How Ed Oxenbould became Hollywood's next big little thing Trailer: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Alexander's day is a comedy of calamities as his mum, dad, brother, and sister all find themselves living through their own very bad day. PT2M28S http://www.smh.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-3ka7k 620 349 November 13, 2014 Ed Oxenbould was getting ready for school at home in Bondi last July when the phone rang. His mum called for him to get it. At first, the 12-year-old couldn't figure out who it was; the caller had a strong accent. Then he realised it was Miguel Arteta, the Puerto Rican director known for his movies Youth in Revolt and The Good Girl. Ed had auditioned for him for the lead in a big-budget Disney movie to be shot in Hollywood, but hadn't heard anything for a couple of weeks. "I honestly thought it was time to let that go," he says. Not quite. Arteta asked if he wanted to play the title role in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, with Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner playing his parents. Ed Oxenbould at his favorite restaurant in Hollywood, Bobs Bigboy. Photo: Matthew Symons/Coleman-Rayner "For the first time in my life, I was speechless," Ed says. I didn't know what to say. In my head I was saying, 'Yes!' Finally he got the words out. 'Yes, please!' And then we just talked and I can't remember anything we said. The son of two Sydney actors, Di Adams and Jamie Oxenbould, Ed began acting at a young age, as did his older brother Archie. It started with an air freshener ad voice-over, then appearances in television ads. In Puberty Blues with Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Claudia Karvan and Ashleigh Cummings. Auditioning for one of these, he read opposite local actor Matthew Moore, who was immediately struck by his natural talent. "I thought, I want to write something for this kid," Moore says. Six months later, he wrote Julian, a short film starring Ed, about a school kid with a mighty moral compass. It was Moore's first experience as writer and director, as well as Ed's first time on film. Just as Moore had anticipated, Ed shone in the title role. What Moore didn't expect was Julian winning awards at festivals all over the world, from Sydney to Tokyo, including Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival. With most children, Moore says, the trick to filming is to get them comfortable so they can be unselfconscious and spontaneous. The thing that's different about Ed is he makes choices. He's like a mini Dustin Hoffman," he says. It's not just about capturing spontaneous moments, he's coming in having thought about it. Ed's parents, Di and Jamie, are experienced actors in film, theatre and television. They did not push either of their sons into acting; doing voiceovers, ads and small roles was just a way to make pocket money. Archie, who did his HSC last year, outgrew the interest, but still wants to work in the industry as a film producer. Ed Oxenbould in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Ed got hooked on a set visit to Raggs, a children's show his parents provided the voices for. He remembers being amazed at how small the set looked in the big warehouse where it was filmed, all the people behind the scenes, and the actors in big furry costumes chatting with their dog heads off. "From there I was really interested in the creative process and how everything comes together," he says. He helped Di and Jamie learn their lines. "Ed would read it perfectly each time; from the beginning he'd make sense of it," says Di. So he was a really good person to read opposite at six or seven. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Anthony (Dylan Minnette), Alexander (Ed Oxenbould), Ben (Steve Carell), Emily (Kerris Dorsey) and Kelly (Jennifer Garner). After Julian and shooting another short film with Moore, The Amber Amulet, which won best short at Berlin, Ed was cast in the television adaptation of Puberty Blues, playing David Vickers with Claudia Karvan as his mum. He was 12. By this time, he was used to doing self-tests at home for overseas films; Jamie or Di would film him using Archie's blue doona cover as a backdrop. He was also used to disappointment, having missed out on a Jason Bateman film he really wanted, Bad Words. The first audition for Alexander was just another self-test after school. "We didn't think he'd ever get it, not in a million years - why would they give it to a 12-year-old Australian kid?" says Di. We thought it was hilarious. Ed did his thing and then went, 'I'm hungry' and that was it. Movie poster for the Flickerfest-winning short film Julian. "We just filmed it and sent it," says Jamie. Put it in Dropbox and went, 'Oh well'. In LA, Arteta had spent months auditioning 500 kids. He was sitting up in bed one night with his wife, a casting director, speed-flipping through audition tapes. "Stop!" his wife said. Look at that one. They rewound, watched Ed's tape and both agreed. He was the one. The Oxenbould family: (From left) Jamie, Di Adams, Ed and Archie. "He was completely unique," says Arteta. Unlike all the kids before him who sounded very whiny when they were talking about the bad things that happened in their bad day, Ed sounded like a kid who just felt misunderstood. For any parent whose offspring finds success on screen, the spectre of the precocious child star looms large. Will they be OK? Is it too much to take on? Will it spoil them? What happens when the roles dry up? Will it ruin their life? Di and Jamie knew how fickle the industry could be. They also knew acting was something Ed loved, and he always had the final say on which roles he decided to audition for. He has turned down as many auditions as he's taped. He looks for good writing and roles that are different to his previous work. Often my main thing is, can I see myself doing it? And I picture other people in the roles, maybe celebrities, and I think, could I do this or could I not? If it's not, usually I'll knock it back. He said no to an audition for the lead opposite Jake Gyllenhall in a film to be shot in New York. It was a good script, just not for him. Despite Ed having the final say, Di and Jamie know they will be seen as pushy stage parents. "As soon as you have a kid working