Def.: Actors and actresses that appeared in media from my childhood/adolescence that ended up being much more significant in my media life now. Not people like Anna Paquin that I never stopped loving and being aware of; people who sort of disappeared from my radar for a while, then became very relevant again.
5. Alexa Vega
(First seen here in Spy Kids, then in Repo! The Genetic Opera.) Let’s just not mention the debacle-except-for-one-minute-of-Summer-Glau that is Sleepover, because I never liked that movie, so it’s not relevant. Spy Kids was my jam when I was, well, a kid (and in a way, a different kind of “I didn’t know I’d love you so much” for Robert Rodriguez). Alexa Vega in general doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, but Repo is for sure my jam now. And that the little spying kid girl grew into “I have a blood disease” Shilo Wallace, who sings the line that the title of this list is from? That’s pretty rad.
4. Vincent Kartheiser
(Here seen in All I Wanna Do and Mad Men. And in the interim, he was on Angel. So that’s rad, too, I guess.) All I Wanna Do is a silly, straight-to-video movie about a girls’ boarding school in the 1960s. I loved it deeply. Even though it was ridiculous. In it, Vincent Kartheiser played the townie boy who courted one of the boarding school girls; now he’s love him/hate him/love him/hate him again Pete Campbell on Mad Men. I don’t love Pete by any stretch of the imagination. But he is a fascinating character.
3. Ben Foster
(Here seen in Flash Forward, and then just in real life.) I remember watching Flash Forward on the Disney channel as a kid. I don’t remember a single detail about it, but I learned that it starred not one but two people I adore. First off is psycho darling Ben Foster, who I think is wonderful in any role he does. Even as gratuitously shirtless flying guy in X3. Especially as the crazyass in 3:10 to Yuma.
2. Jewel Staite
(Here seen in Flash Forward and in a photo shoot from recentish times.) The other star of Flash Forward was, apparently, my baby Jewel Staite. And that makes me very happy. I wish I remembered a damn thing about the show, I really do. I also want to find recordings of it to watch some day, because I’m sure it was awesome. And I wanna know if tiny me related to her on that show like big me does to Kaylee on Firefly. I think tiny me was a little Whedonmafiapsychic or something.
1. Eliza Dushku
(Here seen in Bring it On and a Dollhouse promo shot.) As I’ve before mentioned. I loved Bring it On to an unhealthy degree. And I was peripherally aware of Eliza’s career between then and my Great Whedon Revelation, but it wasn’t the same. She was my favorite in Bring it On, and I love her in Buffy and Dollhouse now. (Even if Buffy was technically before Bring it On, I wasn’t aware then. So yeah.)
–your fangirl heroine.
