The
rebirth of Kirk Cameron
BY
Dan Ewald
His adolescence
was nothing like yours, unless your name happens to be Scott Baio
or Justin Timberlake. At the age of 14, Kirk Cameron was receiving
10,000 letters a month while starring as Mike Seaver on the hit
sitcom Growing Pains, which ran on ABC TV from 1985 to
1992. For children of the ’80s, Mike was the coolest kid
on television. Reagan-era children (like myself) were too young
to appreciate the Fonz, but we dreamed of having the brown leather
coat, the hip parents, and the well-timed wisecracks of Mike Seaver.
Cameron was making $50,000 a week
but had to deal with such things as lovesick teenyboppers and kidnapping threats.
“Kirk had a couple of ardent fans who kind of went over the top —
stalkers, in fact — and that frightened all of us to some degree,”
says his co-star and TV dad Alan Thicke.
In 1986, the kid with the ear-to-ear
grin described his life to 16 Magazine:
“I’m just going to have to get used to the uncomfortable parts,
like not having a lot of privacy. Interviewers want to know if instant stardom
is overwhelming and I answer no, it isn’t — it is a lot, but I
can handle it.” This optimistic attitude didn’t stop fellow TV
star Michael J. Fox from giving Cameron a tip:
“Don’t let this stuff
go to your head. Don’t think you’re better than anyone else.”
Did it work? More than a decade
after Growing Pains left the air, Kirk Cameron — his boyish good
looks still intact, albeit a tad rougher — contemplates that thought
while sitting at a booth in IHOP, picking at a ham-and-cheese omelet. “That’s
a hard question,” he sighs. “Even the most arrogant of people
would say, ‘Well, of course I haven’t let it go to my head.’
So you probably ought to ask someone else to get an objective opinion. But
I think it was good advice, and necessary because it’s very easy to
let things go to your head. If you give a kid candy for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner, of course he’s going to have a warped sense of who runs
the world.”
Cameron, 32, says he viewed the
world as though he were the center of it and began expecting things to be
done for him — because they were. “Anything I wanted was given
to me. That was what I expected because that was my reality.”
‘There
is no God’
People presumed Kirk Cameron to
be the happiest guy on the planet. He was driving around in sports cars. He
flew to exotic countries for vacations. He was offered lead roles in movies
without having to audition. While all his dreams were coming true, Cameron
likens that time in his life to biting into a chocolate bunny on Easter and
realizing that it’s hollow. “There was this aching, empty feeling
that left me very disillusioned with the business I was working in,”
he says. “What else was there? What else did I have to shoot for? I’d
basically reached the top of the ladder, and I was 18.”
He sat on the set of Growing
Pains contemplating what life was all about. A far cry from
the superficial character he played on the show, Cameron was a thinker. “It
was difficult to discuss things with people because they knew me on a celebrity
level,” he says. “You couldn’t really get into conversations
like that. As a teenager, I wasn’t comfortable talking to my parents
about it and didn’t have any true friends that I could really sit down
and talk with.”
Although he had only been to church
once or twice in his life, Cameron had seen hypocrisy and self-righteousness
among those who believed in God — so much so that he began to consider
himself a “devout atheist.”
“As far as I was concerned,
thinking people didn’t believe in fairy tales,” he remembers telling
himself. When asked in interviews about God, the teenager would respond: “There’s
no God. You can’t prove that there’s a God. Absolutely not. You
guys are performing your own lobotomy in order to believe this kind of stuff.”
Change of heart
An actor on the set invited the
teen star to his church in Fullerton, Calif., where well-known preacher and
author Chuck Swindoll was then pastor. Although he was hesitant, Cameron agreed
to go. It was there that he heard a message about God’s holiness, about
judgment against sin, and the concepts of grace, mercy and the Cross.
“I left the church with my
head filled with questions,” says Cameron. “I felt guilty when
he talked about sin.”
One day, after dropping off his
friend at acting class, Cameron pulled his sports car to the side of Van Nuys
Boulevard in Studio City. The thought occurred to him that if he were to die
in a car crash that day, he wouldn’t go to heaven. This is too important.
I don’t want to be wrong about all this,
he thought. “I prayed the clumsiest prayer that’s probably ever
been prayed,” he remembers. “I closed my eyes, because I thought
that’s what you were supposed to do when you pray. I said, ‘God,
if You are there, please show me. If You are real, I need to know.’
”
He started studying the Scriptures.
“I couldn’t get enough of the Bible,” he recalls. “I
read about this amazing God who sees my thought life, who considers lust to
be adultery, who considers hatred to be murder, who sees all the sins that
I’ve committed that no one else knows about — the secret arrogant
attitudes. And instead of giving me what I deserved, He’s provided a
way for me to be forgiven and changed.”
Baby-Christian
steps
Cameron’s newfound Christian
faith began to change the teen heartthrob. Unfortunately, not all of the changes
seemed that positive to his colleagues on the set of Growing Pains.
“When he came back from [the
summer hiatus in 1990], Kirk was very different,” producer Steve Marshall
told the cable series E! True Hollywood Story.
