Fred Savage | Olivia D'Abo | Jason Hervey | Dan Lauria | Danica McKellar | Alley Mills | Josh Saviano
"No matter who we talked to in terms of casting
directors, everyone said the same thing. We had to look at Fred
Savage. We screened some footage on him, and all felt strongly
that he would be perfect."
-Steve Miner, Supervising Producer and Director
"Fred is such a normal, nice kid. He's incredibly
knowledgeable about camera and he's really genuine. It's like
working with a Mozart. The kid is just amazing."
-Andy Tennant, Director
"One of the ways the show has changed is that Kevin's
gotten older, and one of the things we dealt with .... is that
you couldn't 'get away' with kid things anymore. And you couldn't
just depend on Kevin's cute little smile to pull you out of a
situation. It's become a little bit more of a challenge to
address his adolescence, and not rely too much on the cuteness of
the situation."
-Todd W. Langen, Story Editor
"The thing that I was probably proudest of about that
episode ["Good-bye"] was that in the long run it was
not specifically a weeper, which I never wanted it to be. I
thought there was a strength in it. I thought at the end of the
episode where Kevin Arnold walks down the hallway, there was a
manliness to him, which I had wanted to accomplish. I wanted an
episode where he accepted being a man."
-Bob Brush
The strength of The Wonder Years, beyond its thoughtful scripts and direction, is the ensemble of characters, and no character is stronger than its lead, Kevin Arnold. Much of Kevin's strength is provided by one of the finest young actors in Hollywood today, Fred Savage. In his hands, between seasons one and four, we've seen Kevin develop and grow as a human being as Savage grew up.
Kevin began as a 12-year-old boy trying to come to grips with the metamorphosis of his life through adolescence and the era he is growing up in. Through the ensuing years, he's become a young adult ready to deal with relationships and take the plunge into his teenage years. Savage, through his considerable talent, is able to take the audience along for his journey through life, making us reflect on our own and perhaps allowing us to learn something about ourselves.
"The auditions were near our house and it sounded like fun," explained Fred Savage in terms of entering a career in acting. "So mom and I went over. I didn't get it and six months later the same director held another audition. I didn't get it again. Six months later, the director called and I was cast in a Pac Man vitamins commercial. I did commercials for two years, then I got into movies. I did quite a few and I was in a TV series called Morning Star, Evening Star. It only lasted six weeks."
This extremely talented young actor had TV roles in The New Twilight Zone, Convicted: A Mother's Story, Run 'Til You Fall, Runaway Ralph and the recently aired When You Remember Me. His film credits include The Princess Bride, The Boy Who Could Fly, Little Monsters, The Wizard and Vice Versa.
"I was called in to read for The Wonder Years, because the producers had seen me in the movie Vice Versa," Savage recalled. "They sent me the script for the pilot. It was just a terrific script, so special and something so terrific, we flew to LA and read for the producers, and then for network approval and they approved."
Of the show itself, he's added, "The beauty is that when my voice changes I can still do the show. Even if I get zits. I see Kevin as just a typical kid growing up in the late 1960's. He's very shy. He has a non-stop fear of the men in his family. His older brother's always beating up on him and everyone's afraid of his dad. He's sort of insecure, especially around girls. But I think he's a cool kid. He's a normal kid.
"The narration really gives me a lot of room to play around with the acting, because it lets me go further than you would be able to go without it. If there wasn't any narration, my [facial reactions to things] would be too much. The narration lets me play around with it. What they do is, when we're filming one of the scenes, there's someone off stage reading the narration where it should be in the show, so we get the timing and the reactions right."
One of Savage's greatest strengths, and one of the things that has given him his reputation as such a consummate professional, is the way he has remained so level-headed despite his enormous success in the industry.
"Usually each episode takes about six days to film, and that's Monday through Friday and the next Monday," he's explained. "Usually I work around nine and a half hours a day. There's a lot of work that goes into one show. It takes hours and hours to shoot one scene that you only see for 30 seconds. I actually never get bored, because when school is in session as soon as we're done with a scene, I go right into school, so that keeps me busy. And when there are ten minutes break or something, I learn new things all the time. You can't learn too much on the show. You ask different questions about everything. That's what I do, and play cards.
