She's only joking, of course, stressing her gratitude that she came of age in England rather than in the madness of Hollywood where former teen star Lindsay Lohan epitomises the dangers of growing up too fast, too young: "Don't you think I'm one of them? Don't you think I'm crazy?" she asks coyly. "No? Well, thank you. But I can totally understand why they go nuts. The level of interest in their lives and the pressure to be perfect, and they're teenagers. And that's what you do, you screw up," she muses.
When Disney-created pop band the Jonas Brothers announced last year that they had pledged to abstain from premarital sex, they were met by a flurry of ridicule and parodied at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards by the less-than-pure Russell Brand. While today's young stars aren't exactly in a rush to follow the Jonas Brothers by going out and buying purity rings, there's undeniably a new awareness at work.
The influential Los Angeles-based talent manager Melanie Greene – who guides the careers of Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick and Paul Bettany as well as Stroma – is, for one, delighted by the change in attitude she sees in today's rising stars: "Freddie is a wonderful role model, and I personally welcome the positive new approach that he embodies. Bad behaviour is becoming less and less tolerated. For any young actor who's serious about their career, good values are important."
Hollywood's Squeaky Cleans today boast a growing membership including Kristen Stewart, 19, Dakota Fanning, 15, and Camilla Belle, 22.
Well educated, The Squeaky Cleans are smart, clean-living and moral. Career-orientated, they keep themselves busy with wholesome activities while saving themselves for the right person. They refrain from attending every opening of an envelope, instead preferring to do charity work, pray or enjoy a light, alcohol-free, supper with friends. Indeed, young Fanning even recently pledged, before her mother Joy and agent Cindy Osbrink, that she won't have a teenage pregnancy or get any tattoos or piercings, at least until she turns 18...
These actors all started young, Fanning in I Am Sam at six; Watson debuting in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, aged 11; Belle starring in A Little Princess at nine, and Stewart making her major movie debut as Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room, aged 11, before finding fame as Twilight's Bella.
Stroma's initiation began a little later, and when he walked up the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince red carpet, he celebrated not only his screen debut but also a 2:1 BSc in neuroscience from University College London.
"Education has always been very important to me," says Stroma, who attended the Hogwarts-style Radley College, a boys' boarding school in Oxfordshire. "I enjoyed every minute there. It was a very good school with great facilities and great teaching. It was lovely and old-fashioned and they really taught their children how to be gentlemen. I was having so much fun that I rarely got homesick."
And, despite the fact he has no skeletons in his closet, after the BBC announced his casting as the Gryffindor Quidditch keeper Cormac McLaggen in the sixth installment of the Harry Potter franchise 18 months ago, Stroma eschewed Twitter, Facebook and all the usual forms of youthful social networking.
"I left Facebook after Facebook groups began appearing about me and suddenly your personal photographs start becoming public property," explains the handsome, blond, 5ft 11in actor.
"When the BBC first announced the new cast members, I hadn't even started filming and yet there were all these websites, all having something to say about me. It was very bizarre. It was mostly complimentary, but because I do a bit of modelling as well, they'd got hold of my portfolio so all those pictures got around too. Now there are message boards about me: all these people claiming to be good sources saying things that are completely inaccurate, like my parents are divorced and stuff, none of which is true.
"It's not like there's any drunken photographs out there of me, it was just more the fact that they were my photos of friends and family; suddenly, everyone could look at them."
In common with his fellow Squeaky Cleans, Stroma lives vicariously on-screen, in a world where these smart young actors can make believe all the things they refuse to do in their real lives – Belle playing the mistress of a man twice her age in her latest film, Adrift, while Fanning was seen fall-down drunk in her recent sci-fi film, Push, although she insists that's only for the camera: "I didn't actually drink for that scene. I didn't even know that I was going to do it that way until the minute I did it," she grins.
Fanning has been dubbed The Million Dollar Baby, and her co-stars already number Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro. Having grown up in such an adult world, this religious girl feels no peer pressure to drink at parties or otherwise misbehave: "That's not something I think about right now and hopefully will never have to experience. I know what's right for me, and I stay on my path."
Priding herself on good behaviour, she adds: "I don't think I'm a brat although I realise that most people think that kids in the business are brats. But you don't have to be a brat to be an actress. I just enjoy it so much that there's no time to do anything like that. And why would I want to, when I'm enjoying myself? My family and friends keep me grounded. I'm a Southern Baptist, and I grew up in the south, so every Sunday I went to Sunday school and I've grown up in a family where that's really important," says the actress.
"I've been to some of those Hollywood clubs with my friends, but we just show up and we're like, 'OK, this is what it is! Great!' and then we leave... I don't even drink alcohol. It's pretty much sparkling water. I've never been a big drinker," says Belle who apparently chose Jonas when forced to make a romantic decision between Jonas and Twilight's Robert Pattinson.
