Looking back is an occupational hazard for an actor whose career started at age 7.
Will Wheaton is best known for his roles as Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me, Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a version of himself on The Big Bang Theory.
He wrote his first memoir in 2004, Just a Geek: Unflinchingly Honest Tales of the Search for Life, Love and Fulfillment Beyond the Starship Enterprise.
Now, nearly 20 years later, he re-examines the attitudes of his younger self with annotated comments and new honesty about abuse by his parents, regrets, depression and surviving Hollywood in his new book, Still Just a Geek.
Will Wheaton and his updated memoir, Still Just A Geek Photo: supplied
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Wheaton tells Jesse Mulligan that while reflecting on his experiences written in his first book and how far he’d come, he was able to find compassion and empathy for himself.
“I began to really understand that the person I was when I was turning 30 was in all kinds of pain [and] had not yet reckoned with being a survivor of child abuse and exploitation.
“I was trying desperately to just figure out where I fit in in the world, without really understanding that I had never been given an opportunity to choose the path that I would walk to find that place.”
It was also a second chance, he says, as he took responsibility and apologised for his mistakes in the first book.
“I didn’t understand how privileged I was, I didn’t understand what it was like to be a woman in the world, I didn’t understand what it was like to be somebody who wasn’t exactly like me, and that just came out in stuff that I thought was funny, [but] that’s actually extremely hurtful.”
But in revisiting his past, there was also a lot of personal pain that this time around he wanted to be honest about.
“I was forced to participate in my mother’s lie so publicly, I think that’s a big part of it, is feeling like I maintained the fiction, I believed the lie, I was so gaslighted by her, I believed the lie she told me about being an actor was my idea, I knew it wasn’t true.”
Stand By Me (1986), starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell, based on Stephen King's book. Photo: Collection Cinema / Photo12 via AFP
Wheaton says his feelings were manifested in his role as Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me.
“I wasn’t fully aware of how much enmity my father had for me until I was in my teens, when his abuse became physical rather than just emotional.
“When I was kid, it was subtle things that I couldn’t pick up that I wasn’t aware of, the teasing, the humiliating, the undermining, those sorts of scapegoating things like that, and I think a lot of that is something that I, as a human, had in common with Gordie the character.”
Gordie just wanted to be seen and loved in his home but ends up finding a family in his friends.
“I identified with that so much, I didn’t even know it, I sincerely believed I was acting this character because I was told this whole story about how perfect our life was, about how great everything was,” Wheaton says.
“It is difficult, it has been lately, for me to see myself in that. Not always, but just lately, I think because promoting this book and talking about it a lot has kind of stirred a lot of that up, right now I feel very emotionally close to that little boy and it’s a challenge to watch.”
He also landed the role of Wesley Crusher in the 1987 Star Trek TV series and says he had hoped it would finally please both his parents.
“That was the biggest part about getting into Star Trek, right, all those possibilities that it kind of opened up for me and I was more relieved than anything else, than there’s this other part of me that has been a Star Trek fan since I can remember.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) TV series, starring Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Michael dom, Marina sirtis, Wil Wheaton. Photo: Paramount TV / Collection Christophel / Collection ChristopheL via AFP
The actors who made up the primary cast of the show became “a family” in quite a legendary way in the entertainment industry, he says.
“As the host of The Ready Room, I talked to the actors and creatives from the current incarnations of Star Trek: Discovery, and Strange New Worlds, and Picard, and every single one of them says ‘oh boy, we know all about how much you guys all loved each other and how 30 years later you’re all close and you’re family and we hope that we earn the same relationship with each other that you guys have with each other’.
“That means so much to me because I desperately needed a family and they became that family for me without even knowing it.
“It wasn’t even until last year that I finally had the courage to contact each member of the cast individually and tell them exactly what they specifically and personally meant to me, including Patrick.”
Many in the modern convention culture fell in love with it for similar reasons, he says.
“There’s so many of us who found love in these stories and worlds because we didn’t feel loved or at home or accepted or safe in the real world that we had to live in.
“I’m so grateful to be part of a culture that by and large, with the exception of small pockets of toxic fandom, but by and large says please just come as you are and let’s love this together and let’s have so much fun celebrating this thing that bring joy into our lives for reasons that are unique and special to us individually.”