October 13, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Taylor Dooley’s breakout role as Lava Girl launched her into sudden fame, but it also came with pressures few young actors are prepared to handle. By her late teens, she stepped away from Hollywood to live life outside the spotlight. Years later, Dooley returned to reprise the role that defined her childhood in Netflix’s We Can Be Heroes. Here, Taylor opens up about the challenges of child stardom and the joy of reconnecting with her character as an adult.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we bring you the story of Taylor Dooley.
She's an actress most known for her role as Lava
(00:32):
Girl in the Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl,
the two thousand and five film. She has returned to
acting today in the Netflix film We Can Be Heroes.
Here's Taylor with her story.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I was just a little girl with a big dream
when I was probably ten.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, I was about.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Ten when I caught kind of the acting a little bit.
I had been through a few modeling classes and was
modeling and having fun. My dad saw this thing to
be able to take some acting classes and thought, hey,
maybe you might.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Like that as well.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
So I did absolutely fell in love with it, to
my parents' dismay. They didn't They didn't know anything about
the acting world or anything about it, nor wanted me
really to be into it much. But once their daughter
fell in love with it, they kind of just really
pushed me through that. We were living in Arizona at
the time, and my mom was crazy enough and wonderful
(01:34):
enough to start driving me back and forth to auditions
for commercials and such. So we were driving like eight
hours a day to come to California to go on
an audition just to.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Drive back home, which was absolutely insane.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And then my agency suggested that I should go on
theatrical auditions for TV shows movies, so they kind of
switched me over to there, and that's when one of
my very first auditions was the Adventures of Shark bwayn Lovagirl.
I ended up booking that, which was such a special,
special thing and that became kind of the catapulting thing
(02:09):
that took my career over a little bit, which.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Is absolutely amazing and I feel super super blessed for.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But growing up in the business is kind of very crazy,
and I think that people don't touch on it as much.
We kind of hear about it a little bit in
the news, and with people who grow up in the business,
you kind of the media I think shies away a
little bit from that. Growing up in and around with
everybody around the same age as I was hanging out
(02:35):
with everyone from Nickelodeon and Disney and all those shows
and all those fun things. After Shark Bwayne Lovagirl came out,
it was so much fun, and I had like such
an interesting childhood getting able to meet all these fun people.
But my parents the entire time had this thought that
I just was a hard childhood. They they thought that
I should be able to be a kid and not
be working. And so that's kind of when people find
(02:58):
me nowadays on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Everyone's like, where did you go? After Shark Boy and
Lawber Girl.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I kind of vanished a little bit from the entertainment industry,
and it was because my parents had the want to
take me out and make me live a normal, regular life.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
When you're a child actor, you have usually, I.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Mean even as an adult, you have a manager and
an agent usually, and when you're a kid, they don't.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Really talk to you. They talk to your parents.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
So I didn't really understand or know much of the
business aspect of anything. It just was my parents handling everything,
so they behind the scenes knew of a lot of
stuff that I didn't know that was going on, which
is why I had in my brain more license to
be angry at them when they did pull me out
because I didn't know all the business and stuff that
came from it. But my parents just felt like it
(03:51):
just didn't feel like you could have an authentic childhood
if you were busy being a little adult at ten, eleven, twelve,
even you know, even as a teenager.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Because when you're a kid, you just usually have to
worry about kid things. But when you're in the business,
you start worrying about.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Things like, you know, how many auditions did you have
before you got a call back? Or how many times
you you know you've booked something. All your friends are
working and you're not working. But you're only fourteen. Most
people aren't working at your age, so there's so many
rejections that happened before you get one. Yes that as
a kid, it's really hard to swallow that because you're
(04:33):
not usually dealing with that amount of rejection as you know,
as an adult, you go on work interviews and you
are prepared for that.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Mentally and emotionally, but as a kid, you don't.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
You can't separate the why didn't I get the You're
kind of you're selling yourself as an actor a little bit,
you know, and it hurts when you don't get things
consistently for a while. I also, twofold, had something else
going on where I. I kind of grew really early
and in the business that they want older kids that
(05:05):
look younger, not younger kids that look older, and so
I had a lot of people want to book me
for auditions right after Shark Point and Lave Girl, and
then I got so old.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Looking that they would were They were like, well, she
doesn't look fourteen, and I was fourteen at the time.
