A child actor couldn’t have a better mentor than Steven Spielberg.
Joe Mazzello, one of the standouts in the HBO miniseries “The Pacific,” didn’t know how lucky he was when Steven Spielberg took him under his wing.
Mazzello, who plays PFC Eugene Sledge, a real-life Marine who wrote a book that “Pacific” producers used as source material, was only seven years old at the time. To him, Spielberg was “that nice guy with the beard” when they met in 1992 on the set of “Radio Flyer,” Mazzello’s very first movie, in which he played Bobby, the younger brother of the film’s main character.
“Spielberg used to come on the set to look at me for a role in ‘Hook,’” says Mazzello. “But I was too young. He said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you in a movie this summer.’”
That movie was “Jurassic Park.” Mazzello played Tim Murphy, the grandson of the film’s star, Sam Neill, and he remembers the dinosaurs in the film as “were huge machines that were like really scary. I wondered, what if the T-Rex falls down, that kind of thing. Actually it did once, it broke the plexiglass” roof of the car his on-screen family drove.
Relaxing in the fabulous tea salon of New York’s Crosby Street Hotel, Mazzello, 26, eats some toast with his tea and talks about an acting childhood that was perversely normal, largely because he and his parents wanted it that way. When he wasn’t doing things like playing Meryl Streep’s son in “The River Wild,” Mazzello went to Catholic school in his hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY, and played kick ball with his friends and went to the prom. At all times, normalcy was the goal.
“I didn’t have the typical child actor life,” Mazzello says. “My parents never moved out to LA and put us up in the Oakwood apartments, where all the child actors stay. I would go away and do these crazy things on location. Then I would come home. I would play in the league. So when I got to high school. I wanted all those normal things. Getting into college became important to me. I put my career on the back burner. I dropped my representation for two or three years.”
The memory of his father holding him by his ankles in order to pull off the wet suit that he had to wear during the four-month “River Wild” shoot made Mazzello cringe, but the experience of working with directors such as Curtis Hanson and Richard Attenborough convinced him that acting was his destiny. And eventually, after several callbacks, he auditioned for Spielberg to appear in “The Pacific.”
Mazzello says the audition process took seven months, but once he was cast and bound for Australia, the location for the production, everything was great.
“It was like college. You’re going to some foreign land with people that you’ve never met before and you’re staying in these dorms,” he says. “It was the best part of the whole thing because the shoot was so intense.”
As Sledge, Mazzello has a pivotal role in “The Pacific.” He enters the war at Guadalcanal as an innocent and finds himself increasingly demoralized the longer he fights; he returns home an embittered young man whose parents cannot easily communicate with him. In one especially brutal scene, Eugene, nicknamed “Sledgehammer” by his military buddies, attempts to dig the gold fillings out of the teeth of dead Japanese soldier and is stopped by a fellow Marine.
“He goes over the line and someone grabs him and brings him back,” Mazzello says. “These are moments that snap him back to humanity and make him realize who he is.”
The actor, who lives in LA and dates a young woman named Devon, an aspiring screenwriter he met at film school, says that he and his “Pacific” castmates would blow off steam by just hanging out with each other off-screen. “We would just yak. And laugh,” he says. “The shoot was so difficult and the subject matter was so dark that you physically cannot live in it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 10 months. You need those moments where you come up for air were about making each other laugh.”
He grew to admire Sledge who went on after the war to get his Ph. D. in biology and teach at Alabama College.
“Eugene had a real appreciation for life and that’s why he wanted to study biology,” Mazzello says. “He had seen so much death and so many things that he didn’t want to see.”
* THE PACIFIC
Sunday, 9 p.m., HBO