“No practical jokes, very serious. If he wasn’t in a scene, he’d
go away.”
Cameron’s TV mom Joanna Kerns
agrees. “Kirk kind of pulled away from all of us in a way that made
it very odd suddenly,” she told E!.
“We were all very close, and then we weren’t.”
“He seemed kind of sad, and
we thought that was odd for somebody who had found religion,” adds Marshall.
“Usually religion brings joy into a person’s life, and he didn’t
seem very joyful.”
As he got deeper into his faith,
Cameron found himself wanting to be an even stronger role model in the public
eye. He now objected to sexual innuendoes, such as a scene that actually depicted
a bad dream his mother was having. Mike Seaver was to be in bed, without his
shirt on, lying next to a beautiful girl. The writers wanted him to say the
line: “Hey, babe. Good morning. By the way, what’s your name again?”
Immediately his mother, Maggie Seaver, would bolt up, wake from her nightmare,
and be thankful it was just a dream.
“You didn’t know it
was a dream at first,” says Cameron. “It was for shock value.
At the time, I felt really uncomfortable with that.” He told the producers,
“Surely we can think of something else that would make Maggie break
out into a sweat.” But the writers felt like the teen star was exerting
too much power.
“That was huge,” writer
Lelani Downer recalls. “That was the night the writers said we’re
quitting and going home. We were not going to budge on it. It was like a hostage
situation.”
Gung-ho about his newfound principles,
Cameron began to further ostracize himself from the other cast members. He
fell in love with his co-star Chelsea Noble — an actress who also was
a Christian — and they began spending their free time together. By the
time they married in 1991, none of the Growing Pains
cast members were invited to the ceremony.
While “cleaning
up” the show might have been a gallant effort (even though
the show was rather innocuous as far as sitcoms go), the actor
admits he made some mistakes common to new believers
— such as distancing himself so far from the world that
he was no good for anyone. The show ended in 1992, and Cameron
gladly went his separate way.
In time, however, he realized his
missteps. In 2000, he rejoined his former cast members for a Growing Pains reunion movie. With a decade of spiritual growth under
his belt, he stood in front of his TV family and apologized. “I was
a 17-year-old guy trying to walk with integrity, knowing that I was walking
in the opposite direction from many other people. I didn’t have the
kind of maturity and graceful way of putting things perhaps that I would now,”
he says.
Cameron’s fellow actors immediately
embraced him. “He is [once again] the Kirk that I remember,” co-star
Jeremy Miller told E!. “He is
the fun-loving, playful, generous, amazing person that we all grew to love.”
All grown up
Nowadays, Christian audiences know
Cameron for his role in the Left Behind
films, which are based on the best-selling book series. Left Behind
II: Tribulation Force, premiered in the fall of 2002 on home video.
Cameron is excited to be involved
in Christian films, despite their decidedly lower budgets. “Instead
of staying away from a small-budget, independent movie,” he explains,
“I wanted to get involved and say, ‘What can I do to help raise
the bar and make it better?’ I think we’ve been able to do that
from the first to the second movie.”
One of the perks of doing Left
Behind is the opportunity to once again work with his wife,
who is also featured in the films. Cameron and Noble live in a Spanish-style
home on an oak tree-lined acre of property near the Santa Monica Mountains.
The house is perfect for their large family.
“Chelsea and I knew we wanted
to have a big family,” says the happy father of five. “We got
talking about the subject of adoption. We decided, ‘Wow, there’s
a lot of kids who need families.’ ”
The couple adopted their son, Jack,
and soon thereafter were surprised to find that Noble was pregnant. “Olivia
being conceived — it wasn’t something we were planning,”
he says. “We were very surprised, but at the same time, thrilled.”
They adopted one baby per year — for three more years — bringing
the brood to their present total. And Cameron hints that the family could
possibly grow even larger in the future.
In addition to the Left Behind movies, the actor is currently enthusiastic about his partnership with
Way of the Master Ministries (www.wayofthemaster.com), a program designed
by author Ray Comfort to teach Christians how to share their faith effectively.
It’s something that might have helped Cameron when he first became a
Christian at the height of his popularity. He now writes for the Way of the
Master Web site while considering acting offers, which he admits aren’t
quite as frequent as they were a decade ago.
Yet Kirk Cameron isn’t worried
about his mainstream Hollywood career. “My job is my job,” he
says. “I’d love to be on a hit television show again, but not
for the sake of being on the cover of all the magazines. I’d do it simply
because I was putting something great into the hands of American families.”
Cameron takes a final bite of his
omelet and pushes his plate away. “As I’ve matured as a man and
a Christian, I’ve gone from an actor who’s become a Christian
to a husband and a father who wants to lead his family in integrity and in
living a life of faith.”
Not bad for a guy who once basked
in the limelight and wore his atheist badge with pride. It was
a bumpy journey, but that cool kid with the leather jacket and
smart mouth is all grown up.
Dan Ewald
is a free-lance writer in Los Angeles, Calif.
E-mail your comments
to pe@ag.org.
