Kids grow up fast, especially on TV. No longer are they mere accessories these days — some are actively driving the plot. Here are three pivotal young performers who turn out to be as brilliant off TV as they are on it.
Holly Taylor (Paige Jennings on FX’s ‘The Americans’)
On TV, she’s the 14-year-old American spawn of Russian spies who’s freaking out her parents because she’s beginning to put the pieces together about their hidden identity. Off it, she’s a 16-year-old Nova Scotia native who made her Broadway debut in “Billy Elliot,” takes dance classes on weekends and says her favorite TV show is “Friends.”
“She’s a mature kid, but she’s still a kid,” says show-runner Joel Fields. “It’s remarkable to see her on the set horsing around, then you hear
‘Action!’ and she transforms.”
Holly was in her middle school’s gifted-and-talented program and is a year ahead in math and science at her New Jersey high school. Now, she’s thinking about studying psychology in college (“I’ve always been really interested in how the brain works”).
For now, she’s happy analyzing Paige and her relationship with her mother, played by Keri Russell.
“This season, Paige is really conflicted and trying to find something to believe in,” Holly says. “Like her mother, she believes she can do anything.”
When she’s not on-camera, she says, she plays football with Keidrich Sellati (her TV brother Henry) or hangs out in the hair-and-makeup trailer.
“We have this huge wig — we call it the Felicity wig,” she says, after Russell’s breakout role. “It’s like this huge brown-and-blond Afro we put on everyone — cast members, crew members, the writers. We even got Jimmy Fallon to wear it!”
Nolan Gould (Luke Dunphy on ABC’s ‘Modern Family’)
The boy who trapped his head in a banister — to see if it could fit — seems an unlikely prodigy. But Luke is lately less the buffoon and more a kind of evil genius, in part, perhaps, because the boy who plays him has a Mensa-level IQ. Executive producer Chris Lloyd jokes that they didn’t
know Nolan was a genius “until he started correcting our grammar.”
What sold them at his audition five years back was his personality: “At 10, he didn’t seem like a kid actor — he has a sweet, approachable, thoughtful quality.” Over the phone, the 15½-year-old seems all that and more — and very excited about picking up his first car. “It’s a Ford Fusion,” he says. “I could have done the typical Hollywood thing and gotten a Range Rover, but I really care about the environment.”
He passed his state’s high school proficiency exam at 14, so he’s no longer getting schooled on the set — he’s taking college courses online. “I’m
trying to get my core curriculum out of the way so I can transfer, but I’ll have to see how the acting business plays out,” he says. This from the boy whose TV alter ego wondered, “Why are there giant lollipops all over our front yard, and why do they taste so bad?”
Music runs in Nolan’s family. He’s still playing the banjo Ellen DeGeneres gave him on her show last year, when he also confessed to having a crush on Miranda Kerr. Does he still?
“That changes every day,” he says. “Whoever I find cute that day, I have a crush on. I think I’m gonna start moving away from older women and find
someone my own age.”
Girls, the line forms to the left.
Graham Phillips (Zach Florrick on ‘The Good Wife’)
Maybe it’s not such a stretch playing the son of a governor and a lawyer, the 20-year-old says — after all, his mother was an assistant US attorney and his dad was appointed to the federal bench, “so there’s less a political connection and more of a judicial one.”
But while Zach is a computer whiz who protects his sister Grace against Internet stalkers, goes on the web for his mom’s job and aids his dad’s campaign, Graham’s forte lies elsewhere: in music. He’s sung on Broadway (2008’s “Thirteen”) and at the Met. But it didn’t take any arias for him to win the “Wife” audition, says executive producer Michelle King.
“He had the perfect combination of innocence and confidence.”
In two years, he’ll have something else: a Princeton degree — thanks, in part, to his TV mom, Julianna Margulies.
“She argued that it would help my acting and directing.”
His fellow Princetonians have been pretty cool about it, he says, though a woman whose apartment he rented screamed when she saw him. “She said, ‘That’s my favorite show! I missed the last episode. Do you think Alicia will ever get back with Will?’”
Ever tactful, Graham replied, “Um, why don’t you watch the last [few] episodes and get back to me?”