"As far as someone coming up and asking for my autograph," he's added, "from my first one to my last one, that's going to be flattering to me and I love to do it. That part doesn't bother me, but sometimes when you're working and you're really tired, you wish you could be other places. But there's a lot of give and take. I haven't been to a school dance, so I'm a freshman in high school and this is my first one, but I have been able to go to the Emmys. The best part is that I get to experience things that no other 14-year old experiences. I get to go to the Emmys, which is just terrific; I get to dress up in tuxedos, then I get the best of both worlds, because I can do that and I can also go to school and be with my friends. I think that's one of the best parts about it."
Savage is quick to point out that he's not worried about what playing a character like Kevin for so long will do to his career in terms of typecasting.
"I don't think I worry about the next role," he has admitted. "You pick things as they come. If The Wonder Years is on hiatus and there are no roles, then I go to camp. There's not really a worry. People I haven't met before, for the first day .... not even the first day, but for the first couple of hours, react to me differently. I think someone's only a celebrity when you don't know them. When you first see someone you say, 'Oh, there's Tom Cruise, there's Tom Cruise!' But when you get to know a person and talk to them, they're just a person and you kind of forget that they're on television or do movies or sing songs. I guess someone's a celebrity or star when you don't know them. Being a star is the same thing as being a regular kid. Friends of mine are football stars, hockey stars or big tennis players, and they get a lot of recognition for that. I feel that's the same thing I do, except with acting. They treat me the same way they treat the captain of a football team, really.
"I definitely want to go to college. Acting is really a big part of my life, but I think education and my family comes before that. If it means taking four years off from acting, I'm definitely going to go to college."
He is justifiably proud of the impact that the show has had on the television audience.
"A lot of adults come up to me and say, 'You know that episode where your family went shopping for a new car, and you went to your father's office? That exact same thing happened to me'," Savage reflected. "They say I'm reliving their lives. I think one of the great things about the show is that in the same episode I'm doing something that people were doing twenty years ago, and kids are still going through the same things today. It might have been fun to live back then for a week, you know? And I could buy all the really good baseball cards for like a nickel a pack. And then I'd bring 'em back.
"I really enjoy acting," Fred Savage concluded. "I'd like to continue it for a while. I do want to go to high school and college. I'd like to direct. On the set they call me 'Little Opie,' because Ron Howard started as a child actor and grew up to direct. He could be a role model for me. I'm always looking through the camera and checking angles. I want to learn all I can."
And one has to believe that he will.
Karen Arnold is what everyone in 1990 imagines a Flower Child of the sixties to be. She is caught up in the sweeping changes of the decade, her consciousness raised as she becomes aware of the events-some quite terrible-taking place around her.
While the character has not developed very far beyond the rebel daughter who rejects her parents' ideals, she is nonetheless a valuable member of the ensemble, providing the necessary fireworks in numerous episodes. Perhaps the most interesting Karen episode besides "Daddy's Little Girl," was season one's "Angel," in which her sleeping-around boyfriend makes her realize that all of the things she believes in may not be exactly the way things should go; that, in a sense, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The hazel-eyed blonde beauty was born a true child of the '60s. Olivia is the second child and only daughter of Michael d'Abo, former lead singer of the classic rock band, Manfred Mann. Her mother, Maggie London d'Abo, was a top model in London for ten years and had feature rotes in two '60s cult classic films, A Hard Day's Night and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Her cousin, Maryam d'Abo, portrayed the leading lady in the fifteenth James Bond film, The Living Daylights.
Olivia spent her first eight years growing up in London, where she attended a French school. Her family then moved to Taos, New Mexico. They lived there for five years, "which was like my '60s," she says. Olivia started getting involved in theatre music and dance. "I was never the cheerleader type," she recalls, "and I was always around very creative people." She studied briefly at the London Royal Ballet Theatre.
At 13, Olivia moved to Los Angeles and appeared in her first commercial. She celebrated her 15th birthday on the set of the feature film, Conan: The Destroyer. Her other feature films include A Dream to Believe, Bullies, Mission Kill, Legend of Wolf Lodge and Beyond the Stars. Her TV credits are Tales of the Weird and Unknown, Not My Kid, Growing Pains, One Big Family, Simon & Simon, The Bronx Zoo, Crash Course and Tour of Duty.
Now that Karen has gone off to college, it will be interesting to see how the writers will work her into the storylines.
"Wayne is Wayne."
-Bob Brush
If there is one character who can be considered a cartoon on The Wonder Years, it would have to be Wayne Arnold. From his introduction in the pilot episode through what has aired of the fourth season as of the time of this writing, Wayne has evolved the least.
