Not a stage mom! Minnie Driver told Us Weekly at the Hollywood junket for her new movie, Beyond the Lights, on Tuesday, Oct. 21, that she is not an advocate of child actors in the industry.
"I'm not really for the whole kids in show business thing," the mother of one, 44, said. The actress, who plays a nasty Hollywood momager in the film, told reporters that even moreso, she's felt uncomfortable with the parents of these young kids in the spotlight.
"It's really difficult even when you meet lovely parents of children who are in show business," admitted Driver, who also works closely with a child actor on the set of her NBC sitcom About a Boy. "There is still the fact that they're not having a childhood. They are out of their element, and in the element of an adult world which is not always appropriate. It seems to me there is always a certain level of desperation that makes a person put a child in that position."
Driver, a mom to her 6-year-old son Henry, tried to draw the character profile of a stage parent. "That's an interesting place to start for a character: Someone who's desperate and conflicted," she said. "And if that's overshadowing everything else, it doesn't matter how nice or kind or empathetic they may be elsewhere. The overriding thing is quite fierce."
The Good Will Hunting star said it really was a clash ("an interesting seesaw") between wills. "You love them, of course you love them, but you want this other thing," she reasoned. "It's the realm of the hungry ghosts. That's really interesting for an actor."
Meanwhile, the Oscar-nominated actress claimed that her character is not a villain. "You can't be a villain. Villains aren't interesting unless there is the un-villainous part of them," she explained. "You really understand why she does what she does… You really get it. It's not from a malicious point of view. She's not a sociopath, she's not evil. She just desperately did not want to go back to that poverty and she wanted something better for her kid."
