power to bleach my roots in no time flat; we just had to be prepared for them to be a slightly different shade than the rest of my hair.
With my hair smelling like lemons, chlorine, and dirty dishwater, I let my head bake in the sun for the recommended half an hour.
Then I dashed off to the water slide. I loved that water slide.
I climbed up the ladder, sat down, and grabbed the slide’s sides to rocket my body twelve feet down to the cold water.
Splash.
I closed my eyes tight, telling myself that with just a little bit of effort I could swim to the bottom.
I certainly had enough air in my lungs. I flipped over, kicked, and kicked again.
My ears started to ache as my chest became tight.
Suddenly, I felt my knuckles scrape against the hard, grainy concrete at the bottom.
The flesh on my fingers ripped open, and I shot back up, wincing in pain.
“Mom, Mom!” I yelled when I got to the surface. “I’m bleeding!”
The first thing I thought of was that they’d probably have to clear the pool because of all the blood. My second thought was about my Remember the Titans audition. How was I supposed to audition for a major Hollywood picture with bloody, shredded knuckles? This was a tragedy. A cataclysmic tragedy.
“What happened?!” Mom asked, jogging toward me.
I started sobbing. “I hit the bottom. It hurts. And I have an audition, a big one. What have I done?”
I climbed out of the pool, and Mom looked me up and down. Clearly, her Mama Bear instincts had kicked in because she wrapped a towel around me and pulled me close. “Look, honey,” she said, “it’s not that bad. Nothing a few Band-Aids can’t fix. And as for the audition, I think I have a plan.”
If this involves superglue, I’m out, I said to myself.
An hour later my bandaged fingers and I walked into Sears with Mom and headed straight for the children’s clothing section. Unlike previous trips, we made a beeline for the boys’ area, where Mom handed me some boys’ jeans and a baggy sweatshirt.
“Here, this will fit,” Mom said, holding the sweatshirt up to me. “They want tomboy, we’ll give them a tomboy who’s not afraid to get a little bloody. You dress the part, you get the part.”
Two days later, I boarded a plane to Los Angeles with my hair in braids, a brand-new haul of boys’ clothes, and five Band-Aids wrapped around my fingers.
We even put a little gauze under them to make my injuries look worse.
That afternoon, I walked into the casting room wearing an outfit that made me feel, at long last, like me.
I was Hayden, the tomboy, and when I opened my mouth, I slipped into the character of Sheryl.
My hands shook less than normal, and my voice barely cracked.
Gazing out toward the director, I had the confidence to channel a feisty football-loving preteen caught between the racism of her town and the fearlessness of a coach who wanted to break that down.
I didn’t freeze up. I turned it on and let it loose.
Mom later claimed that the casting director threw open the door after my audition, walked into the waiting room, and fell to her knees.
“I am so sorry! Get Hayden’s agent on the phone and tell her what a fool I was to question her! Hayden Panettiere has the role!”
I remember none of this, but Mom—who leans into the drama—swears it’s true. I was about to take on the biggest role of my life, and it was about to change everything.