My Cool Friend Michelle
The moment I knew I was going to get along very well with Michelle Trachtenberg, she was in an ice-cube battle with Jonathan Lipnicki.
It sounds impossibly ’90s, and it was — Harriet the Spy play-fighting with the kid from Jerry Maguire, backstage at the 1997 Kids’ Choice Awards, in front of the girl who played Matilda. But it stuck with me for a different reason: She was being nice to him.
Jonathan was five years younger than her, but she didn’t treat him like an annoyance. I knew so many older girls who were mean to younger kids, but she wasn’t, even when Jonathan was trying to slip an ice cube down the back of her shirt.
“Oh no, you don’t!” she said with a laugh, turning on him with her own ice cubes, and he giggled maniacally.
I had been nervous to meet her. She was the star of Harriet the Spy, the movie that everyone at school talked about, the character who spied on everyone and knew the whole neighborhood’s business. Michelle was only two years older than me, but in preteen years, that is an eon. At age 9, I was forever impressed by, and intimidated by, Cool Older Girls. Michelle Trachtenberg seemed to me the epitome of the Cool Older Girl: beautiful, stylish, funny, from New York — so much cooler than my hometown of Burbank, California. I couldn’t imagine she would want to talk to me, let alone be my friend.
But as soon as we were introduced, she gave me a huge, warm smile, then looked at my dress and said “Eurokids, right? I love that store!”
I nodded and felt a surge of joy. I shopped where the cool girl shopped!
To my surprise and delight, she wanted to keep talking to me. Not only was she nice, I realized, but she was remarkably intelligent. Yet she managed not to be condescending and didn’t try to impress with big words, the way other kids (including me) might have. She was smart, but she was also self-possessed, and didn’t need to show off.
Before we left the awards show, Michelle told me she’d be seeing me again: We were both going to be at the Audrey Hepburn Foundation’s Hollywood for Children charity film festival in New York in a few months. I told her I couldn’t wait.
That’s where I would find out it wasn’t just me: Everybody fell in love with Michelle Trachtenberg.
When I started acting at 5 years old, my parents made it known that no matter what happened, I would live the most normal childhood possible. As time went on, though, life hardly ever felt normal — except, ironically, when I was with other child actors.
Imagine a group of child and teen actors hanging out together, and you probably think the worst: everything from being shitty to wait staff to wrecking hotel rooms like mini rock stars. But nearly all the child actors I knew spent their time volunteering with charities, and so did I. It kept us grounded, made us feel like we were giving back, and was also a great way to make friends.
“We were all in that space as actors, but had it not been for these charities, we probably wouldn’t have been able to bond on the level we were able to,” says Vanessa Lee Chester, who had met Michelle on the set of a Panasonic commercial when they were both 5. She later went on to star in Harriet the Spy as Harriet’s best friend, aspiring scientist Janie. “I remember really looking forward to it. I was like, ‘I know I’m helping people out, doing something I would already want to do — but I’m doing it with all my friends!’”
At the same time the Pussy Posse was wreaking havoc around New York, my group of child-actor friends were making PSAs about wearing bicycle helmets, walking in fashion shows to support Multiple Sclerosis research, and giving Christmas gifts to children in hospitals. That group included Chester; Ashley Johnson; Andrew Keegan; Jonathan Taylor Thomas; Rider Strong; Lindsay Felton; Mae Whitman; Bryton McClure; Michael Fishman; Raven-Symoné; Miko Hughes; Taran Noah Smith; Zane, Paris, and Reeve Carney; Tia, Tamera, and Tahj Mowry; Adam Wylie; and many more.
After, we’d gather at a restaurant — usually Planet Hollywood — or someone’s home. Our parents were always present, and the teenagers would also keep an eye on the preteens. We’d sing Beatles songs and showtunes our parents taught us in the car, and pretend to be secret agents with walkie-talkies borrowed from generous security guards (“Come in, Thunderbird! This is Firebird! Over!”). We weren’t “child stars”; we were nerds.