I'm like, but I am fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
So my parents were just looking around and just seeing
how all this rejection was like devastating my confidence.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
In who I was.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And I was such a my parents always described me
to myself. They'll tell me that I was like a
really self confident, super outgoing that they would say, and
I was like a little spark plug. And a few
years in the business and it was really I was
getting depressed and I was getting sad because when you
love something that that much, I couldn't understand why I
(05:52):
wasn't working when some of my friends were, or things
weren't happening for me, and it just was really devastating
to who I was.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So my parents did like that and they were really worried.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
About what that would look like and translate to into
adulthood or young adulthood, just having that self doubt, and
so they wanted to put me in high school to
just take a break from it and not worry about
it and to be a normal kid so that I
could come back as an adult and be able to
handle the rejection and everything that comes with being an actor.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
At the time, I didn't agree with them, and I
think I my mom put me in.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
High school, and I remember crying in the front office,
telling her that she did not love me because she
was making me stop acting and go to school like
a normal teenager. And I remember just being such a
wreck in the front office of this high school, like.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
If you leave me here, I promise you you just
hate me. You must hate me. I was so upset
with her.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you're listening to Taylor Dually tell the story of
her experience in Hollywood as a child. By the way,
everything she's saying applies to grown ups too. It's a tough,
tough life. It is a life filled with rejection. And
by the way, her parents, luckily for her, saw the
change in her life, the depression from a spark plug
to a depressed teenager, and so the family interceded, intervened
(07:14):
and protected their daughter. When we come back more with
Taylor Dooley her story here on Our American Stories, plea
habibe here, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe
to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify,
or wherever you get our podcasts, and a story you
(07:36):
missed or want to hear again can be found there
daily Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast
on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get
your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories and the story
of Taylor Dooley. She played Lava Girl in the Adventures
of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, but her parents decided
that the acting business was not a good environment for
a fourteen year old girl, so they took her out
and put her in regular high school. Taylor was upset
at first, but now more than fifteen years later, she
(08:31):
is a different perspective. Back to Taylor.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
And hindsight, it ended up being the best thing to
ever happened to me, because I got to kind of
live not such as sheltered life and do some of
my other life goals before I was able to get
back into acting now. So I'm thankful that they did
that because I definitely learned a lot about myself and
(09:01):
I had a few years. I think that after leaving
the industry that I kind of got really upset and
mad at God for a while because I would say
to him, why did you put something so deep.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
On my heart?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Like why do I love this so much? But yet
I can't do it? Like my friends are working and
I'm not.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Why is that?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And I realized throughout the years that it was just
because I had already always prayed and wanted an adult
career and to be an adult actor, because I never
really wanted to do the kid fluff stuff. I was
always so much older than my age acting. I was
like thirteen, and I used to tell everyone I wanted
to be like Natalie Portman. I was always very I
(09:43):
just wanted a very serious adult career, which doesn't happen
when you're a kid usually. So it kind of was,
I think God's way of answering my prayer in a
roundabout way.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
You just never know.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
When you're in it, and it feels emotional when you're
in it. And now that I'm on the other side
of it, I'm thankful that I didn't work through those
years and that my parents pulled me out and I
was able to take that break because it allowed me to,
As I said, it allowed me to kind of grow
as my own person and heal from some of the
wounds that I feel like as a kid, child actor
I got from the rejection and all that stuff, and
(10:15):
to be able to just kind of have a basis
of who I am. And it also helped shepherd kind of.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
More of a faith.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
I've always my family has always been I kind of
grew up. My parents found God when I was young ish.