in an adult world, people make a judgement," Jamie says. Half of them will go, 'Great, he's good at that, why not let him do it?' And half of them will go, 'I wouldn't let my kid do that'. Since filming Alexander, Ed has also played lead roles in Paper Planes, an Australian film shot in and around Perth by Robert Connolly, and Sundowning, the latest film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, of The Sixth Sense fame. Sundowning was shot earlier this year during one of the coldest winters on record in Philadelphia. Di asked Night, as he is known on set, if he would let his children do the same thing. He said, 'I don't know. If they absolutely had to do it - and I think your kid absolutely has to do it'. The enormity of what Ed had taken on did worry them at times. Di recalls a particular moment in a four-day whirlwind trip to LA last year, a few weeks before Ed was offered Alexander. We were jetlagged, Ed had a cold, we were lying in bed at seven o'clock and the director rang and I started going, 'I don't know what I've done', and he said, 'It's OK, I'll look after you'. And in that whole year, he hasn't abandoned Ed. As Ed is well aware, he has been very fortunate to have enjoyed every project so far. There were times on each one when he thought he wasn't up to the job, but that's when it helps to have parents who are actors. "During Alexander, Mum and I would talk, she would say, 'Just try it again, it's all right, Miguel picked you because he liked you'," Ed says. That helped me. On Sundowning, a low-budget shoot with some challenging emotional scenes, Di, Jamie and Archie were in Philadelphia with Ed. At the start, being a teenager with two movies under his belt, he didn't want his parents' advice. As I got to the emotional stuff I realised, 'Wow, I really need them', because so much of the stuff I didn't get until they explained it to me. Archie was at home doing his HSC while Di and Ed were on the Alexander set, but didn't resent the interruption to their lives. "I never really saw it as that, it just happened and it was very exciting," he says. Ed being the one in the spotlight is fine by his brother. I much prefer not having the attention on me. When we went over to LA for the premiere, I loved it because we got the star treatment, got driven around and stayed in nice hotels, but no one was looking to me for anything. Jamie thinks the five-year age gap between the boys has helped. "If Arch was only two years older it might be weird," he says. And he knows we've all had benefits from it, we've travelled a lot more than we ever would have without it. We all just got a guided tour around Disneyland. Who gets that? We all felt very lucky. Everything has its downside. Missing out on a good role is hard - Ed would have loved to be in True Detective but wasn't cast. As he gets older, he understands more about the process, the many factors at play and that "you can't get everything." Much harder, he says, is saying goodbye at the end of a film shoot to the cast and crew, who have become close friends. You wake up, spend all day with them for so long, with only weekends off - sometimes not even that - then you say 'bye to them. You'll never be there with them all together again," he says. You miss the excitement and camaraderie of being on set. Then there were the Alexander press junkets, sitting in a room at the Four Seasons hotel doing 70 five-minute interviews a day for two days, answering the same questions over and over again. What was it like to work with Jen and Steve? Amazing! To get through it, he and his siblings in Alexander, two older American child actors, played a game: to sneak in a word the others give you. His "sister" managed to use "praying mantis" in reference to a Peter Pan costume she wore in the film. The scariest thing was the US premiere. It was the classic big-budget bonanza at El Capitan cinema, with Hollywood Boulevard closed down, an endless red carpet lined with press, Ed's face on giant billboards, and a crowd behind the barrier screaming his name. "I was scared, I really didn't want to get out of the Hummer," he says. His family waited patiently in the background for nearly an hour as he went slowly up the carpet, interview by interview. "Sometimes we'd be pushed on by security who didn't know who we were," says Di. It was the most surreal part of the Alexander experience for all of them. Ed is back at school now. When not acting, he turns to his second love, cooking. He taught himself to bake watching YouTube videos, and hopes one day to go to culinary school to qualify as a chef. In acting, having a Plan B is a smart move, and his salted caramel brownies indicate this is a promising alternative career. Moore, who launched Ed's career with Julian, is not worried about his protoge's future as a child star. "His family is in the business, he has been surrounded by it his entire life, it's nothing extraordinary for him in that way," Moore says. His level of success is extraordinary and I think that's not lost on him but he's a special guy and knows what's important. For the two directors who have had the biggest impact on Ed's career so far, what advice do they have for him? "Don't do any scripts you don't feel you can put your heart in," says Arteta. "Ed should be giving me advice," says Moore. I'm going to be running all my future projects by Ed and getting him to tell me if he thinks they've got legs. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day opens on December 4. Ed Oxenbould missed a lot of his first year of high school this year at Newtown's School of the Performing Arts, but he didn't fall behind. The US has strict rules for child actors: three hours of school every day. This means one-on-one tutoring by a teacher who specialises in working on movie sets. Ed's teacher on Alexander was Maura Gannett, who has spent years with kids on Hollywood sets. "She made school so much fun," he says. Every day she'd come in with a big box of things to make all these science experiments. She also provided respite at times from the intensity on set. During a break while shooting one huge party scene, with 200 extras and animals, Ed decided he wanted to go to school. I went to the school trailer, Maura went, 'Oh, OK', and we did some maths for a while. It took my mind off it.