More Than a Name

The sling and cast Balthazar Getty sports for his debut in “Lord of the Flies” are the real thing, says the lanky great-grandson of oil magnate J. Paul Getty.

“About a day before I was to fly to Jamaica (to begin production), I fell 30 feet and broke both my arms,” Getty says, holding up his left arm to display a nasty scar that stretches from the heel of his hand halfway to his elbow. “The bone just went ‘whoosh’--out of my wrist.”

An avid rock climber, Getty tumbled from atop a tree while testing a new rope.

“When the ambulance came, I was just screaming ‘What about the movie? What about the movie?’ ”

In “Lord of the Flies,” a remake of the 1963 Peter Brook film and based on the chilling novel by Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, Getty plays “Ralph,” the military school cadet leader who tries to maintain reason among his shipwrecked young comrades.

Since shooting “Lord of the Flies,” Getty has appeared in “The Turn of the Screw” for Showtime and this summer can be seen in “Home Grown” and “Young Guns II.” But Getty’s affair with Hollywood doesn’t mean he has fallen head over heels.

“I don’t really like too many people in the film industry,” says the serious, worldly 15-year-old. “I don’t really like this fakeness and ‘I love you babe’ and all that stuff.”

Getty explains his weighty name: Balthazar, one of the Bible’s three wise men, carried gold to the newborn Christ child; the multimillion-dollar surname is brushed aside.

“I love my family, I’m proud of it, but I don’t involve it in my acting whatsoever. . . . Just because, I’m my own person and I’m making it on my own and people should respect me for what I do and not for who I am.”