Ask if it's fun being the envy of every teenage girl on the planet, she smiles serenely: "Well, I don't know, you can't help what people say or what people write. People are going to say what they want to say. I am just living my life and I'm perfectly happy," says the actress who still lives mostly with her parents despite the fact she bought her own home – 10 minutes away from them – two years ago.
Likewise Watson sees no harm in waiting. "I'm sure my knight in shining armour will come along at some point, although hopefully not too soon because I have a lot of work to get through and I don't want to be distracted," she says.
While talking with Kristen Stewart on the set of New Moon last month in Vancouver, she sighed at my suggestion that she might have anything in common with Bella, her tormented screen alter ego: "You wouldn't believe how boring I am in real life. I don't have any of the issues that Bella has. If I wake up in a bad mood, I'll go running or do some kind of physical exertion. If you completely exert yourself, you can, like, clear your mind. I don't focus on success and I'm not an impulsive person," she says. "My biggest splurge to date is buying my own home – complete with a studio where my mom can paint."
Neatly placing his knife and fork together on his salad plate, Stroma is nothing but impressed by his Potter co-stars, concluding: "There is that Hollywood scene of young stars who seem to get a lot of bad press, but Emma, Dan [Radcliffe] and Rupert [Grint] are such brilliant role models. There's simply nothing bad to report about them because they're all really lovely and they are down to earth.
"Maybe it's because they work so hard and it's been one film after the other –and they've been doing it since they were 12 or so – and they work such long days. They must have time to let loose or whatever, but they're working constantly so they grew up quick, I think. They learned how to behave themselves and I imagine they must have had good role models around them to look up to."
If Stroma's post-Potter career doesn't pan out, then he already has a back-up plan: "If my dramatic career doesn't work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and other motor neurone diseases. It's a very exciting field of research. But I'd like to continue in drama so it wouldn't be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle."
Hollywood under fire for targeting violent films at teenagers
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Tuesday, 29 August 2000
A year-long US government investigation into Hollywood's marketing of violence is expected to conclude that the entertainment industry has deliberately and aggressively lured teenagers and younger children towards graphic material supposedly reserved for adult audiences only.
The report, commissioned in the wake of last year's shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, is likely to renew an anxious debate about the role of film, television and video games in fomenting real-life violence. It could also prompt new calls for regulation of the entertainment industry, which for the moment largely regulates itself.
According to leaks published in The Washington Post, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report, to be published next month, shows that R-rated films - which teenagers are supposed to see only in the company of an adult - are routinely advertised during television programmes with a large under-age audience. Producers of violent video games have also been found to advertise in magazines aimed at the teenage market.
Perhaps most damningly, the government investigators have unearthed internal marketing documents from movie studios in which violence is acknowledged to be a useful hook with which to capture the youth market.
It is unclear what the impact of the report might be, particularly in the middle of a presidential election campaign in which both major parties have assiduously avoided Hollywood-bashing for fear of alienating voters and West Coast campaign contributors. It will, nevertheless, be the centrepiece of congressional hearings on violence in the entertainment industry, scheduled for next month, and will put pressure on lawmakers to consider regulation of movie advertising, if not of the movies themselves.
Already, a group of 60 psychologists have written to the American Psychological Association lambasting their fellow professionals for offering Hollywood producers advice on how best to market their products to children of all ages - something they call an "abuse of psychological knowledge".
Film studio executives and producers could be called to testify before Congress - under subpoena if necessary - much as they were during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, the committee holding the hearings will be chaired by another presidential player in this year's campaign, Republican Senator John McCain.
FTC reports have a mixed record in bringing about change in marketing practices. RJ Reynolds, a tobacco giant, cancelled its Joe Camel cartoon three years ago after the FTC accused it of marketing cigarettes to children. An attempt to stop the manufacturers of sugar-laden cereals advertising to young children in the late 1970s was initially successful, but the legislation enacted was overturned after two years under pressure from food industry lobbyists.
Teenagers from hell
Dark deeds done because, like, you know, nobody understands me, OK? `The Craft' is a teen movie from heaven
Emma Forrest
Thursday, 7 November 1996
There have been a lot of duff films made about teenagers. We're so used to the likes of Rumblefish and Footloose that it's a shock when they get it right. In Michael Lehmann's 1989 classic, Heathers, the latest craze at school is teen suicide. Like any other high school trend, it belongs to the rich and beautiful. When a dumpy girl attempts to take her own life, she is scoffed at. Heathers works so beautifully because it starts from the premise that its target audience is smart enough to understand the concept of satire. Similarly, Clueless was a huge hit because it is a reworking of an author (Jane Austen) who never once told a lie about human relationships.
The best teen flick since Clueless is The Craft, in which four unpopular high school girls become witches. The good girl, Robin Tunney, comes on like a junior Agent Scully, all cynicism and ginger hair. But it is the evil Fairuza Balk who, like Winona Ryder of Heathers, is going to have a serious career.
