Aaron Stanford: Fear, terror and a panic attack - welcome to the acting business
By David A. Keeps
April 1, 2002 Aaron Stanford’s first rehearsal for his first movie, the Sundance hit Tadpole, was a tad intimidating. “I had to kiss Sigourney Weaver,” recalls the 25-year-old Westford, Massachusetts, native. “I had a little heart attack, and after that I didn’t have much to be nervous about.” The film was “a complete sprint,” shot in 14 days on digital video, but Stanford’s performance as Oscar Grubman, a Voltaire-quoting 15-year-old whose raging hormones are locked-and nearly unloaded-on his stepmother (Weaver), steals the show. The youngest son of academics, Stanford-inspired by obsessive viewing of Gary Oldman in State of Grace (1990)-earned a theatre degree at Rutgers. “You hear everyone telling you you’re insane to try,” says the actor. “But I had to go after it. I’m not good at anything else.”

Next month, Stanford gets to act his age, playing a tantrum-throwing movie star in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending. “I was hired two hours after the audition,” he recalls. “And spent the rest of the movie in abject terror of being fired.”