A former child star has detailed the efforts they took to try and secure the starring role in The Hunger Games.
In 2001 Alyson Stoner rose to fame as the co-host of the Disney Channel’s Mike’s Super Short Show, going on to star in movies and TV shows including Cheaper by the Dozen, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, That’s So Raven and Drake & Josh.
They were also a background dancer for Missy Elliott, Eminem, Outkast and Will Smith.
However, this month Alyson, 31, is publishing a memoir about their time in the spotlight from such a young age.
Part of an excerpt published by Vanity Fair has now detailed how the actor, who uses they/them pronouns, went to desperate lengths to be cast as Katniss Everdeen in the film adaptation of the best-selling novel series The Hunger Games.
‘Katniss was the ultimate role and the ultimate strong female lead: purpose-driven, sharp, athletic, and, thankfully, a heroine whose capacities were more important than physical beauty. But the role was playing with fire for me,’ Stoner wrote.
‘Katniss was characteristically thin — not starving, but small enough to reflect growing up in an underfed district — and muscular from hunting and archery. If I was going to devote myself to checking every box of the character description, I had to commit to strenuous training without fully succumbing to my eating disorder.’
Although Stoner believed their Disney history made being cast a ‘long shot’, they also tried to remain optimistic as it wasn’t unheard of for a director to ‘pluck an unexpected person from the crowd and make them a star, either’.
But in the process of preparing to audition Stoner, who was 17 at the time, was approved to attend a ‘world-renowned medical weight loss camp’ to get into shape for the role despite already being severely underweight.
The program involved ‘two weeks of seven hours of daily exercise on a calorie deficit’.
As Stoner writes, they ‘didn’t recognise the irrational expectations that doctors and society made for Hollywood’, going on to share how at 10 years old, a heart murmur was covered up by a doctor to ensure the actor could continue working.
‘Upon sharing that I had dizzy spells and blackouts, he didn’t mark anything on my file because it “might stop the production company from letting you work”. I followed the doctor’s orders and ignored the murmur like he did, deducing that Hollywood must exist above medicine, above the law, and even above common sense.’
Stoner went on to slam the doctors and trainers who should have ‘never permitted an underweight minor to do seven hours of fourteen-mile hikes, heavy lifting, and high-intensity cardio’.
Despite all the efforts to secure the role, it eventually went to Jennifer Lawrence.
But while Stoner was waiting to hear back about how their auditions went, they went into a ‘full-body emergency alarm for food’ and then ‘completed the biggest binge of my life’.
When eventually told they’d missed out, Stoner ‘sat on my bed with vacant eyes and a distant mind’.
The Hunger Games director Gary Ross said selecting Lawrence was the ‘easiest casting decision I ever made in my life’.
‘I absolutely cast the right person for the role and in my view, there wasn’t even a question who the best Katniss was,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in 2011.
The first Hunger Games movie hit screens the following year and grossed $695.2 million (£929million).
Stoner’s memoir Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything is out on August 12.
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