The Commander's Circle

For Hayden

I wasn't going to write this week. Then I realized I had to.

This piece was written for my Commander's Circle community. Please don't excerpt, republish, or quote from it elsewhere without reaching out to me first. This is an account of what I can talk about from personal experience, from being an actor and from my time spent with her.

I want to say, first, thank you. The outpouring of love for Hayden this week has been its own kind of gift — to her family, to everyone who worked with her, and honestly, to me. It has reminded me of something I don't think most people understand, and I want to spend this newsletter trying to explain it: what it actually looked like to watch this particular person work. Because I don't think the world ever fully understood what she could do. I'd like to try to give her that. Especially now.

What Acting Actually Is

I played Hayden's mother for three years on Guiding Light. People hear "child actor" and they picture someone who memorized lines well for her age. I need you to understand that learning your lines is nothing. It is the most basic requirement, the equivalent of knowing your letters. Knowing those letters is great, but it is only what you do with them that turns them into something that can convey a story.

Acting Is a Craft That Rarely Becomes Art

The craft of acting is the choices — the specific, considered decisions an actor makes about how to carry a line, where the character is coming from emotionally, what she's protecting or chasing in a given moment. That homework happens alone, before anyone calls action. This is a learned craft and takes most actors years to do well. But it is only the beginning.

The art of acting only happens with another actor or group of actors. It happens when another actor isn't just performing their own lines at you, but is actually with you — remembering their choices, but then letting those choices be colored by the moment, by what the other actor is doing. To experience the art you have to be willing to put your attention fully on the other person, to take it off yourself and let what you see change you in the moment. It is that moment, created between two people where the art exists. It requires the craft done well, a willingness to completely trust the other person and senses so finely tuned they pick up on the slightest emotional cue. Getting to the art is rare between adults. It is close to impossible to find working with a child.

Hayden could do it. At nine years old, she could do it.

And soaps make it harder still. These aren't multi-take film shoots with a wide shot and then each individual's close up. It's largely one take. Directors are managing a dozen technical things at once and rarely have time to give acting notes. Which means the actor must take care of themselves, both before the scenes are shot and once they are on the set. Unless the mistake is egregious, the actor is the one who has to notice, in real time, if something is going wrong in the scene — and either fix it in the moment or ask to go again.

There's a famous story about Hayden, and it illustrates her unique ability. Here it is: In the middle of an intense scene, Hayden realized her scene partner, Michael O'Leary, was blocking her light, putting a shadow on her. (Let me tell you how hard that is to notice for most adult actors and how important it is to notice. If you don't have light on you, the camera can't catch that expression in your face, in your eyes, and you as the actor can't tell the story.) Hayden stopped mid-scene and said, "I'm sorry, can we start over?" Everyone jumped to attention wondering what was wrong. And then she very politely said, "Mr. O'Leary, you're in my light." They reset and started the scene from the top. Afterward, when Michael was apologizing to her, she told him, "It's okay, Mr. O'Leary, it was better the second time anyhow."

Think about what that required. The technical awareness to notice lighting mid-emotional-scene. The confidence to stop a working adult actor, respectfully, without breaking the moment for either of them. The emotional intelligence to read her scene partner's feelings well enough afterward to reassure him. And underneath all of it, the sustained focus to track her own emotional arc, read her partner's emotional cues, hit her blocking, and make every single one of those things look like it was happening to her for the first time — organically, not as choreography. Most adults can't do all of that at once. Most nine-year-olds have no framework for even understanding what's being asked of them.

Hayden had both. That's not precocity. That's a gift.

The Question None of Us Are Innocent Of

Lesley, Hayden's mother, taught her that. Nurtured it, shaped it, put in the work on set the way a parent does when they see something rare in their child. I bring this up because I know there is a lot of judging of Lesley out there and I want to give everyone something to think about.

The Line of Pushing Too Much or Not Enough

Following the Knicks championship win, we collectively admired Jalen Brunson's father for making his son practice his basketball skills daily until it built the athlete Jalen became. We look at Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, even Mozart, and see how the world would never know these greats without their parent's push. Then we look at ourselves as parents and quietly wonder if we didn't push our own children enough. We question ourselves and wonder if not pushing was our own selfishness of not making time. We wonder, were we right? Were we wrong? In the end, we don't know.

I don't think any of us who are parents get through the parent experience without wondering where the line is. You see a talent in your child and you have to decide, over and over, in a thousand small daily choices, how hard to hold it. Push too little and you may watch a gift that never reaches its potential. Push too much and you risk something else entirely. I don't know a parent who is certain they got that balance right.

