Who was brad renfro dating when he died
03-Sep-2020 08:54
Looking for a kid who is the role as much as they can perform it — especially one with no prior acting experience — remains common practice: It’s how the young boys in Moonlight and Lion were cast, and how Quvenzhané Wallis earned an Oscar nod for Beasts of the Southern Wild. ”This was not the first time Renfro had fielded this kind of pointedly ardent attention, either: In 1995, director Peter Horton told the Chicago Tribune that Renfro "has tremendous charisma and sex appeal," and that local girls would follow Renfro around during production of The Cure.
It had been years since Renfro had delivered a performance that caught the public's attention, and at the time, he was treated as yet another addition to the mournful legacy of former child stars — Dana Plato, River Phoenix, Judy Garland — whose lives collapsed from Hollywood darling to death by overdose.
But it also meant that it could be easy to forget just how young Renfro actually was."He was 15 or 16 or something I think when we were doing that job," Tom and Huck production designer Gemma Jackson told Buzz Feed News when asked about her immediate memories of Renfro. He had a girlfriend who was years older than him." Reminded that Renfro was actually just 13 while making the film, Jackson paused. Despite having zero real acting experience before getting cast in The Client, Renfro took naturally to life on a major studio movie. While other child actors would spend more time in their trailers with their families, he'd wander and ask questions of department heads about set construction or costume design.
Film sets can often feel like ad hoc families, but in Renfro’s case, it became almost literal. "He was just obviously screaming for someone to establish some kind of boundaries for him, something that never happened in his life." (Harris died in 2013.)There are several authority figures on a movie set: the director, the producers, and the lead actors, of course, as well as the first assistant director, the person responsible for keeping the production moving and on schedule.
As one person who worked with Renfro when he was a child told Buzz Feed News, "He just had an enormous amount of energy, and he looked for trouble. I want to break the rules."Without anyone able, or willing, to enforce those rules, it appears Renfro broke, too.
When Renfro was cast in The Client from a pool of 5,000 kids as Mark Sway — a foul-mouthed delinquent from a Tennessee trailer park — he was a 10-year-old from Knoxville with the same floppy bangs and youthfully handsome face of so many other popular child actors of the 1990s who funneled through Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows.
He got his big break when producers of “The Client” -- the adaptation of the John Grisham novel -- conducted a national search to find a fresh face to play the lead role of a boy who is put in peril after he overhears a conversation about a murder.