TVGuide.com – Matt Webb Mitovich
If Boys Don’t Cry, what is it that wannabe girls aren’t supposed to do? In Lifetime’s A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story (premiering tonight at 9 pm/ET), Academy Award winner Mercedes Ruehl plays Sylvia, a single mother whose son, Eddie (J.D. Pardo), knows he is supposed to be a girl, and takes steps toward fulfilling that potential. TVGuide.com talked to Ruehl about tackling this true story, as well as her gigs as two other moms ? to Angelina Jolie and Entourage’s “Aquaman.”
TVGuide.com: What sort of research did you do into the real Sylvia?
Mercedes Ruehl: I didn’t meet the real Sylvia until midway through shooting, but the woman who wrote the screenplay, Shelley Evans, and I had many long conferences about the research that she had done with Sylvia. Through that, I understood a lot of the backstory the family had gone through.
TVGuide.com: As an actress, was not meeting Sylvia right away a pro or a con?
Ruehl: It was a good judgment call on the part of the producers to ask me to wait until halfway through, because the actual screenplay, as is almost always the case, creates a character who has a dimension of the real person, but there is then a whole other area of a fictive character, and the first thing you have to be true to as an actor is what’s on the page. It might have been a confusion of the issue to meet the real Sylvia, who is an extraordinary woman but somewhat different from the person I play.