“I didn’t want to be an actor when I was a kid. My parents forced me to do it, my mother made me do it. My mother coached me to go into her agency and tell the children’s agent, ‘I want to do what mommy does,’” said Wheaton, whose mother Debra was an actress and his father Richard a medical specialist. “And through a combination of an incredible emotional abuse from my father and a lot of manipulation, using me, from my mother, it really put me in that place.”
Wheaton, who is now estranged from his parents, said his own struggles helped him play a young kid whose emotionally walled-off parents were dealing with the death of Gordie’s older teen brother (John Cusack). “[It] put me in exactly the right place to play Gordie,” he said. “Because Gordie’s experience very much reflected my experience. We’re both invisible in our homes. We both have a brother who is the golden child. We’re both the scapegoat in the family. So when I watch ‘Stand by Me’ now, I cannot ignore the unbelievable sadness in my eyes. And I cannot ignore the reality that it was that sadness, that isolation that I think gave me what Gordie needed to come to life and I think Rob Reiner saw that.” Wheaton went on to feature in projects including the 1991 film “Toy Soldiers,” and as Wesley Crusher in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but now focuses on his own writing, and hosting the “Star Trek” after-show “The Red Room.” “I guess I want to be a writer so that makes me Gordie. I never realized until I was in my 40s that I was Gordie because I was Gordie,” he said. You can see “Stand by Me” in theaters on Wednesday, May 26. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
