Why Matilda Star Mara Wilson Disappeared From Hollywood

Being a child star can be deeply challenging. There are a lot of elements to both acting and fame that can be too much to handle for developing minds, not to mention that being on set all the time leads to a very different childhood than the average kid. There's a reason why quite a few child stars end up having "normal" jobs as adults — fame is a seriously tough mistress. So, it's really not a huge surprise when child stars disappear from the limelight as adults, but in the case of young actor Mara Wilson, it did seem a little shocking. After all, at just nine years old she was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood as the titular character in "Matilda" and it seemed like she could have whatever career she wanted as an actor. However, after making the critically panned "Thomas and the Magic Railroad" in 2000 opposite Alex Baldwin, Wilson disappeared from the limelight for nearly 12 years.

Though she has returned to acting to some degree, mostly through voice work or small parts in various web series, Wilson has never gone back to acting full-time and instead mostly works as a writer. She graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and has written a full-length memoir, "Where Am I Now?," along with numerous essays and articles all over the web, occasionally popping up on a talk show or speaking out on social media but otherwise avoiding the limelight. So, what happened to make Mara Wilson disappear from Hollywood and stay away for more than a decade? It was a combination of some difficult events in her personal life and the challenges of the industry, making Wilson step back and reassess the cost of fame.

Wilson never actually set out to be a star, as she noted in her memoir, "Good Girls Don't" (via The Guardian). She grew up in Burbank, where her father was an engineer for NBC, and children often did commercials or small movie roles in order to try and put away a little money for college. Wilson did a few commercials and then nailed the audition for her first film role, "Mrs. Doubtfire," which would end up being the catalyst to her stardom. She was five or six years old when she played Natalie Hillard, the youngest child in the Hillard family, who are dealing with the dissolution of their parents' marriage. It was a chance to star alongside the greats Sally Field, who played her mother, and Robin Williams, who played her father, a man so desperate to see his children that he pretends to be their nanny through the help of prosthetics and crossdressing.

It's a pretty incredible first role for a child star, and it led to more roles than Wilson or her family expected. She starred in a TV movie called "Time to Heal," then the 1994 "Miracle on 34th Street" remake opposite Richard Attenborough. Then, when she was nine, she got the role of a lifetime as the telekinetically-inclined grade schooler Matilda in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic novel of the same name. "Matilda" would rocket Wilson to stardom, but it would come at a difficult time and proved to be just a little too much to handle.

Wilson's mother was dying of cancer while the young actor filmed "Matilda," and she died six months after filming, while the movie was still in post-production. Though her fictional parents in "Matilda" were monstrous, they were played by real-life couple Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, who helped take care of Wilson and became like a "favorite aunt and uncle" to her. DeVito also directed the film and did everything he could to ensure that Wilson was safe and happy, but she told the Guardian that she was really struggling:

"I felt completely lost, completely unmoored. There was who I was before that, and who I was after that. She was like this omnipresent thing in my life. I really believed that she would never die and as I've gotten older, she's taken on even more of a mythical quality in my mind. To lose her felt like this incredible upheaval. I didn't really know who I was."

It can be challenging enough to forge your own identity as a child actor without also losing a parent at a critical age, so Wilson's struggles are sadly unsurprising. She also struggled with feeling inadequate or not being enough like the character she played, saying that she could no longer be herself out in public, which meant she had to hide the pain she felt from dealing with her mother's death. That's a whole lot to ask of a nine-year-old, and that's not including some disturbing discoveries that led her to feel sexualized even as a young child.

In a New York Times op ed called "The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls," Wilson revealed that even though she and her family were very careful to curate her appearance and film roles in order to protect her from pedophiles, she was still unfortunately sexualized by the media and some fans. She said that while it "was cute when 10-year-olds sent me letters saying they were in love with me, it was not when 50-year-old men did." In addition to unsettling love letters from grown adults, she also discovered that she was being sexualized online, saying that "before I even turned 12, there were images of me on foot fetish websites and photoshopped into child pornography. Every time, I felt ashamed."

Unfortunately, female child stars often exist in a strange limbo where they must stay childlike but are also frequently forced to grow up too quickly. Society doesn't like to let its Disney idols grow up, for example, and they're often being fetishized for their youth. Though thankfully Wilson was clear that she never experienced any harrassment on set, like many of her peers who worked at Nickelodeon during its heyday, having the media and the general public treat her like a sex object when she was pre-pubescent was extremely painful. That sexualization led to her not feeling pretty enough around puberty, when she started struggling to find roles. It was when she read for the role of a "fat girl" that she decided to bail on acting because she didn't feel like she fit the ideal Hollywood wanted, and she had better things to do.

Throughout her hiatus from Hollywood, Wilson became a bit of a Twitter darling and wrote essays for sites like Jezebel, The Daily Beast, and Cracked.com, and she finally made her onscreen return in 2016 in an episode of the comedy central series "Broad City," playing an unnamed waitress. In an interview with Brokelyn, Wilson explained that she actually pursued the cameo herself and that she has no interest in acting unless it's with friends or voiceover work, "because that's really fun for me." She had briefly met "Broad City" co-creator and star Ilana Glazer and was a fan of the show, and she reached out to the other co-creator and star Abbi Jacobson over Twitter to tell her that she would be interested in a little cameo. Since they were working on a "Mrs. Doubtfire" inspired episode that paid homage to the scene in the restaurant where Mrs. Doubtfire (Williams) saves his estranged wife's date from choking, it was pure kismet.

Wilson is pretty great about her occasional TV show and podcast appearances, bringing a dry sense of humor and her hard-earned wisdom, but she doesn't do it too often. It seems that Wilson doesn't mind referencing the roles from her childhood or acting a bit as long as it's with the right people and for the right reasons, though she's made it clear that she would rather do her acting off-camera in a number of voiceover roles.

It's funny that Wilson mentioned how much she likes voice acting, because that's primarily what she's been doing outside of her writing since her unofficial return to entertainment. She voices The Faceless Old Woman on the hit creepy podcast series "Welcome to Night Vale" and Jane in the podcast series VAM PD, which is pretty cool in and of itself, but she also voices a bunch of cartoon characters. She voices both Claudia and The Creepy Girl on the kids' show "Ollie & Scoops," while on "Helluva Boss" she voices Mrs. Mayberry. Elsewhere, on Disney's "Big Hero 6: The Series," she even had the dual role of Liv and Di Amara, starring for 13 episodes. Perhaps the most famous of her voice roles, however, is as Jill Pill on the adult comedy "BoJack Horseman", a series that deals heavily with the impacts of child stardom and fame.

Honestly, it's wonderful that Wilson has been able to take control of her own life and public image and has had the ability to speak eloquently on her struggles with childhood stardom. Many young stars who go through similar disillusionment can have some painful and unsettling outbursts, like "Two and a Half Men" star Angus T. Jones, who disappeared from Hollywood after denouncing everything he worked on and the people he worked with.

The legacy of "Matilda" has only increased with time, as the movie has found new audiences through streaming and a musical based on the novel has found itself a special place not only in children's films, but also as a gateway for young actors to move into horror. It's a travesty that Wilson had to go through feeling scrutinized and sexualized all while dealing with the death of her mother, but frankly, she handled it with extraordinary grace. Here's to Wilson getting all of the voice acting roles she could ever want, because she's earned them.