Confessions of a teen short film actor

By Leila Lois (she/her)

Before I became a dancer, writer, and editor, I was a teenage drama queen.

My mum had always been a huge film aficionada, so my brother and I watched obscure, arty, and foreign films from a young age. I cut my teeth on Pedro Almodóvar and Jean Luc Goddard as a teen; dramatic, intense film makers from Spain and France. The dramatic temperament developed into a love for theatre. After school I went to acting classes, and I started being cast in plays, rehearsing on weekends alongside my other passion, dance.

When I was about fifteen, my mum took a degree in creative writing and photography and thus began my rather unremarkable career as a teen film actor. My mum made two films that I can remember and screened them at a few local film festivals. The first role I starred as was a nun in medieval Britain. When I told a friend in high school that I couldn’t come to a party one weekend because I was ‘playing a nun in my mum’s home movie,’ I quickly realised how weird that sounded. But it wasn’t THAT weird... just a little avant-garde.

We arrived on set just before sunset, at a gloomy, cold stone church. My parents had a caravan as the ‘star cabin’ where me and my co-actor could have a cup of tea between takes. I was glad my nun’s ‘habit’ was woolen, and I wore thermals underneath as it was so icy. Luckily it was a short film, so the filming didn’t take too long. I only had a few lines. I was a nurse to an ancient queen on her death bed, and the film was a bit dark and morose, bats crossing the sky and flitting between the gargoyles. I was glad when filming was over. I had expected being in movies to be glamourous and sets to be much warmer.

At 17, I agreed to act in Mum’s new project, a short thriller called The Upper Window. This one was set in a dilapidated old farmhouse, with a menacing looking goat in the garden, which was a repeated ‘motif’ in the film, featuring in a lot of zoom-in shots. The effect was more comical than scary, but perhaps the funniest part of the whole exercise (in retrospect) was that my on-screen co-star fell (unrequitedly) in love with me and would not take any deterrent. Believe me, I tried my best to put him off. By the end of filming, I was very glad I wouldn’t have to see him again. Spending an intense filming period with someone so irksome I learned quickly wasn’t very fun! I left home for university around 18, and got involved with the ballet club, leaving behind my acting career. My experience of the silver screen wasn’t lustrous, but it was very entertaining, and it is funny sometimes to pull out the old disk when I can find someone who still has a DVD player and have a giggle.