February 16, 2023 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, actress Taylor Dooley shares the story of when she played the role of Lavagirl at the age of 13. More than 15 years later, she has returned to acting to play the same role in the Netflix Film We Can Be Heroes. Take a listen to hear Taylor tell her story.
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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. I was just a little
girl with a big dream when I was probably ten,
(00:56):
I want to yeah, I was about 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 like that as well. So I did absolutely fell
in love with it, to my parents' dismay. They didn't
(01:19):
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 enough to start driving me back
and forth to auditions for commercials and such. So we
(01:40):
were driving like eight hours a day to come to
California to go on an audition, just to drive back home,
which was absolutely insane. 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 Bay and Lava Girl. I ended up
(02:01):
booking that, which was such a special, special thing and
that became kind of the catapulting thing that took my
career over a little bit, which is absolutely amazing and
I feel super super blessed for the Growing up in
the business is kind of very crazy, and I think
that people don't touch on it as much. We kind
(02:22):
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 with
everyone from Nickelodeon and Disney and all those shows and
all those fun things. After Shark Bayne Lama Girl came out,
it was so much fun, and I had like such
(02:43):
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 thought that I
should be able to be a kid and not be working.
And so that's kind of when people find me nowadays
on Instagram. Everyone's like, where did you go? After Shark
Boy and law Er Girl. I kind of vanished a
(03:05):
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. When you're a
child actor, you have usually, I mean even as an
adult you have any a manager and an agent usually,
and when you're a kid, they they don't really talk
(03:26):
to you. They talk to your parents. 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 what 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
(03:48):
my parents just felt like it 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, 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 things like,
(04:12):
you know, how many auditions did you have before you
got a callback? 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 happen
before you get one. Yes that as a kid, it's
really hard to swallow that because you're not usually dealing
(04:35):
with that amount of rejection as you know, as an adult,
you go on work interviews and you are prepared for
that mentally and emotionally, but as a kid, you don't.
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
(04:58):
going on where I. I kind of grew really early
and in the business that they want older kids that
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 Plain and Lava Girl, and
then I got so old looking that they would were
They were like, well, she doesn't look fourteen, and I
(05:19):
was fourteen at the time. I'm like, but I am fourteen.
So my parents were just looking around and just seeing
how all this rejection was like devastating my confidence and
who I was. 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 they would say,
and I was like a little spark plug. And a
(05:40):
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 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. So my parents did like
that and they were really worried about what that would
(06:03):
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. At the time,
(06:23):
I didn't agree with them, and I think my mom
put me in 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, if you leave me here, I promise
(06:44):
you you just hate me. You must hate me. I
was so upset with her. And you're listening to Taylor
Duly 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,
(07:04):
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 and protected their daughter. When
we come back more with Taylor Dooley her story here
on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great
(07:32):
American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the Our
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to Our American
Stories dot com now and go to the donate button
(07:53):
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our
American Stories in the story of Taylor Dooley. She played
(08:13):
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 has a different perspective. Back to Taylor
(08:40):
and hindsight, it ended up being the best thing to
ever happen 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, and why did you put something so deep
on my heart? Like why do I love this so much?
But yet I can't do it? Like my friends are
working and I'm not. Why is that? And I realized
(09:25):
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 just wanted a
very serious adult career, which doesn't happen when you're a
(09:47):
kid usually, So it kind of was I think God's
way of answering my prayer in a roundabout way. You
just never know 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
(10:08):
to kind of grow as my own person and heel
from some of the wounds that I feel like as
a kid child actor I got from the rejection and
all that stuff, and to be able to just kind
of have a basis of who I am. And it
also helped shepherd kind of more of a faith 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
(10:30):
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 was
a twin born insanely prematurely. He was born three and
a half months early, and but we ended up losing
(10:51):
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 just severely underdeveloped. In the cold from Michigan
was really hard on his lungs. So we needed to
move someplace warm, so my parents found Arizona, which is
insanely warm, so it worked out perfectly. And my brother,
(11:13):
who could barely walk because his lungs were so horrible.
I think we moved when he was four and I
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. But
that's my brother. Is kind of how my parents found
(11:34):
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. He was just the tiniest little thing.