He is a bully, nothing more and nothing less. He's also obnoxious, ill-mannered and cares for no one but himself. Wayne's greatest joy is to beat the hell out of Kevin, and to ruin his younger brother's life at whatever opportunity he can find. Watching the episodes, one gets the feeling that even his own family can't stand him, and only tolerate his nastiness because he's one of them.
Although we've seen the barest hints of conscience ("Hiroshima, Mon Frere") and pain ("Growing Up"), Wayne has continued to get nastier as he's gotten older, as witnessed by his continual abuse of Kevin in such episodes as "Wayne on Wheels" and "The Journey." This perpetual barrage has resulted in the audience confusing fiction with reality.
"People always come up and call me a jerk and say, 'Why don't you leave Kevin alone? How'd you like it if I beat you up? Come on, let's fight!' [Fred's] a cute little kid, with the cutest little face I've ever seen. If I were watching TV, I'd take his side too. [By confronting me], they let me know I'm doing a good job," Hervey has pointed out.
The talented teenager who is recognized everywhere from his appearance as the young Rodney Dangerfield in the box-office hit film, Back to School, already has acquired the kind of professional credentials most actors long for. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jason Hervey appeared in his first commercial at the age of four-and-a-half, after an actor friend of the family's insisted that Jason go see his agent.
Jason has since grown up, balancing a tight schedule that includes his acting career, school attendance and excellence in sports. He made his television acting debut at the age of six on the series Sweepstakes, and appeared at the age of seven in a Levi's jeans commercial that won the prestigious Clio Award. His other TV credits include guest starring roles on Trapper John, MD., The Two of Us, The Love Boat, Taxi, Alice, Punky Brewster, Simon & Simon, Together We Stand and A Year in the Life. He starred as a series regular on Wildside, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the last year of Different Strokes. His TV movies include Little Spies, The Last Electric Knight, Daddy, I'm Their Mama Now and The Ratings Game.
His other film credits include PeeWee's Big Adventure, Back to the Future (he's sitting at the dinner table in 1955, demanding that Marty McFly tell him what a rerun is while they're watching a brand new episode of The Honeymooners ), Police Academy II, The Buddy System, Meatballs II and The Monster Squad.
"I want my next role to be something challenging," Hervey has said. "But if they just give me Wayne Arnold-type roles, I'm comfortable with that too. I'll just do a good job at being a jerk."
Jack Arnold cannot be an easy role for Dan Lauria to play. For one thing, nine out of ten times the man is a grump, plain and simple. Certainly in most circumstances this must get repetitious and boring for an actor to play, but Lauria imbues Jack with just enough humor and an occasional smile to make you realize that inside he's a softie, despite his gruff exterior.
Right from the beginning, Jack Arnold was - and probably in many cases still is - the typical American father. He breaks his back every day at work and is undoubtedly unappreciated for his efforts by his superiors, all in an attempt to make sure that his family is provided for. Like Older Kevin noted in the pilot, just because he took care of his family, didn't mean that Jack Arnold wanted to talk to them. Food was on the table, what else did they want? Yet in episodes like the excellent "My Father's Office," "Pottery Will Get You Nowhere....... The Powers That Be," "Faith," "Tree House," "Daddy's Little Girl" and "The Cost of Living," we see his other side; the gentle, caring husband and father who just wants what is best for his loved ones. He may not always be able to demonstrate it openly, but he loves them and would do anything he had to in order to improve their way of life ... or, at the very least, keep things status quo. Now, with Karen off at college and Kevin getting older, Jack is finding himself in the position of having to accept change, something he's not always open to.
Dan Lauria never thought twice about it when he would come home from school and his aunt would order him to "eat your supper and go to sleep." Later, in the middle of the night, she would wake him up with charmed words such as: "James Cagney" or "Jimmy Stewart." Watching classic black-and-white American movies has become a lifelong love of Lauria's. It gave him his first glimmer of what he would like to do in life-act.
But as a kid growing up in blue-collar Lindenhurst, Long Island, Lauria didn't have much chance to think about acting. With his rugged, athletic build, the young Lauria lived and breathed sports, taking up everything from football - he was captain of his high school and college teams - to wrestling and baseball.
He won a football scholarship to attend Southern Connecticut University. One day on the practice field, Lauria was telling a joke to his teammates when he felt someone tap him on his helmet. "You're an actor, son," said Constance Welch, acclaimed head of the Yale Drama (cq) for 30 years. "I need you for a play."