I think I was like five or six when we
started going to church. My parents started learning a little
bit more about God. I am from originally from Michigan,
my whole family. My parents had never left Michigan when
until we moved for my brother's health and my brother
(10:42):
was a twin born insanely prematurely. He was born three
and a half months early, but we ended up losing
my one of the twins, one of my brothers. But
my brother was a miracle baby. My other brother who
did make it. His name's Andrew. He made it, and
his lungs were severely underdeveloped, and the cold from Michigan
was really hard on his lungs. So we needed to
(11:05):
move someplace warm, so my parents found Arizona, which was
insanely warm, so it.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Worked out perfectly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
And my brother, who could barely walk because his lungs
were so horrible.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I think we moved when he was four and I.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Was six, And by the time we moved to Arizona,
we were there like two weeks and he was already
being able to swim and dive in the pool. His
lungs had just developed so much better in the warmth,
which was such a blessing in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
But that's my brother.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Is kind of how my parents found God because with
the tragedy of the twins and not knowing my brother
was in the nicu for over one hundred days because
when he was born, he was born just over a pound.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
He was just the tiniest little thing.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
They kind of threw that experience and losing my other
brother and trying to worry about whether my brother Andrew
was going to live, they found God and found.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Their faith and kind of kept it through all these years.
They really were what.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Showed me what faith kind of looked like, but was
kind of crazy, is that we were kind of all
learning to do it together.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
My parents were.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
They called themselves baby Christians at the time because they
didn't really know anything about it, so they just we
all kind of were learning together as a family, which
I think made it.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
So much closer for all of us.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We were always very close, so I kind of was
always grown up knowing about that. But I kind of
really took my faith as my own as I was
able to step out of the business and kind of
be a teenager away from everything, and when you're.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Kind of that age of angsty wanting to know what
this world is about.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
It was nice to be able to be away from
the industry and being away from that to be able
to kind of cultivate my own faith, in my own
identity as to who I am, because when you're in
the business at such a young age, it's like such
a sheltered people kind of tell you who you are
because it's like anymoron, you have to grow up so
quickly and be a little adult at like eleven years old,
(13:06):
but then you they also.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Tell you who you are.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
It's like, as a kid, it's really hard to muddle
through what's what, and so it was nice to be
able to take a step back. And then when I
went to high school, I didn't. I tried theater for
a little bit and I loved it, but it just
didn't feel like there was like always this cattiness because
I was an actress that the end, because I used
(13:31):
to work that, I felt like some of the people
in theater were so catty with me about that.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
And I didn't. I didn't want to deal with all
of that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So I was like, eh, I'll quit that and not
do that because I just didn't have the time or
want to do that. So I instead found my own
group of friends, which I still have to this day
from high school and was able to In the very beginning,
they were I got made fun of because I was
a lot of a girl, and it was usually in
an endearing way.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
People would call me Lava girl. It was like they
were ribbing me.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
But you know, in high school everyone likes to make
fun of everybody. And at the same time, Taylor Lautner,
who played Shark Boy, was going to high school with me,
so people would make fun of us because Shark boyn
Lava Girl went to the same high school. Knew that
people were just ribbing us when they all loved the movie,
So it just rolled right off my back and I
was able to make friends that, like I said, I
still have this day. And then all that space and
(14:25):
time from the acting world allowed me to be able
to make friends and people with people who kind of
had no idea who I was in a certain way
because sometimes some of the people when they were older
didn't necessarily watch Shark Boyne law a Girl. Actually, when
I met my husband, funny enough, people used to call
me Lava Girl, and he had no idea. Because my
(14:45):
husband's ten years older than I am, he had no
idea what a lava girl was. So he thought it
was some really weird nickname from high school.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And finally one day he was like, why do people
call you that?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And I had to break I was like, I'm an actor,
