On the new season of 'In Treatment', child actor has it right… mostly

Aaron Grady Shaw is a 12 year old kid from Baltimore (my neck of the woods!) who is about to make a splash.

He’s about to go nose-to-nose with Gabriel Byrne.

Usually I hate child actors… they’re all precocious and act like they 40 years old. But not this kid. I’ve seen clips of him in action (you can see him beifely in the preview below) and he’s great.

He does fall in the trap of wanting to become rich and famous but I’m thinking Gabriel Byrne smacked him around a bit and put some sense in him.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Aaron, who has been riding Amtrak trains and tour buses with his grandmother since age 5 to auditions in New York, delivers a breakout performance as a troubled 11-year-old patient of Dr. Paul Weston, the psychologist-therapist played by Gabriel Byrne. In the four episodes made available for preview, the adolescent performer, who has never had a formal acting lesson, more than holds his own with the Golden Globe-winning Byrne in scenes that essentially become two-person plays. It is quality, adult television at its literate best, and it’s a revelation to see this little kid holding up his half of the dramatic load opposite such a large on-screen persona.

“When I started going to those New York auditions with my grandmother and grandfather, I was only 4 or 5 years old, and I didn’t really understand a lot of what was happening. I had it in my mind that I wanted to be rich and famous – that was all I knew,” Aaron said in an interview last week. “Now, after In Treatment, I think I still want to be famous, but I want to be a great actor, too, if I can. I learned so much, and now I want to try and go all the way with this acting thing.”

What did he learn? How to cry, how to “cuss” at his parents and how to “go to a deep, dark scary place” inside himself and find such emotions on cue. He discovered a way to get inside his imagination and live there until the director says “cut.”

He also learned that the “camera is a truth detector,” that it “sees everything” and so you better be “totally in the moment” and true to what is happening onstage. In short, he went from being a child performer with lots of personality who was good enough to do commercials and a couple of independent films, to being an actor worthy of sharing a stage with the likes of Byrne. Talk about adolescence and coming of age.

Weston’s third session each week is with Oliver, an 11-year-old who is tormented by eating and body image issues, as well as a bully at school. His parents are going through an angry divorce. It is a rich, but complicated and challenging, role.

“I had to learn how to cry for episodes five and six,” Aaron says. “I never had to make myself cry before. And my coach told me that I had to put myself in character, and then think of myself going through the exact same things that my character is going through. So, I had to think really sad thoughts and dig really deep. I had to think, like, ‘What if one of my parents died?’ I had to take myself away from everything else, and be in that little corner. She told me I had to go to that dark, deep place and be there all by myself.”

The tears flowed on cue in episode five, but in six, the script called for Oliver to confront his parents. That, Aaron says, was the biggest challenge of all.

“I had to cuss at my parents, and that was the hardest, because I would never do that to my parents. Daddy would probably send me to an early grave,” Aaron says of his father, Ardie Shaw, senior pastor at The New Cavalry Life Temple in the city of Baltimore. “So I really had to be Oliver that day.”

At first, he told Coleman he couldn’t say the words. But she knew better, and once again, she led him to that “deep and dark place” where he went to learn how to cry an actor’s tears.

“She took me off to the side and told me to imagine something bad happening to Oliver. Then she had me close my eyes and imagine all the bad things Eric had done to Oliver,” he says.

As viewers know from the conversations between Aaron and Weston, these acts range from Eric verbally abusing Oliver for his weight in front of his classmates, to urinating on Oliver’s sneakers at a party held by a girl Oliver was trying to impress.

“And I would just close my eyes, and think about that, and she would say, ‘Eric, Eric, Eric,’ and little words about what he did to me, and then, I just started feeling mad and like I could do something crazy like that to start cussing at my parents. … And then, I did it.”