Balk is a cross between Christopher Walken and Norma Desmond, always descending Gothic staircases, nail varnish chipped and eyes shining with gleeful nuttiness. Her character, Nancy, uses her powers to kill her mother's abusive boyfriend and to cause the school's bitchy blonde to have premature hair loss. Like the subtly subversive Addams Family Values, The Craft sees growing up as a battle between the smart, brooding dark kids - the blacks, the Jews, the working class - and the cheery blondes. The miserable, the morbid and the Morrissey fans will inherit the earth.
The tabloid press always seems surprised when a child commits a crime. The Craft acknowledges that the young, especially teenage girls, are capable of nastiness unimaginable to most adults. Warned by a friendly bus driver to "watch out for those weirdos", Nancy hisses: "We are the weirdos, Mister." It is a beautiful moment. Tunney, on the other hand, is weak: the only spells she casts are love potions to win the geeky school jock. You get the impression that she is the one who really abuses her powers. Sure, Nancy unleashes the wrath of God and Satan, but at least she doesn't pander to a boy. The girl thinks big.
The Craft has all the components of a great teen film - the obvious star- in-waiting in Fairuza, the requisite lousy make-over, in which they take the prettiest character and put lip-gloss on her (Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club; here it's poor Neve Campbell). The look to copy is Catholic schoolgirl meets Goth - all tartan miniskirts, knee-high socks and black kohl. It also has a hip sound-track (Elastica, Portishead, and a heavy metal version of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows").
The Craft is the bastard child of Carrie and the Brat Packers. After the Loners (Clift, Brando and Dean) and before Friends (bouffant with blonde highlights and her chums with black bob, buzz cut, floppy fringe and centre parting) were the Brat Pack. Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Matt Dillon, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald were an amalgamation of teen rebels, jocks, princesses and psychos wandering in and out of a collection of mid-Eighties John Hughes movies. Their roles were as defined as the Village People's and their acting was just as good.
Brat Pack films were the football pitch where proto-Rachel from Friends and sub-James Dean went to play each other off. For two hours the loner and the spoilt princess would eye each other with distaste, before kissing each other's faces off in the last reel.
Apart from The Craft, The Breakfast Club is the perfect teen movie of all time. Ringwald, Nelson, Estevez, Sheedy and Anthony Michael Hall play five students with nothing in common who are forced to spend a whole Saturday's detention together. Adults do not intrude, except in the form of one corrupt teacher who gets his comeuppance. The film struck a chord because it depicts young people trying to come to terms with each other, rather than with their parents or the establishment. Hey, we're self-centred, but vulnerable. The gap within the generation is generally more interesting than any perceived generation gap.
Ringwald also starred in the seminal Pretty in Pink, as a poor girl going out with a rich guy (Andrew McCarthy). I always found it fascinating because the American idea of "poor" is so twisted: we know Molly is on the poverty line because she drives a Chevrolet instead of a Porsche, and because she wears pink scarves. Ringwald's career never took off because, she claims, she is still seen as a teenager. The same fate befell Michael J Fox when he tried to cross over from the Back to the Future trilogy to the cocaine saga Bright Lights, Big City.
Two alumni are attempting to resurrect their careers via sitcom: Molly Ringwald in the Friends rip-off Townies, and Judd Nelson in the Brooke Shields vehicle Suddenly Susan. Ringwald plays a blue-collar waitress and Nelson a newspaper editor. It's very confusing for someone who's seen The Breakfast Club 27 times. "No," you find yourself yelling at the screen, "some mistake. Molly is the princess and Judd is the rebel, and that's how things have always been."
Fear, out next week, fails on every level at which The Craft succeeds. It is supposed to be a teenage Fatal Attraction, a kind of My First Stalker Movie. It stars Reese Witherspoon and ex-rapper Marky Mark, who I decline to call Mark Wahlberg because I don't think he's earnt it: speaking very quietly does not make you a great actor. Our heroine has a winning combination of prissy face and lockjaw. Marky Mark looks like a muscular pixie. The first half is in the tradition of Liz and Monty in A Place in the Sun, except violent and awful, with unattractive stars. This is not a teen film, but a Teenie movie, for kids who exist purely in the heads of 50- year-old executives. It is as laboured and off the mark as Teenie TV like The Girlie Show and The Word.
The point is, you don't need to cast a teenage boy as a psycho, because teenagers are awful enough as it is; that's what makes them interesting, as The Breakfast Club, Heathers and The Craft prove. By the end of Fear, Mark has killed the best friend, murdered the pet dog, tied up the family and made the object of his affection watch.
Summing up her dislike of Fear, one young girl scoffed, "He did all that and she's not even pretty." Make a Teenie movie and be judged on Teenie termsn
