You should reconsider your assumption that becoming a kid star would make you popular on the playground.
Twenty years have passed since Jack Black’s debut on the big screen in School of Rock, where he played the lovable but slothful instructor Dewey Finn.
Who could overlook the School of Rock itself, though? The group of students Black mentors, who were all still enrolled in school at the time, joined him.
Regretfully, for some of them, stardom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
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During the film’s 20th anniversary, several of the young cast members disclosed to Rolling Stone that they had experienced terrible bullying at their schools following the completion of the renowned 2003 movie.
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They had difficulties when they left the School of Rock for the real world following the release of the movie.
They all had a difficult time going back to school, even Joey Gaydos Jr., who got struck in the face simply for playing in the beloved children’s movie.
He was made to feel like a “three-headed freak” when he returned to his little hamlet outside of Detroit after playing lead guitarist Zack “Zack-Attack” Mooneyham.
“I was looked at like a complete weirdo, and that was hard,” he said to the site.
“It reminds me of an older girl who came up to slap me across the face at a high school football game saying, ‘Look at that weird guy from the movie.'”
“People believed that I was a total package. It was unbelievable to me.
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And Brian Fauldato, who played the band’s stylist Billy in the movie and famously declared, “you’re tacky and I hate you,” claimed that when he was “just being myself and having a great time,” people were trying to “box him into the title of the gay kid.”
“While it was great to have this experience where we were all made to feel special for being different, it also made going back to school more difficult,” he continued.
And after returning home from shooting the movie, 11-year-old Veronica Afflerbach declared she would “never do this again” and that she was leaving Hollywood behind. Things didn’t get any better for the girls.
Even though she was cast as the movie’s “groupie,” Eleni, her abusers took advantage of the fact that she had little screen time.
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“And kids said really horrible things,” she recalled. What other actions did you do to earn that much money? since it comes from more than a few lines in a film. You’re not needed.
Afflerbach acknowledges that she regrets allowing her tormentors to triumph after turning her back on stardom.
However, Rivkah Reyes has returned to the film industry as a writer and humorist, thus not all of the cast has left.
It wasn’t easy, though, as Reyes spent years “being really, really sick and really, really mentally unwell and using anything I could to feel nothing” due to severe bullying she endured after portraying bassist Katie.
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She started writing after that and discovered that, as an adult, she was loving the field more.
She told Rolling Stone, “[For] the last five years, I’ve been sober and re-navigating the film industry and comedy and writing and all of it.”
In addition, “It’s just so much easier when my real self, me, isn’t impeded by all that extra stuff.”
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