Lauria studied with Ms. Welch over the course of six years. Graduating from college with a double BA degree in United States history and philosophy, he served from 1970 to 1973 as a captain in the Marine Corps. He was stationed in the Pacific and briefly in Vietnam. Lauria returned to Yale, where he did some directing, and then earned an M.F.A. degree in playwriting from the University of Connecticut.
Lauria's professional stage career began in the early '70s at the Washington Theatre Club in Washington, D.C. He has since accumulated an impressive roster of performances in 54 plays. From his home base in New York, he spent 12 years touring on the road and had roles in numerous off-off Broadway productions. Lauria also worked for nine years as dramatic director for the Raft Theatre in Manhattan. He wrote a number of full-length plays that were produced there, among them Game Plan and The Setup, both of which later moved to off-Broadway.
Lauria made his television debut on the daytime soap, Love of Life, and starred on several other soaps, as well as doing a two-year stint on One Life to Live. The chance to co-star with Carroll O'Connor in Brass took Lauria to the West coast. Some of his other TV credits include guest starring roles on Moonlighting, Growing Pains, Spenser: For Hire, LA Law, Wiseguy, Simon & Simon, Hill Street Blues, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Cagney and Lacey and Hooperman. His feature films include Without a Trace and Stake and in the TV movies David and Making the Case for Murder: The Howard Beach Story.
Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper)
"There is only one Winnie, and she is the wonder years.
Winnie is everything good, sweet, true, wonderful, pure and
everything about love at 14."
-Bob Brush
The children of The Wonder Years have gone through a tremendous transformation as they've evolved from childhood to puberty, and perhaps the change is no more evident than in Danica McKellar, who portrays Kevin's true-love, Winnie Cooper.
Our first introduction to Winnie in the pilot episode is of a virtual tomboy, just one of the guys who hangs around with Paul and Kevin. However, on the first day of school, she suddenly, according to older Kevin's narration, has blossomed into a beautiful young woman, who no longer wants to be called Winnie, but, rather, her given name, Gwendoline (although this was short lived, as with episode two she's back to being called Winnie).
McKellar has been quite convincing in her attempts - no doubt very real to her - to deal with her changing life and differing mores of her peers. Also in her friendship with Kevin, the temporary dissolution of that friendship and the eventual blossoming of their feelings for each other into love. As Bob Brush states above, Winnie Cooper, and in turn Danica McKellar, are the wonder years of life.
Born and raised in La Jolla, California, Danica McKellar and her younger sister, Crystal (who happens to play Becky Slater on the series) got their first taste of acting as toddlers in a class at their mother's dance studio. Apart from the fun of it, acting did not make much of a first impression on the little girls, who instead excelled at their dancing.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1982. At the recommendation of Lesley Ann Warren, Danica began attending a children's acting program at the Lee Strasberg Institute. Crystal went too and despite the long, sometimes arduous days, both became mesmerized.
Danica won her first part in a commercial at the age of nine: all you saw of her were her long pigtails behind a beach ball that she was carrying. She went on to do several more commercials before making her television debut on an episode of The New Twilight Zone. She met with so much favor that she was invited back for another episode.
Danica's portrayal of Winnie Cooper is her first starring role on a television series. Most recently, teen singing star Debbie Gibson invited Danica to make a cameo appearance in Debbie's latest music video, "No More Rhyme." The two girls had a great time working together.
An academically gifted student who has won honors and awards for her proficiency in math and French, Danica says her favorite subject is science. In addition, she leads a very full life off-screen. She loves to ski, swim and surf, and has taken synchronized swimming lessons. She also collects stuffed Garfield toys, and is a whiz at playing video games. She recently discovered a real passion for green growing things, and persuaded her mother to let her design and plan a walkway and garden at their house. She plans to attend college.
Elsewhere in this volume, Norma Arnold is referred to as "an intelligent Edith Bunker." To a great degree, this is true. Norma is also the quintessential sixties wife and mother, managing to keep the peace in her household, and happy, to a large extent, is just being there for her husband and children.
As the sixties was a decade of self-discovery and awareness, we have seen her go through quite a change. Perhaps the first sign of this was in season one's "Angel," in which Karen's hippie boyfriend makes some comments about her being a servant to her family, which at first infuriates her and then gives her pause to consider the role she plays in the Arnold household. This is taken a step further with season two's "Pottery Will Get You Nowhere," in which she turns to pottery-making as a way of giving her something more to do. As was the norm at the time, the rest of her family can't comprehend Norma's need for something else. Don't they give her enough to do? Additionally, each episode provides continual development, however subtle it may be. We see her doing what she can to make everyone else happy, while simultaneously having to accept the fact that her children are growing up (season three's "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" and "Mom Wars," and season four's appropriately titled "Growing Up").