I was a cat child actor, and I was this
character Lava Girl. He had absolutely no idea for like
the first I think like five months that I knew him,
which was nice. It was nice to just be, you know,
a normal human being, went to college, graduated college, met
(15:17):
my husband, which all of which would have never happened,
and had two beautiful, amazing, wonderful kids, and was able
to kind of somewhat live a normal life until Robert
Rodriguez called me in twenty nineteen because we shot in
the fall of twenty nineteen for the new movie weekn
Be Heroes. I had just had my daughter and she
(15:37):
was two or three months old when I got a
phone call from Robert telling me that he was wanting
to bring back Shark Boy and Lava Girl for this
new film and that we'd have a daughter and all
this really fun, exciting stuff about this new movie and
was asking if I'd be willing to come back and
play Lava Girl again after all these years, and it
had been fifteen years since Lava Girl first appeared in
(15:59):
my life, so I was. I was totally gung home
for it. I was able to go right back to
work A few months later. I got my button to
shape after being pregnant, so I had a few months
to get back in shape and was in the fall
filming Weekend Be Heroes with Robert getting to be Lava
Girl again with my crazy pink Care, and they were
so sweet to let my entire family come to Austin,
(16:19):
Texas to film, so I had my kids with me,
and it was just such a wonderful kind of reintroduction
back into the business and to me, just such a
beautiful way that I felt like God was telling me
that after all these years, I did the right thing
by stepping away with my parents actually who made me
did the right thing by making me step away, because
I was able to come back into the business from
(16:40):
a new perspective as a mother, as an adult, as
a wife, as an adult woman, to be able to
make more decisions and know who I am now after
all of these years. It was just such a beautiful thing.
And I told Robert this, but I have like such
special feelings for Lava Girl because she kind she started
my career twice.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Now. She is light. That's her character.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
That's like her superpower is that she's not just that
she's lava. If you've seen the first movie, it's all
about the fact that she discovers that she is light.
And it's just to me such a beautiful kind of
symbolism in everything. To be able to come back as
Lava Girl all these years later, Who's just light? And
I just kind of feel like, that's what I'd love
to be in this world if I can, just would
(17:25):
like to spread.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Love and light.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
And wouldn't we all? And a special thanks to Robbie
and to Faith producing and putting together that beautiful piece.
Go to Netflix. We Can Be Heroes is the movie
and you get to see Lava Girl fifteen years later.
The story of Lava Girl, the story of Taylor Cooley.
Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we bring you the story of Taylor Dooley.
She's an actress most known for her role as Lava
(00:32):
Girl in the Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl,
the two thousand and five film. She has returned to
acting today in the Netflix film We Can Be Heroes.
Here's Taylor with her story.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I was just a little girl with a big dream
when I was probably ten.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, I was about.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Ten when I caught kind of the acting a little bit.
I had been through a few modeling classes and was
modeling and having fun. My dad saw this thing to
be able to take some acting classes and thought, hey,
maybe you might.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Like that as well.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
So I did absolutely fell in love with it, to
my parents' dismay. They didn't They didn't know anything about
the acting world or anything about it, nor wanted me
really to be into it much. But once their daughter
fell in love with it, they kind of just really
pushed me through that. We were living in Arizona at
the time, and my mom was crazy enough and wonderful
(01:34):
enough to start driving me back and forth to auditions
for commercials and such. So we were driving like eight
hours a day to come to California to go on
an audition just to.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Drive back home, which was absolutely insane.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And then my agency suggested that I should go on
theatrical auditions for TV shows movies, so they kind of
switched me over to there, and that's when one of
my very first auditions was the Adventures of Shark bwayn Lovagirl.
I ended up booking that, which was such a special,
special thing and that became kind of the catapulting thing
(02:09):
that took my career over a little bit, which.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Is absolutely amazing and I feel super super blessed for.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But growing up in the business is kind of very crazy,
and I think that people don't touch on it as much.
We kind of hear about it a little bit in
the news, and with people who grow up in the business,
you kind of the media I think shies away a
little bit from that. Growing up in and around with
everybody around the same age as I was hanging out
(02:35):
with everyone from Nickelodeon and Disney and all those shows
and all those fun things. After Shark Bwayne Lovagirl came out,
it was so much fun, and I had like such
an interesting childhood getting able to meet all these fun people.