“We fucking lived for those nights at Planet Hollywood,” Chester says. “We were all too young even to go to teen clubs, so these were our social moments.” Michelle had donated her spy belt from Harriet to Planet Hollywood, and Robin Williams gave one of his Mrs. Doubtfire dresses. For us, it felt less like a kitschy theme restaurant and more like being at a relative’s house, surrounded by family knicknacks.
Michelle was a later addition to the group, but she quickly became the heart of it. When she told us a set anecdote or a shaggy dog joke, in her slight New York accent — “Harriet” was “Haah-rriet, never “Herr-riet” — everyone would listen.
That wasn’t a surprise to Danny Tamberelli, who worked with her on the Nickelodeon sitcom The Adventures of Pete & Pete (she played his best friend, Nona). She was great at bringing people together, and was “immediately a sibling” to him, he recalls. Her second week on set, he decided to stay in his trailer and play his bass instead of going to lunch. “She hid the auxiliary cord from me,” he says, because she was annoyed that he wasn’t hanging out with her at lunch. “I got the message,” he says with a laugh. “I had two little sisters!” And now he had three.
Harriet was the perfect role for her, says Tamberelli, because she was always inquisitive. A studio teacher on Pete & Pete once taught him how to do a card trick; he was able to trick adults on the set, but he couldn’t fool Michelle. “She sniffed it out so quick,” he says. “She was like, ‘Let me shuffle the deck.’ I said, ‘No, no, no! You can’t shuffle it! You can’t shuffle it!’ She blew me up.”
Michelle can do anything, I remember thinking — until the night someone handed her a mic and said, “Hey, Michelle, freestyle rap for us!” She tried for about ten seconds, but couldn’t think of anything to say besides just the word “rap” over and over again, and dissolved into giggles.
That April of 1997, while we were at the film festival, marked one year since my mother had died. Being with the group in New York felt safe, the one place my mother’s absence didn’t haunt me. Still, on the anniversary of her death, I burst into tears. Michelle and everyone else rallied around me, giving me hugs and doing whatever they could to make me laugh. This so impressed my normally cold grandmother that she allowed me to have a hotel sleepover with my best friend of the group, Paris Carney, a sweet child actress and singer.
And what did we talk about at the sleepover? Michelle, of course. While she had been trying and failing to freestyle rap in the other room, some of us had been playing Truth or Dare, and another child actor friend had made a big revelation.
“He said he was in love with Michelle,” I said as we were brushing our teeth.
“Yeah, not even a crush, but in love!” Paris said. This was particularly scandalous to us because she already had a boyfriend. She was dating Paris’s sweet and funny older brother, Zane, a child actor and a regular on the CBS sitcom Dave’s World. It was a very middle-school relationship, no more than sitting next to each other and occasionally holding hands, but everyone knew they were together.
“He kept saying how jealous he was of my brother,” she added.
“He was like, ‘If I had Michelle Trachtenberg, I wouldn’t even give her to God,’” I said.
“I mean, she belongs to God,” Paris said, laughing.
“And to herself!” I said.
“I don’t know that she and I ever kissed,” Zane told me, as an adult. “It was very pure. But for me, it felt like love.” He’d developed a huge crush on Michelle after he saw Harriet the Spy; they met when she was cast as his preteen love interest on Dave’s World. After she went back to New York, the two of them started a long-distance phone-call relationship, which went on for years.
A few months after my sleepover with Paris, someone told me there were photos from the Audrey Hepburn Hollywood for Children film festival in a teen fan magazine. I flipped through it to see an image of Michelle, making an adorable face with an adorable stuffed animal. Under it was the caption “SCOOP: Michelle Trachtenberg and Zane Carney are an item!”
I felt a bit embarrassed on their behalf, and I still do. Imagine your middle-school dating life being discussed in a national magazine.
Michelle and I did events together all the next year. We went on a charity cruise together, where we sang along to the Grease Megamix, and she assured me that my ’40s-inspired outfit — a sort of half–Rosie the Riveter, half-pinup-model outfit an older girl had dressed me in — for “Retro Night” wasn’t too last-minute, or too mature, like I worried.