I want to be careful here, because I don't know of all the complications between Lesley and Hayden through the years. I know Hayden wrote her own account of what that pressure cost her, and I have no doubt that her feelings were deep and real. I also had a mother who pushed me, and I had feelings of resentment at times and feelings of gratitude at other times. I'm also a parent. So I can hold two things at once: Hayden's truth about what she experienced, and compassion for a parent making impossible, high-stakes calls with no instructions, the way all of us do, just without the whole world watching the results. Our mistakes don't play out in public. Hers did.

The Business of the Entertainment Business

There is another aspect that people forget too. Along the way there were many individuals that sought to control Hayden for their own gain. People who tried to sway Hayden to their side so they could be the one in control. I certainly didn't experience it on Hayden's level and I didn't experience it at such a young age. But I did have a manager who convinced me that my agent was not doing me justice so that he could be my most trusted advisor. I dropped my agent and only later discovered the manager was the one not doing right by me. He poured poison in my ear. I didn't know it until many years later. I have to imagine for Hayden that happened hundreds of times, all the time. All adding up to her not knowing who she could trust, both off and on the set.

What People Don't Understand About the Other Thing

People have judged her for the drug use. I'd ask anyone doing that to read Beth Macy's Dopesick, which lays out — carefully, clinically — how opioids alter brain chemistry to the point where it becomes physiologically difficult to think the way you did before you started using.

I have a friend who used heroin decades ago. Clean for twenty years when she told me, "There isn't a single day I don't wake up and think about using that drug again." Sit with that for a second. Most of us can't keep a Monday diet resolution past Tuesday. Now multiply that pull by ten, and imagine it never, ever going quiet.

The Question as to Why So Many Actors, Child or Adult, Have Struggles Is Something Almost No One Knows, Not Even Some Actors

Here's what I actually think happens to some of us, and it's the thing I most want this newsletter to leave you with. When one is able to reach the art of acting that I described above you enter a creative flow state with the other actor. It is sublime. It feels like flying, a human connection so total it is life in technicolor — and you cannot manufacture that alone. A painter can go back to the canvas any time they want. An actor has to wait for the right casting session, the right role, the right material, the right partner, and even then it isn't guaranteed — some actors are so focused on themselves you can never feel that flow state with them. But here's the thing, once you've felt it, you know exactly what you're missing when it's gone, and you long for that creativity in a way that doesn't have an off switch.

I think that longing, and the one my friend described about heroin, are similar. Not the same thing — I'm not equating them — one is for a this combination of creativity and human connection and the other, the drug, is for an individual state. But both are a wanting: in acting it is a hunger for creative connection so intense that you feel life is a little less when you can't have it.

What I Am Wondering Now, After All the Interviews

Hayden was extraordinary because she could get to that place I just described at nine years old. I now wonder if some of what came after, the years of struggle people were quick to judge, may have been the cost of a nervous system that had learned, that young, exactly what it felt like to be truly, fully connected in that unique way — and then had to go looking for it, without a scene partner, without a director, without the safe place to feel it.

I have always maintained that no child should be in the entertainment business, no child except Hayden. With her extraordinary talent, her emotional IQ, her executive functioning at such a young age, when she walked on the set you felt all her lights come on. I always say it was like watching a fish placed in water.

The natural pull is to wish she never stepped on a set but I can't help remembering the aliveness in her, her glow, her wriggling with excitement. And most of all, seeing her know in the core of her being that she was really good at this acting thing.

It might be hard to see the many scenes we played on Guiding Light, but go watch Remember the Titans, that was shot during the time we worked together. You will see that glow, that confidence. You will feel her joy.

All I Know for Sure

Of course, I can only speak for her time with us on Guiding light. This I know for sure: Grant Aleksander, Tina Sloan, Ron Raines and I cherished her, protected her, and tried to make sure she felt safe every day. And every one of us would have protected her if we thought she was suffering or unhappy during her time with us. Hayden skipped into the studio. She ate her lunch in my dressing room or Grant's, she colored with me there, she went to the studio gym to sit with Grant while he did his workout. She trusted us because we made her feel safe off the set. And I trusted her completely on that set. In those scenes we were not separate, we were more like one person. That doesn't happen with everyone you work with, not even close. I got to hold onto her for three years while we made art together.

Grant sent me an article that had a quote from Hayden talking about her time with us. She said, "If I saw them today, I would run to them like I was their child."

Oh Hayden, how I wish I could run to you too.

With love and thanks,