But my parents the entire time had this thought that
I just was a hard childhood. They they thought that
I should be able to be a kid and not
be working. And so that's kind of when people find
(02:58):
me nowadays on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Everyone's like, where did you go? After Shark Boy and
Lawber Girl.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I kind of vanished a little bit from the entertainment industry,
and it was because my parents had the want to
take me out and make me live a normal, regular life.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
When you're a child actor, you have usually, I.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Mean even as an adult, you have a manager and
an agent usually, and when you're a kid, they don't.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Really talk to you. They talk to your parents.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
So I didn't really understand or know much of the
business aspect of anything. It just was my parents handling everything,
so they behind the scenes knew of a lot of
stuff that I didn't know that was going on, which
is why I had in my brain more license to
be angry at them when they did pull me out
because I didn't know all the business and stuff that
came from it. But my parents just felt like it
(03:51):
just didn't feel like you could have an authentic childhood
if you were busy being a little adult at ten, eleven, twelve,
even you know, even as a teenager.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Because when you're a kid, you just usually have to
worry about kid things. But when you're in the business,
you start worrying about.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Things like, you know, how many auditions did you have
before you got a call back? Or how many times
you you know you've booked something. All your friends are
working and you're not working. But you're only fourteen. Most
people aren't working at your age, so there's so many
rejections that happened before you get one. Yes that as
a kid, it's really hard to swallow that because you're
(04:33):
not usually dealing with that amount of rejection as you know,
as an adult, you go on work interviews and you
are prepared for that.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Mentally and emotionally, but as a kid, you don't.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
You can't separate the why didn't I get the You're
kind of you're selling yourself as an actor a little bit,
you know, and it hurts when you don't get things
consistently for a while. I also, twofold, had something else
going on where I. I kind of grew really early
and in the business that they want older kids that
(05:05):
look younger, not younger kids that look older, and so
I had a lot of people want to book me
for auditions right after Shark Point and Lave Girl, and
then I got so old.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Looking that they would were They were like, well, she
doesn't look fourteen, and I was fourteen at the time.
I'm like, but I am fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
So my parents were just looking around and just seeing
how all this rejection was like devastating my confidence.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
In who I was.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And I was such a my parents always described me
to myself. They'll tell me that I was like a
really self confident, super outgoing that they would say, and
I was like a little spark plug. And a few
years in the business and it was really I was
getting depressed and I was getting sad because when you
love something that that much, I couldn't understand why I
(05:52):
wasn't working when some of my friends were, or things
weren't happening for me, and it just was really devastating
to who I was.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So my parents did like that and they were really worried.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
About what that would look like and translate to into
adulthood or young adulthood, just having that self doubt, and
so they wanted to put me in high school to
just take a break from it and not worry about
it and to be a normal kid so that I
could come back as an adult and be able to
handle the rejection and everything that comes with being an actor.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
At the time, I didn't agree with them, and I
think I my mom put me in.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
High school, and I remember crying in the front office,
telling her that she did not love me because she
was making me stop acting and go to school like
a normal teenager. And I remember just being such a
wreck in the front office of this high school, like.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
If you leave me here, I promise you you just
hate me. You must hate me. I was so upset
with her.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you're listening to Taylor Dually tell the story of
her experience in Hollywood as a child. By the way,
everything she's saying applies to grown ups too. It's a tough,
tough life. It is a life filled with rejection. And
by the way, her parents, luckily for her, saw the
change in her life, the depression from a spark plug