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 their
(11:57):
faith and kind of kept it through all those years.
They really were What 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. My
parents were 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,
(12:20):
which I think made it so much closer for all
of us. We were always very close, so I kind
of has 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 kind of that age of inksty wanting to know
(12:40):
like what this world is about. 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 and 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 it's like
an see more on you have to grow up so
(13:01):
quickly and be a little adult at like eleven years old,
but then they also tell you who you are. 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
(13:24):
feel like there was like always this cattiness because I
was an actress that the end, because I used to
work that, I felt like it's some of my theater.
The people in theater were so catty with me about that,
and I didn't I didn't want to deal with all
of that, so I was like, yeah, I'll quit that
and not do that because I just didn't have the
time or want to do that. So I instead, I
(13:47):
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 love of a girl, and
it was usually in an endearing way. People would call
me Lava girl. It was like they were ribbing me,
but you know, in high school, everyone likes to make
fun of everybody, and at the same time, Taylor Lautner,
(14:09):
who played Shark Boy, was going to high school with me,
so people would make fun of us. Because Shark Bayn
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 the day and then all that space and
time from the acting world allowed me to be able
to make friends and people with people who kind of
(14:32):
had no idea who I was in a certain way
because sometimes some of the people when they were older
didn't necessarily watch Chark Bayne Lava Girl. Actually, when I
met my husband, funny enough, he people used to call
me Lava Girl, and he had no idea. Because my
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. And finally
(14:53):
one day he was like, why do people call you that?
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 Week
in the Heroes. I had just had my daughter and
she was two or three months old when I got
(15:39):
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 my life, so I was totally gung hell for it.
(16:01):
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 week
and be heroes with Robert, getting to be Lava Girl
again with my crazy pink hair. And they were so
sweet to let my entire family come to Austin, Texas
to film, so I had been kids with me and
(16:21):
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 and
did the right thing by making me step away, because
I was able to come back into the business from
a new perspective as a mother, as an adult, as
(16:43):
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 of she
started my career twice. Now. She is light. That's her character.
That's like her superpower is that she's not just that
(17:04):
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 Gir 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 love and light, and wouldn't we all?
In 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,
(17:46):
the story of Taylor Julie. 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. I was just a little
girl with a big dream when I was probably ten,
(00:56):
I want to yeah, I was about 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 like that as well. So I did absolutely fell
in love with it, to my parents' dismay. They didn't
(01:19):
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 enough to start driving me back
and forth to auditions for commercials and such. So we
(01:40):
were driving like eight hours a day to come to
California to go on an audition, just to drive back home,
which was absolutely insane. 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 Bay and Lava Girl. I ended up
(02:01):
booking that, which was such a special, special thing and
that became kind of the catapulting thing that took my
career over a little bit, which is absolutely amazing and
I feel super super blessed for the Growing up in
the business is kind of very crazy, and I think
that people don't touch on it as much. We kind
(02:22):
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 with
everyone from Nickelodeon and Disney and all those shows and
all those fun things. After Shark Bayne Lama Girl came out,
it was so much fun, and I had like such
(02:43):
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 thought that I
should be able to be a kid and not be working.
And so that's kind of when people find me nowadays
on Instagram. Everyone's like, where did you go? After Shark
Boy and law Er Girl. I kind of vanished a
(03:05):
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. When you're a
child actor, you have usually, I mean even as an
adult you have any a manager and an agent usually,
and when you're a kid, they they don't really talk
(03:26):
to you. They talk to your parents. 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 what 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
(03:48):
my parents just felt like it 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, 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 things like,
(04:12):
you know, how many auditions did you have before you
got a callback? 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 happen
before you get one. Yes that as a kid, it's
really hard to swallow that because you're not usually dealing
(04:35):
with that amount of rejection as you know, as an adult,
you go on work interviews and you are prepared for
that mentally and emotionally, but as a kid, you don't.
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
(04:58):
going on where I. I kind of grew really early
and in the business that they want older kids that
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 Plain and Lava Girl, and
then I got so old looking that they would were
They were like, well, she doesn't look fourteen, and I
(05:19):
was fourteen at the time. I'm like, but I am fourteen.
