Young Hollywood: Breaking the news that acting is your calling

Many parents are wary of their children becoming actors, fearful that their progeny will toil in minimum-wage jobs while going on endless auditions.

Bella Heathcote, one of the young actresses featured on this year’s Los Angeles Times Young Hollywood roundtable at the AFI Fest, said her father was not excited by the prospect of her moving from Australia to Hollywood. He was a lawyer, and Heathcote said she worked as a paralegal at his firm to placate him.

“He spent a few years being like,’‘Yeah, that’s great. You can do acting after you go to university and get a degree. Once you figure out your backup plan, you can go and be an actor,’” the 24-year-old star of the upcoming “Not Fade Away” recalled. “And then I did one year and just dropped out. I was like, ‘Ugh, I’m gonna kill myself.’”

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 27, the youngest in a big family, said her parents were more encouraging: Her older siblings fought all those battles ahead of her and wore her parents down. But 28-year-old Aubrey Plaza also faced resistance from her parents. And when she finally persuaded her mother to let her attend an audition in New York at age 12, things didn’t pan out.

“I totally bombed and totally got rejected in my face,” Plaza said. “[The casting director] was like, ‘We’re actually looking for African American boys.’”

Check out the clip above to hear more from the AFI Fest event, and circle back with Movies Now through the week as we post more short videos with additional highlights from the conversation.

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