to a depressed teenager, and so the family interceded, intervened
(07:14):
and protected their daughter. When we come back more with
Taylor Dooley her story here on Our American Stories, plea
habibe here, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe
to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify,
or wherever you get our podcasts, and a story you
(07:36):
missed or want to hear again can be found there
daily Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast
on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get
your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories and the story
of Taylor Dooley. She played Lava Girl in the Adventures
of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, but her parents decided
that the acting business was not a good environment for
a fourteen year old girl, so they took her out
and put her in regular high school. Taylor was upset
at first, but now more than fifteen years later, she
(08:31):
is a different perspective. Back to Taylor.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
And hindsight, it ended up being the best thing to
ever happened to me, because I got to kind of
live not such as sheltered life and do some of
my other life goals before I was able to get
back into acting now. So I'm thankful that they did
that because I definitely learned a lot about myself and
(09:01):
I had a few years. I think that after leaving
the industry that I kind of got really upset and
mad at God for a while because I would say
to him, why did you put something so deep.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
On my heart?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Like why do I love this so much? But yet
I can't do it? Like my friends are working and
I'm not.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Why is that?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And I realized throughout the years that it was just
because I had already always prayed and wanted an adult
career and to be an adult actor, because I never
really wanted to do the kid fluff stuff. I was
always so much older than my age acting. I was
like thirteen, and I used to tell everyone I wanted
to be like Natalie Portman. I was always very I
(09:43):
just wanted a very serious adult career, which doesn't happen
when you're a kid usually. So it kind of was,
I think God's way of answering my prayer in a
roundabout way.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
You just never know.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
When you're in it, and it feels emotional when you're
in it. And now that I'm on the other side
of it, I'm thankful that I didn't work through those
years and that my parents pulled me out and I
was able to take that break because it allowed me to,
As I said, it allowed me to kind of grow
as my own person and heal from some of the
wounds that I feel like as a kid, child actor
I got from the rejection and all that stuff, and
(10:15):
to be able to just kind of have a basis
of who I am. And it also helped shepherd kind of.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
More of a faith.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
I've always my family has always been I kind of
grew up. My parents found God when I was young ish.
I think I was like five or six when we
started going to church. My parents started learning a little
bit more about God. I am from originally from Michigan,
my whole family. My parents had never left Michigan when
until we moved for my brother's health and my brother
(10:42):
was a twin born insanely prematurely. He was born three
and a half months early, but we ended up losing
my one of the twins, one of my brothers. But
my brother was a miracle baby. My other brother who
did make it. His name's Andrew. He made it, and
his lungs were severely underdeveloped, and the cold from Michigan
was really hard on his lungs. So we needed to
(11:05):
move someplace warm, so my parents found Arizona, which was
insanely warm, so it.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Worked out perfectly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
And my brother, who could barely walk because his lungs
were so horrible.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I think we moved when he was four and I.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Was six, And by the time we moved to Arizona,
we were there like two weeks and he was already
being able to swim and dive in the pool. His
lungs had just developed so much better in the warmth,
which was such a blessing in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
But that's my brother.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Is kind of how my parents found God because with
the tragedy of the twins and not knowing my brother
was in the nicu for over one hundred days because
when he was born, he was born just over a pound.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
He was just the tiniest little thing.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
They kind of threw that experience and losing my other
brother and trying to worry about whether my brother Andrew
was going to live, they found God and found.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Their faith and kind of kept it through all these years.
