Overnight Star? Not!

"Acting has always been my life, ever since I was little..."

Some people are just born with it—the talent and the desire to get up on stage and pretend to be someone else; to feel the emotions of a character. That's what it has always been about for DEVON. Today's hottest teen movie star didn't get into showbiz for the money; he certainly didn't get it for the fame. Devon Sawa became an actor because he wanted to be an actor. It's something he has always done.

"I always wanted to do theater..." "...Ever since I was a little kid," Devon reveals, "ever since pre-school. When the teacher said, 'Who wants to be in a play?' I was the one whose hand went up first. Every time. And it wasn't because I saw kid actors on TV, in commercials or anything like that. It was just something I knew I had to do. I still remember my very first play. It was in preschool, and it was called The Marvelous Toy. I was the toy!

"When I got to elementary school, I had the chance to do more school plays and I took every chance I got. I did every since class play and I usually got the leads. Of course, sometimes I was the only one who wanted it! But that wasn't enough, one play a year. So when I was six, I told my mom I wanted to get more involved in acting. That's when I joined this little theater group called the Vancouver Youth Theater.

"We did a lot of plays there. My two favorites were How To Eat Like A Child and Obsession, which was about teenage obsessions, everything from girls to the Men to talking on the phone, stuff like that."

"I also went to film school for more training. I'm not one of those kids who made it overnight, I've had eight years of training and working hard. That's why no one in my home town thought of me as a star or anything. They still don't!"

From the Stage to Commercials... "It was because of the theater group that I got an agent. That's really how I got discovered. The agent was in the audience and thought that I had some talent. He started sending my pictures out and stuff. I began with some modeling, and then went to commercials. I guess the most famous are the ones I did for Nerf Toys—that was fun. I did some others, along with voice-overs—the most recent was one for a cartoon show called Action Man. But that stuff is pretty much behind me now.

To TV's KIDZONE! "I did two television shows in Canada. One was a kids' show called The Odyssey; the other was Kidzone, which I was on for a year. I describe it as a Canadian version of 90210. It was like a soap, but there were these little lessons at the end, like morals. It was a drama series that had eight main characters, a group of Junior High School aged kids> I played a kid named Devon—gee, I wonder how they came up with that!—I was the kid who wanted to be cool, but suffered inside with insecurities. Though it airs mostly in Canada, there are some PBS stations in the USA that carry it. Only it's called Kerrisdale High in the U.S."

"They rotate the cast of Kidzone every once in awhile. One year, Sarah Chalke was in it. She went to play Becky in Roseanna and co-starred with me in Robin of Locksley. The year I was in it, the cast included Jorge Vargas, Chris Hahn, Kea Wong, Jai West, Melissa Barker-Sauer, Maria Dimou and Amber Warnat."

"While I enjoyed Kidzone, being in it made me realize I don't really want to do a TV series. I get more of a challenge playing different characters—which is why I've pretty much decided to do movies from here on in. And luckily enough, when I just finished up my season in Kidzone, I got the part of Junior in Little Giants."

"Take it Slow..." "Everyone asks me for advice about getting into showbiz. Here's what I always say. Take it slow. Don't expect things to happen overnight, because they never do. As you can see, it certainly didn't work that way for me. And I'm glad. I've learned a lot—mainly that I love acting as much as I always did. I suspect I always will. And that's the only reason to get into it. Because you love it, and can't not do it."

Thanks to The German Devon Sawa Club for this article.

Back 12.31.2007.