“You look adorable,” she told me. “You’re like one of those ‘limited edition’ collectible dolls.”
We had the kind of closeness that grows between girls who’ve spent a short but intense amount of time together, like summer-camp friends. After the press for Matilda and Harriet the Spy died down, though, we saw each other less and less, and I worried about when I’d see her again. There were only so many times I could fly out to New York.
Then something surprising happened: She moved to where I lived, in Burbank, and we ended up at the same middle school.
Surely, I thought, she’d be one of the beloved girls in school. But that didn’t happen. Every time I even heard someone say “Michelle Trachtenberg,” a kid would jump in to say that they’d heard she was mean, full of herself, a total bitch.
“She’s not,” I’d say, every time. “She’s really nice!”
I couldn’t reconcile it with the Michelle I’d known, the one who was never anything but warm and kind. I’d gotten the feeling she might have a feisty side, but that just made me like her more.
I remember wondering if the kids at school were jealous. A lot of students were aspiring actors: One week three people in my class were excused early to audition for the same Nickelodeon TV show. There was always a lot of resentment toward the kids who’d “made it.”
While my career was on the wane, Michelle’s career was thriving. We’d both been up for the role of Penny in Inspector Gadget (she got it), and she was just about to be cast as Dawn Summers, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s sister on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d see her around school, with a small group of friends, and while she always looked gorgeous, she usually didn’t look happy. Could it be that she had changed? She probably won’t want anything to do with me now, I thought, and kept my distance.
Then, right before she graduated in 1999, she pulled me aside, and asked if she could talk to me. It was the first time we’d had a one-on-one conversation that wasn’t just a quick “hi” in the hall since I’d started middle school.
“Are the kids here mean to you?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Because they are to me,” she said, tearing up. “They call me Harriet the Slut, Harriet the Bitch, Harriet the Bitchy Spy … and so much worse. They never stop.”
I had never seen Michelle cry before. I’d never seen her anything other than perfectly composed and confident. That’s what it was, I realized. That’s why they said she was “mean.” Because they were mean to her first, then when she went on the defense, they called her a bitch.
It wasn’t just that she was being bullied; it was that there wasn’t any way she could get them not to hate her. So much of being a child actor is about making everyone happy. It felt cruelly ironic to be so hated when our raison d’être was getting people to like us.
At the time, I was fortunate: I had supportive teachers and a solid friend group. When I started high school a few years later, though, both my friend group at school and my crew of child actors splintered, and I found myself in the same place Michelle had been. I was being bullied at school — both for having been a child actor and just for being an awkward teenager — and I felt completely isolated: The people-pleasing had made me resentful, and the resentment made me bitter and furious. Now everyone was calling me a bitch.
I transferred to a different high school, one for the visual and performing arts. There, once again, I found a group of friends and was able to feel like I could be myself again. I did miss screen acting, but I was tired of all that went with it: the months away from family and friends, the long hours and tedious reshoots, the constant scrutiny from the press and studios, the “fan letters” from grown men about your body.
Michelle must have also gone through it all. We never talked about it, but I know that if I did, she did too. I don’t know how she got through it. You had to be tough to weather the cruel misogyny of the 2000s and early 2010s. And Michelle was. (“She’s from Brooklyn!” Tamberelli said.) She always seemed to be working while mostly avoiding being tabloid fodder. That, to me, was success. Probably because, more than anything, she truly loved acting.
Even after I lost contact with her post–middle school, she never failed to surprise me. She could be in a goofy sex comedy like EuroTrip, then in a dark indie movie like Mysterious Skin, then in a family-friendly movie like Ice Princess. I was proud of her, and just like in middle school, I never stopped defending her.
“Michelle Trachtenberg is so mean on Gossip Girl,” a college acquaintance once told me, “that I feel like she just has to be a bitch in real life.”
“She’s not!” I said. “I knew her. She was a sweetheart.”
