Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton did not want to be a child actor

1 June 2022

American actor and later blogger Wil Wheaton, whom I came to know through his roles as Gordie Lachance in Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, and later Wesley Crusher in the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, says he did not want to be an actor as a child, and writes that it was a choice his mother made for him.

I can’t remember specifically when I first said “I just want to be a kid,” but I can still see the late 70s smog, and smell the exhaust all around us as I begged her for what feels like years to stop making me do this, while we sat in traffic on the freeway after school, going to and from auditions, day after day after day.