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Big screen's clean team
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July 29, 2009
By Gill Pringle
'I don't drink, I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and I don't take drugs. I tried a drink a few years ago, but it just wasn't my thing so I simply stopped," says Harry Potter newcomer, Freddie Stroma, 22, matter-of-factly.
Demure not decadent, polite not pouty, sober not sloshed: a new breed of Good Boys and Girls - call them The Squeaky Cleans - is replacing Hollywood's naughty bunch. Their role models are Natalie Portman and Jodie Foster, not Lindsay or Britney. They worship culture, not cocaine, and their favourite haunts are gyms and museums, not nightclubs.
Stroma's co-star and Potter "love interest" Emma Watson, 19, echoes those sentiments: "For me, I didn't have time for that (to rebel). I was working too hard to be the rebellious teenager, though I'm sure when I hit my 30s I'll go crazy. I'll have this rush of hormones and madness."
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 as well as Stroma - is, for one, delighted by the change in attitude she sees in today's rising stars: "I welcome the positive new approach Freddie embodies. Bad behaviour is becoming less and less tolerated."
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 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, Fanning even pledged, before her mother Joy and agent Cindy Osbrink, that she would not have a teenage pregnancy or get any tattoos or piercings, at least until she turned 18.
These actors all started young, Fanning in I Am Sam at six; Watson debuted in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, aged 11; Belle starred in A Little Princess at nine, and Stewart made 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 Half-Blood Prince red carpet, he celebrated not only his screen debut but also a BSc in neuroscience from University College London.
"Education has always been very important to me," says Stroma, who attended Radley College, a boarding school in Oxfordshire.
"I enjoyed every minute there. It was a very good school with great facilities and great teaching."
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 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."
The Squeaky Cleans are all super-accomplished: Watson - who speaks French fluently - scored 10 A symbols in all her A-levels last year and has enrolled for an Ivy League degree, while classically trained pianist Belle - who's dating Joe Jonas - speaks Spanish and Portuguese, and the precocious Fanning learned to read at the tender age of two.
Belle kick-started her acting career as a child model: "When I started at nine months old I modelled in commercials, but I stopped once I started doing films," says sensible Belle, who rejects modelling offers as often as she does party invitations: "I don't live that Hollywood life; I don't take part in it. Obviously I'll go to events, but very rarely. I'm not showing up just to show my face."
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 clear your mind. I don't focus on success and I'm not impulsive," she says.
"My biggest splurge to date is buying my own home - complete with a studio where my mom can paint."
Stroma is nothing but impressed by his Potter co-stars.
"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 grow up quickly, 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: "I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and other motor neuron 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."
- The Independent
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