“But she’s so good at playing a bitch!” she insisted.
“Because she’s a good actress,” I said, rolling my eyes.
She was, I thought, wildly underrated. I’d see Michelle in a show or a magazine and smile, happy for her. Would she want to be friends with me now? I’d wonder. Would she even remember me?
Last month, when I found out Michelle died, I was packing for a work trip. I looked at my phone and felt my stomach drop. My hands were shaking and my knees went weak — I thought I might pass out. I sat in a chair, and started to sob.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was too young. She’d worked too hard. I always thought I would get the chance to see her again, to tell her how much I’d always looked up to her. To tell her the times we spent together as children were some of the best of my life.
I went through my Instagram and was instantly overwhelmed by all the tributes to her. Not only were all of my childhood friends posting about her but so were so many people I never knew had known her. Comedians, musicians, actors, people I’d met as adults. Fans and friends.
“My childhood friend is gone,” I posted. I didn’t know why I did it. It didn’t feel like enough.
But the next week, I was in New York, and I lost count of how many times people told me they’d seen my post and said, “I am so sorry about Michelle.” Not Michelle Trachtenberg. Just Michelle.
“You knew her, too?” I found myself asking, again and again. They did, or they knew people who did. All the while, I couldn’t stop thinking of my childhood friend group. So many of them I had just recently begun to reconnect with. I’d been so embarrassed about who I was as a preteen and teenager, it had taken me years to reach back out, to realize that it didn’t matter to them. They were forgiving.
I started texting and messaging all my friends who’d known Michelle. I needed them to know that I loved them and missed them.
In retrospect, it feels as though we were the last generations of child actors who were allowed to be kids.
Zane had stayed in touch with Michelle the longest. They had drifted apart and broken up in their early teens and lost touch while she was filming Gossip Girl and he was touring with different bands. His brother, Reeve, ran into her in Ireland while he was filming Penny Dreadful, and finally, the preteen sweethearts reconnected at a New Year’s Eve party in 2015.
“She did not miss a beat,” said Zane. She cackled when she saw him, and he felt as if he were seeing “the fully realized Michelle Trachtenberg.” They stayed up until four in the morning talking, and because their relationship had been so innocent, it moved easily into a deep, platonic friendship. From then on, she would always try to come see him play music, especially when he was performing with Evan Rachel Wood (who, Zane says, also loved Michelle).
“‘Joy’ is the word that comes up when I think of our connection,” he says of his grown-up friendship with Michelle. “Just boisterous laughing. There was so much of, like, ‘oh my God, what did we go through? We were like 9 years old!’ Laughter about how we made it through, and stayed positive.”
I told him about the other boys who had crushes on Michelle, and my and Paris’s proto-feminist critique. He laughed and admitted that once when he was 11, he had collapsed on his bed after a long phone call with Michelle and exclaimed, “I’m so glad she’s mine!” That earned him a gentle lecture from his mom about Michelle, and women in general, not being his property.
But I was glad they’d had each other. I was glad we had all had each other.
In retrospect, it feels as though we were the last generations of child actors who were allowed to be kids. I noticed a shift happening in the early 2000s, when former friends of mine, like Hilary Duff, suddenly had to be pop stars and actors and entrepreneurs. It only got more complicated when social media came around.
And being a kid is complicated enough on its own. I thought about this a lot when, last week, for the first time in years, I sat down to re-watch Harriet the Spy. It was a darker movie than I remembered: Harriet loses her beloved nanny, Golly; several of her friends; and, arguably, her own innocence. It’s not nostalgic about childhood. It shows the good and the bad.
I wouldn’t want to be a child again, I thought. Though if I could have lived one week of my life over again, I might have chosen the week I spent at the film festival in New York, with Michelle and all of our friends.
At one point in the film, Michelle, as Harriet, makes a snide observation about a girl in her class as the camera pans over to the girl at her locker, which was covered in photos of teen idols.
That’s when I burst out laughing, through my tears: They were all boys who had been in our group.
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