If you haven’t seen the Hulu documentary Kid 90, it’s a real walk down memory lane for everyone who grew up in the ’90s. And for its creator, Soleil Moon Frye, it was no different making it.
The doc is the product of the Punky Brewster star’s many candid recordings of her friends, who were basically a who’s who of teen stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Sara Gilbert…
And Jonathan Brandis.
Related: Soleil Revealed Her First Sexual Experience Was With Charlie Sheen — Her ‘Mr. Big’
For those of you who don’t remember, Brandis was a hugely successful child star, known for his roles in It, The Neverending Story II, Ladybugs, Sidekicks, and Seaquest: DSV — but known mostly for being THE teen heartthrob in the early ’90s. Sadly the star took his own life in 2003, at only 27 years of age.
In Kid 90, Soleil had so much to say about Jonathan — and had tons of recordings of her fallen friend, including old voicemails he’d left her that she’d just never recorded over for some reason. About filming the doc and reliving her friendship with Jonathan, she said:
“It was incredible sitting in the edit bay listening to the audio recordings and watching the videos and weeping throughout the process. Jonathan [Brandis] and I would have this funny thing where we would fill up each other’s voicemails. So he would leave me these 20-30 minute messages to fill up the tape on my machine, and then in the last 30 seconds be him sharing his true feelings.”
Awww!! Wow! We can only imagine how hard that must have been, albeit healing, to listen to his voice again. She added:
“To hear those messages was a gift — and also it was incredibly painful. It was also so beautiful discovering footage that I didn’t even know was there, like him coming to visit me after the hospital.
For those who don’t know, Soleil had breast reduction surgery after non-stop body shaming. She continued about her generous friend, who left this world too soon:
“I certainly asked myself, ‘Could I have been there more for my friends. Did I do enough?’”
How touching. And she went on to say, too, that doing this digging really helped her and was an incredibly therapeutic process. We can only imagine that, despite pulling up some ghosts from the past, there was much she was able to unravel, too.
About the documentary itself, she admitted:
“The way I remembered our lives had been so joyful, full of light and love and bliss. And then there was also a great deal of pain. I didn’t realize in opening up the Pandora’s Box [of old videos] just what an emotional journey this was going to be. When I set out to make the documentary, it wasn’t focused on me at all. And then as I peeled back the onion more and more and dug deeper, it became this deeply personal coming of age story — both of the teen me and the adult me. I was surprised every step of the way.”
Yeah, we get that. It’s such a hard thing walking back into the past for that very reason. Often things are not how we remembered them, and it sounds like for Punky Brewster it was no different.
For so many, it sounds like being a child star is no easy feat.
What do you think, Perezcious readers? Drop us a comment below! And if you’ve got some nineties nostalgia, we’d love to hear that, too!
[Image via Soleil Moon Frye/Instagram & WENN]
The post Soleil Moon Frye Remembers 'Weeping' Hearing Never-Before-Released Voice Messages From Jonathan Brandis appeared first on Perez Hilton.