They really were what.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Showed me what faith kind of looked like, but was
kind of crazy, is that we were kind of all
learning to do it together.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
My parents were.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
They called themselves baby Christians at the time because they
didn't really know anything about it, so they just we
all kind of were learning together as a family, which
I think made it.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
So much closer for all of us.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We were always very close, so I kind of was
always grown up knowing about that. But I kind of
really took my faith as my own as I was
able to step out of the business and kind of
be a teenager away from everything, and when you're.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Kind of that age of angsty wanting to know what
this world is about.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
It was nice to be able to be away from
the industry and being away from that to be able
to kind of cultivate my own faith, in my own
identity as to who I am, because when you're in
the business at such a young age, it's like such
a sheltered people kind of tell you who you are
because it's like anymoron, you have to grow up so
quickly and be a little adult at like eleven years old,
(13:06):
but then you they also.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Tell you who you are.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
It's like, as a kid, it's really hard to muddle
through what's what, and so it was nice to be
able to take a step back. And then when I
went to high school, I didn't. I tried theater for
a little bit and I loved it, but it just
didn't feel like there was like always this cattiness because
I was an actress that the end, because I used
(13:31):
to work that, I felt like some of the people
in theater were so catty with me about that.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
And I didn't. I didn't want to deal with all
of that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So I was like, eh, I'll quit that and not
do that because I just didn't have the time or
want to do that. So I instead found my own
group of friends, which I still have to this day
from high school and was able to In the very beginning,
they were I got made fun of because I was
a lot of a girl, and it was usually in
an endearing way.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
People would call me Lava girl. It was like they
were ribbing me.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
But you know, in high school everyone likes to make
fun of everybody. And at the same time, Taylor Lautner,
who played Shark Boy, was going to high school with me,
so people would make fun of us because Shark boyn
Lava Girl went to the same high school. Knew that
people were just ribbing us when they all loved the movie,
So it just rolled right off my back and I
was able to make friends that, like I said, I
still have this day. And then all that space and
(14:25):
time from the acting world allowed me to be able
to make friends and people with people who kind of
had no idea who I was in a certain way
because sometimes some of the people when they were older
didn't necessarily watch Shark Boyne law a Girl. Actually, when
I met my husband, funny enough, people used to call
me Lava Girl, and he had no idea. Because my
(14:45):
husband's ten years older than I am, he had no
idea what a lava girl was. So he thought it
was some really weird nickname from high school.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And finally one day he was like, why do people
call you that?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And I had to break I was like, I'm an actor,
I was a cat child actor, and I was this
character Lava Girl. He had absolutely no idea for like
the first I think like five months that I knew him,
which was nice. It was nice to just be, you know,
a normal human being, went to college, graduated college, met
(15:17):
my husband, which all of which would have never happened,
and had two beautiful, amazing, wonderful kids, and was able
to kind of somewhat live a normal life until Robert
Rodriguez called me in twenty nineteen because we shot in
the fall of twenty nineteen for the new movie weekn
Be Heroes. I had just had my daughter and she
(15:37):
was two or three months old when I got a
phone call from Robert telling me that he was wanting
to bring back Shark Boy and Lava Girl for this
new film and that we'd have a daughter and all
this really fun, exciting stuff about this new movie and
was asking if I'd be willing to come back and
play Lava Girl again after all these years, and it
had been fifteen years since Lava Girl first appeared in
(15:59):
my life, so I was. I was totally gung home
for it. I was able to go right back to
work A few months later. I got my button to
shape after being pregnant, so I had a few months
to get back in shape and was in the fall
filming Weekend Be Heroes with Robert getting to be Lava
Girl again with my crazy pink Care, and they were
so sweet to let my entire family come to Austin,
(16:19):
Texas to film, so I had my kids with me,
and it was just such a wonderful kind of reintroduction
back into the business and to me, just such a
beautiful way that I felt like God was telling me
that after all these years, I did the right thing
by stepping away with my parents actually who made me
did the right thing by making me step away, because
I was able to come back into the business from
(16:40):
a new perspective as a mother, as an adult, as
a wife, as an adult woman, to be able to
make more decisions and know who I am now after
all of these years. It was just such a beautiful thing.
And I told Robert this, but I have like such
special feelings for Lava Girl because she kind she started
my career twice.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Now. She is light. That's her character.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
That's like her superpower is that she's not just that
she's lava. If you've seen the first movie, it's all
about the fact that she discovers that she is light.
And it's just to me such a beautiful kind of
symbolism in everything. To be able to come back as
Lava Girl all these years later, Who's just light? And
I just kind of feel like, that's what I'd love
to be in this world if I can, just would
(17:25):
like to spread.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Love and light.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
And wouldn't we all? And a special thanks to Robbie
and to Faith producing and putting together that beautiful piece.
Go to Netflix. We Can Be Heroes is the movie
and you get to see Lava Girl fifteen years later.
The story of Lava Girl, the story of Taylor Cooley.
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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