Laura Wiggins – Starving In Suburbia

Q) What made you want to be a part of the film Starving in Suburbia?

A) I was working on “The Tomorrow People” and my manager was trying to find a project that I would really connect with. He found this, but I wasn’t able to audition for it yet. I was not in town – I in Canada so I couldn’t audition for it. I just remember begging and saying, “I can tape an audition!” I really connected to it from the very beginning, but they weren’t sure about me because they weren’t sure I had the experience in dance since she is a dancer. Obviously, I ended up getting the part.

Q) Please tell us the premise for the movie and about your character Hannah Warner.

A) It’s centered around a normal American family. They have such different things to do during the day. They are members of every club and are very active in the community. It’s a family of four with two teenagers. There is kind of this underlying tone though that everyone wants to be the best that they can. It’s two siblings with a crazy sibling rivalry. Hannah is a dancer so she always wants to get that solo and always wants to be in front and center for the dance competition. Her brother is a wrestler and he really wants to make his weight class. To get those things, they start to compromise food. Their size becomes really important to them throughout the film. Hannah sees her brother always making his weight class and always able to control his food intake, but she feels like she can’t control herself. She becomes addicted to this online site that has this character “ButterflyAna” who is played by Izabella Miko. They encourage each other online to be able to control their diets.

Q) How did you prepare for the role?

A) I  took dance pretty much all of my childhood. I quit because I wanted to do more film acting or just TV. I ended up not having free time because dancers work like twenty hours a week on different forms of dance. I had basic high school dance training and we used to work twenty-five hours a week in the studio. I was pretty confident that I could just get back in shape and do it.

Q) Was that as easy as you thought it would be?

A) Yes, we had a great choreographer that came in and she had me on a regimen of doing sit-ups, pushups and stretching. I had to pretty much do that every day for a few weeks. We just had to get to a place where I was strong enough to do all the turns and be able to dance all day long. We were shooting twelve hour days and, of course, we shot the dances all at once.

Q) Through your research, have you found that teenagers have become more susceptible to these traps? Are younger adults outside of high school falling prey, too?

A) It’s a disease and an addiction. I think of it like a drug addiction because it effects people of all ages, but when you are a teenager you are probably more likely to have a harder emotional time. Your body is changing. A lot of things change and if you start depriving yourself of food to control yourself that way then I think you come up with a lot more emotional issues and the signs will be a lot more obvious than with an adult. But I think people of all ages struggle with anorexia and bulimia.

Q) This is also an issue that comes up for actors, singers and anyone in a spotlighted profession. Is this something you’ve come across in your life?

A) I’ve definitely dealt with it when I was younger. It’s more of a perfectionist’s tendencies. It’s more of a high anxiety thing of wanting to meet this goal and proving to yourself that you can do it. You see Demi Lovato, who has always been this young child prodigy and singer, on Disney Channel and she expects so much out of herself. But I think that when you have that much pressure on yourself it’s very tempting to try and control something that nobody else has control over. You’re like, “I don’t have control over what people say about me and how people feel about me so I will go and control my eating and my food and make sure that my body looks right.” Obviously, that becomes a problem because it turns into an addiction. It’ll start out as, “Oh, I’ll skip lunch today and have a bottle of water.” There is that secret lie where she’ll eat a piece of cheese. She’s like, “When I think I’m going to faint, I’ll have a piece of cheese.” It starts out that way as something you can control, but it turns into a bigger monster. That’s another part of the movie as well. We show anorexia and bulimia as this demon that kind of takes over you and possesses you.

Q) What are some ways you have learned from the movie to cope with these kinds of issues?

A)  One thing that the film taught me so much was how hard we can be on ourselves and how unhappy we can make ourselves. It’s such a played out thing, but it’s true – beauty really is within yourself and people want to see that. They don’t necessarily care about the straight A student super model. They want to get to know you and I think that’s really scary, but if you can really latch on to that and your own identity then it will open you up and you’ll just be a beautiful person because you are you.

Q) What is the message you hope people take away from seeing Starving in Suburbia?

A) I hope they take away that it’s really dangerous to play around with anorexia and bulimia. We have to have zero tolerance towards that and addiction. Also, we have to give ourselves a place to be honest with each other because I think a big part of that disease is accountability. And the more you try to hide it the worse it is going to become.

Q) When the movie airs, are you planning to live tweet and answer some fan questions?

A) I’ll be on Twitter and I’ll be watching it with a bunch of the cast and crew. They’ll have a big screening of it and I’m really excited about that.

Q) What else would you like to share with fans?

A) I’m on the second to last episode of “Tomorrow People.” Watch Monday nights at 8pm on CW!