Being A Child Actor Nearly Killed Me

No, the grass isn't Always Greener on the other side.

I recently went through a collection of old pictures my mother keeps and found a stash of Polaroids from my time on Always Greener.

I was 15 when this photo was taken. We were filming a dance routine for the show, and I had taken a shot of something called ‘liquid speed’ I’d bought from some shoddy hippy dippy store in Glebe. I needed to stay awake and I didn’t like the taste of coffee.

I was also deep in the throes of an eating disorder that very nearly killed me.

Mere weeks after the photo was taken, I was admitted into Westmead Children’s Hospital, where I would spend two horrific months recovering, or rather, repenting for developing anorexia.

I am still Facebook friends with one of the girls I shared my hospital room with. She seems happy now. We message here and there, recounting stories of our time spent incarcerated. The unimaginable horror left imprinted on us. I still remember the name of the ward we stayed on: Wade.

When I sent her the photo, I apologised. I was sorry to remind her (as if she ever forgot), but I have struggled to kill the memories. Sometimes, I feel as though they are all I have, as if the pillar of my personality is built upon and around my illness. I’ve been somehow frozen in time, forever living in its shadow.

One day, I even remember telling my mum that I missed being sick. More specifically, I missed the feeling my illness imbibed in me. It had enveloped me, and very soon, this chrysalis of demented thinking became home. My home.

It’s Murder On Stage Four

At the same time as I was slowly and inadvertently killing myself, I was starring on a TV show. Puberty is hard enough. It’s even harder when you’re playing host to all manners of awkwardness - from acne to braces to alternating bra sizes and periods - right in front of the world, or in this case, Australia. There’s nowhere to hide. There are no sick days if you’re feeling awkward and bloated or if a giant pimple decides to erupt in the centre of your face. It’s just a big case of tough shit.

Look, I know what you’re thinking - no one forced me to act. I went into this fluorescent jungle of stardom of my own volition. It was the dream I had cultivated since forever. My childhood memories are inexplicably tangled with my desire for stardom. I knew the drill, and I expected this to be a tough gig. What I didn’t expect was the loneliness.

I was so very desperately lonely.

Filming commitments meant I couldn’t attend a conventional school and, instead, had a tutor on-set. At first, I tried to stay in touch with whatever small group of friends I did have, but time and life quickly got in the way. Instead, I found solace in chatting with random people online and reading.

The age gap between me and my castmates was glaring but not as cavernous as they treated it. When I was 14, the second-youngest cast member was 20. Of course, I didn’t expect to be invited out or even to be included in the little group chats they had on-set or during table reads. I’m not completely stupid, I know 20-somethings don’t ‘hang’ with 14-year-olds. That would be weird and quite possibly illegal. But, if people are sharing the same earthly space day-in day-out and living through the same unique experience of being on a television show, surely then you’d expect some form of camaraderie to form.

At least I did.

But it didn’t.

And so I folded into myself and in my eating disorder found the comfort, companionship and control I had so been craving.

Even as I fell deeper and deeper into my disease and its affects became more and more profound the silence continued. Not a kind word. Not a concerned word. Not a hopeful word. Nothing. (Well, save for one of the actors who during lunch loudly proclaimed I had to “eat more than just that” before a wardrobe assistant dropped a string bean on my plate. I got up and walked off crying. He never apologised. Never even acknowledged it. He was a protected species though, given he and another star were fucking off-camera.)

Who did I have to fuck for a slice of sympathy?

Wardrobe and makeup took Polaroids of our daily looks for continuity. This was taken after my hospital stay … and after the wardrobe department finally got the message to stop buying clothes for me in the girls department when I was now a teenager … with boobs. Albeit small, they were there.

An Institute Of Silence

The photo at the top of the page was taken just weeks before I was admitted to the hospital, weighing 34 kilos. My eight-year-old daughter currently weighs 30 kilos. I had shrunk and mentally maimed myself into the space taken up by a child.

At the time, I was hours away from a cardiac arrest. The malnutrition ended up permanently damaging my heart. You see, when you lose weight, you lose weight everywhere, and given the heart is a muscle, the drastic weight loss can cause it to shrink.

Upon admittance, the nurses, who seemed to thrive in their cruelty towards eating disorder patients, would regularly tell me how my body had probably “started eating itself … especially your heart”. Oh well, at least, unlike them, I had a heart to be eaten.

My periods had also stopped, and I had grown a fine, white layer of hair across my body. Lanugo, they call it. It sounds exotic, doesn’t it? Almost beautiful.

By that stage, I existed on a diet of water, white fish and Vitamin C tablets - they have a laxative effect, don’t you know?

Even now, I keep looking back on the time and trying to understand why no one said anything.

They all knew. Every single one of them. They all stood and watched me slowly die and said nothing. A few even had children.

Why?

Were they scared of losing their jobs? I mean, I know acting work in Australia is tough, but still…

Nevertheless, the money they saved by turning the other cheek will never be enough to buy back their humanity.

I later learned that instead of checking in with me to see how I was going, or even asking my mother - who by that stage was coming on set with me daily - a makeup artist, let’s call her Bertha, went and reported her “concerns” to the top brass. Bertha would also later tell me that I “didn’t understand what acting was” because I would apply concealer on my acne before filming began. I was 14.

All this while another actress obnoxiously joked with her about how she had nicknamed her pimple: “This is Barry” she replied to no one’s question one morning in the makeup room. Bertha then hurriedly worked to cover the pimple as the pair laughed at nothing.

Anyway, after Bertha expelled her need for inserting herself in someone else’s drama, what followed for me were meetings with producers and agents, everyone trying to work out why Natasha was so sad and how to make sure whatever this “problem” was didn’t cause problems for anyone else.

My agent, a horsey-looking woman who always seemed confused as to why she was talking to me in the first place, sat outside.

By that stage, I had begun to feel the way my body looked: small. I was hauled into a meeting with a producer who sat opposite me and, in a Pollyanna-esque way, described my appearance back to me.

With legs crossed and a smile dripping in artifice, she nodded at my body: “You are getting very skinny now, aren’t you?”

I was alone in that meeting and scared. I apologised. I feigned ignorance. I sat and wondered why I felt so guilty about something I could not control.

Later, after spending two months in the hospital during a filming break, I would sit in a board room with even more producers who would tell me that my contract would be changing. I would only be signed on eight-week blocks, and if I started to lose any weight during that time, I would be fired.

I wonder if any other illness is or has ever been treated this way. Is there any other illness that a sufferer needs to prove they have recovered from to keep their job? Is there any other illness where a recurrence after remission is punished?