Alley Mills brings to the role of Norma warmth, humanity and a maternal instinct that makes you want to pick up the phone and give mom a call.
As a fifth-grader in the exclusive Miss Spence's School for Girls in Manhattan, Alley was given the role of the lion in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which hooked her on acting.
She grew up the youngest of three children in a New York household devoted to the creative arts. Her mother was art editor of American Heritage magazine for many years and her father, Ted Mills, was a television producer, writer and director, later becoming an executive at NBC. Alley's stepmother, Genevieve Mills, a French singer and actress, was often seen on The Jack Parr Show, and her stepfather, Chester Kerr, was publisher of the Yale University Press.
At the age of eight, Alley made her television debut on The Patti Page Show. She studied drama while attending boarding school at Dana Hall, and during the summers, she performed, first as an apprentice, then as a company member, of the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. She made her professional stage debut at Williamstown, along with actors such as Sigoumey Weaver, Christopher Reeve and Peter Evans.
In 1971, after two years at Bennington College in Vermont, Alley switched to Yale, where she was among the first women undergraduates ever admitted. She graduated magna cum laude in 1973 with a B.A. degree in drama and the history of art. The blonde, blue-eyed actress then went to England and earned an M.A. degree at the acclaimed London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. She returned to New York, where she appeared in several off-Broadway plays, toured nationally as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and performed opposite Geraldine Fitzgerald in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of A Collier's Friday Night.
A cross-country camping trip took Alley to Los Angeles. The week that she arrived, she was offered a role in Voices at the L.A. Actors Theatre. That same year, she debuted as a regular on her first TV series, Jim Brooks' The Associates, opposite Martin Short. Among her numerous other television credits are roles on ABC's Moonlighting, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, I Married Dora, Making the Grade, and such TV movies as The Other Woman, The Atlanta Child Murders, Starting Over, To Heal a Nation and I Love You Perfect. She also co-hosted ABC's The Home Show. Her film roles include Diary of a Mad Housewife, Young Lust and Going Berserk.
"Josh Saviano has gone from a little squeaky voiced nerdy
kid, to a guy who has grown a foot in the last year, his voice
has dropped, so those are the real-life things that you play.
We're dealing with that in the show. One of the things you're
going to see happen this year is that Paul Pfeiffer is going to
begin to outgrow his nerd image, because that's just the way it
is. That of course will put more pressure on the Kevin/Paul
relationship, to accept each other as they're growing, to keep
the relationship going and accepting change."
-Bob Brush
Probably since the first group of children gathered in a room to learn, there has been a class nerd; the misfit the other kids pick on. In a typical entry in the television sweepstakes, Paul Pfeiffer would have been that kid. Thankfully on a series such as The Wonder Years, such cliches fail to raise their repetitious head. Here, Paul, like everyone else in the ensemble, is a believable human being.
In the early episodes, there's no denying the character's annoying tendencies, being allergic to everything and reacting to events in so nerdish a fashion that you had to kind of shake your head. As the seasons have passed, however, we've gotten to know him, and even his annoying habits have become endearing. Thank you, Josh Saviano.
Josh Saviano became an actor on an impulse. One day, from his home in northern New Jersey, he and his mother took a neighborhood actor friend to Manhattan to see his manager. On the spur of the moment, Josh asked if he could see the manager too. The five-year-old boy was granted his request. He gave a reading, and a career was born.
Josh went to numerous auditions before winning his first commercial part at the age of six. Soon thereafter, he made his television debut on a clay-animated CBS special, My Friend Liberty, celebrating the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. In Josh's next appearance, he did a takeoff as a young Steven Spielberg in a yet-to-be-released feature, That's Adequate. That was followed by an originally substantial role in Woody Allen's Radio Days, much of which was cut, leaving Josh briefly visible in but one scene.
He then hit the bright lights of Broadway in The Nerd, starring Mark Hamill, which opened in March of 1987. Soon after that, he went to LA for his next feature role, in the New World release, The Wrong Guys, opposite Louis Anderson, Richard Lewis and Richard Belzer. Josh's amazing physical resemblance to Belzer won him the part of the comedian as a child. The Wonder Years is his first starring role on a television series.
Interestingly, like Fred Savage, Saviano has expressed an interest in filmmaking. During the third season, executive producer Bob Brush was quoted as saying that the two youths would be directing an episode of the series. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen.
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