So my parents were just looking around and just seeing
how all this rejection was like devastating my confidence and
who I was. 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 they would say,
and I was like a little spark plug. And a
(05:40):
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 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. So my parents did like
that and they were really worried about what that would
(06:03):
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. At the time,
(06:23):
I didn't agree with them, and I think my mom
put me in 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, if you leave me here, I promise
(06:44):
you you just hate me. You must hate me. I
was so upset with her. And you're listening to Taylor
Duly 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,
(07:04):
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 and protected their daughter. When
we come back more with Taylor Dooley her story here
on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great
(07:32):
American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the Our
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to Our American
Stories dot com now and go to the donate button
(07:53):
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our
American Stories in the story of Taylor Dooley. She played
(08:13):
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 has a different perspective. Back to Taylor
(08:40):
and hindsight, it ended up being the best thing to
ever happen 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, and why did you put something so deep
on my heart? Like why do I love this so much?
But yet I can't do it? Like my friends are
working and I'm not. Why is that? And I realized
(09:25):
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 just wanted a
very serious adult career, which doesn't happen when you're a
(09:47):
kid usually, So it kind of was I think God's
way of answering my prayer in a roundabout way. You
just never know 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
(10:08):
to kind of grow as my own person and heel
from some of the wounds that I feel like as
a kid child actor I got from the rejection and
all that stuff, and to be able to just kind
of have a basis of who I am. And it
also helped shepherd kind of more of a faith 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
(10:30):
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 was
a twin born insanely prematurely. He was born three and
a half months early, and but we ended up losing
(10:51):
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 just severely underdeveloped. In the cold from Michigan
was really hard on his lungs. So we needed to
move someplace warm, so my parents found Arizona, which is
insanely warm, so it worked out perfectly. And my brother,
(11:13):
who could barely walk because his lungs were so horrible.
I think we moved when he was four and I
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. But
that's my brother. Is kind of how my parents found
(11:34):
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. He was just the tiniest little thing.
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 their
(11:57):
faith and kind of kept it through all those years.
They really were What 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. My
parents were 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,
(12:20):
which I think made it so much closer for all
of us. We were always very close, so I kind
of has 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 kind of that age of inksty wanting to know
(12:40):
like what this world is about. 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 and 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 it's like
an see more on you have to grow up so
(13:01):
quickly and be a little adult at like eleven years old,
but then they also tell you who you are. 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
(13:24):
feel like there was like always this cattiness because I
was an actress that the end, because I used to
work that, I felt like it's some of my theater.
The people in theater were so catty with me about that,
and I didn't I didn't want to deal with all
of that, so I was like, yeah, I'll quit that
and not do that because I just didn't have the
time or want to do that. So I instead, I
(13:47):
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 love of a girl, and
it was usually in an endearing way. People would call
me Lava girl. It was like they were ribbing me,
but you know, in high school, everyone likes to make
fun of everybody, and at the same time, Taylor Lautner,
(14:09):
who played Shark Boy, was going to high school with me,
so people would make fun of us. Because Shark Bayn
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 the day and then all that space and
time from the acting world allowed me to be able
to make friends and people with people who kind of
(14:32):
had no idea who I was in a certain way
because sometimes some of the people when they were older
didn't necessarily watch Chark Bayne Lava Girl. Actually, when I
met my husband, funny enough, he people used to call
me Lava Girl, and he had no idea. Because my
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. And finally
(14:53):
one day he was like, why do people call you that?
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 Week
in the Heroes. I had just had my daughter and
she was two or three months old when I got
(15:39):
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 my life, so I was totally gung hell for it.
(16:01):
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 week
and be heroes with Robert, getting to be Lava Girl
again with my crazy pink hair. And they were so
sweet to let my entire family come to Austin, Texas
to film, so I had been kids with me and
(16:21):
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 and
did the right thing by making me step away, because
I was able to come back into the business from
a new perspective as a mother, as an adult, as
(16:43):
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 of she
started my career twice. Now. She is light. That's her character.
That's like her superpower is that she's not just that
(17:04):
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 Gir 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 love and light, and wouldn't we all?
In 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,
(17:46):
the story of Taylor Julie. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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