See Jack Run

Jack plays the six-year-old version of the lead character, a homosexual boy who is adopted by his bipolar poet mother’s psychiatrist. Bening plays the mother; Baldwin, Augusten’s alcoholic father; and Cox, his mother’s psychiatrist. The film also stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood as the psychiatrist’s daughters. Another newcomer, Joseph Cross, plays the teenage Augusten.

It’s Jack’s first feature film, though he’s already been in show biz for half his life, having started modeling in the Twin Cities when he was four. He auditioned for Running with Scissors’ director Ryan Murphy in January 2005. Two months later, he was in Los Angeles, filming his part. The movie opens nationwide October 27.

From what Jack’s real-life mom, Kelly Kaeding, could tell, he shot about ten or twelve scenes for the movie. She hasn’t seen the film yet, but would be surprised if any of Jack’s scenes were cut since there are three on the trailer and two more on the film’s website . Plus, there wouldn’t be a lot to cut since they needed to establish what Augusten was like growing up.

Jack himself won’t see the movie—or read the memoir on which it’s based—for many years. He says he can’t read the book until he’s eighteen. Then he looks at his mother. “Right, mom?” Maybe thirteen, he decides. Then eleven. Then ten. “Take it or leave it,” he says. She laughs. “For sure not ten,” she says.

Jack is an energetic boy with blond, sun-bleached hair, tan skin, deep blue eyes, and dimples. The second of the six Kaeding kids, he and his older sister, Jordan, became interested in modeling when they were four and five years old. While looking at the ads in the Sunday paper, the kids simply decided they wanted to be in them—and they knew precisely which ones. Jordan wanted to be in a Target ad, and Jack wanted to ride a bicycle for Toys “R” Us. The kids went to an open casting call staged by Twin Cities talent agency Caryn International, and, though Jordan quickly lost interest and never appeared in an ad, Jack started work almost immediately.

Jack’s timid brother Will, who’s now six, started modeling by tagging along on some of Jack’s shoots, and today they are competitive about their work. “If Will gets a callback, he makes sure Jack knows it when he gets in the door,” their mom says. Will accompanied Jack to his audition for an ExxonMobil commercial that ran during the 2006 Olympics and got the job. Every time the family heard the commercial’s music, they ran into the room to see Will on TV. Jack’s eight-year-old brother, Andrew, has been asked to model, but isn’t interested. His three-year-old brother, Reed, and two-year-old sister, Ryan, started modeling in the Twin Cities, but haven’t continued since the family headed to Hollywood.

The family relocated to California three months after Jack filmed Running with Scissors, in part for his dad’s new job as a senior superintendent for a homebuilding company, but also to put Jack and his siblings in a better position to be hired for acting and modeling gigs. Jack’s parents grew up in Eden Prairie and didn’t think about leaving until July 2004, when Jack won the first runner-up Child Actor of the Year Award at the International Modeling and Talent Association competition in New York City and was scouted by several agents and managers.

Before the family moved, Jack’s parents made a deal with each other: In two years, if one of them wanted to move back to Minnesota, they would. Halfway now, they’re split. His dad, Chris, likes California, but Kelly—a former Eden Prairie police department 911 dispatcher who now stays home with the kids—isn’t sure she wants to remain. She says the education her kids got in Minnesota was much more advanced than what they’re getting now and people in California aren’t as friendly as they are back home.

Jack has no idea how much money he makes modeling and acting. He’s not yet at the level of Haley Joel Osment, who reportedly made $150,000 for his starring role in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, or Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin, who made $8 million per picture at the height of his career. Jack’s mom says only that the numbers are surprising. “It’s more than I’ll ever make,” she says. California law requires a percentage of wages for actors under eighteen to be put into a trust fund, and except for paying for some professional photos and acting coaches, Jack’s parents save the rest of the kids’ income for their college education.

Jack says he’d like to buy back their Eden Prairie house, adding that he’ll “do another movie and then buy that house back even if it costs a billion dollars.” But Jack likes living in California, especially because he gets to play outside a lot. Like most kids his age, he is high-energy. Baseball is his favorite sport. “I like smacking something once in a while,” he says. “Baseball and a sleepover—what could be better?” He pauses, then answers his own question. “Baseball, GameCube, and a sleepover. Or baseball, Xbox 360, and a sleepover.”

Jack likes to wear his hair long. His California friends like it long too, but his Minnesota friends think he looks like a girl. That doesn’t bother Jack. His favorite T-shirt reads, Tough Enough to Wear Pink. He begged his mom for the pastel shirt. “Every day I see at least five people in school wearing pink,” he says. “All of them are boys.”

Jack doesn’t have a girlfriend, but likes a girl named Megan. He gets embarrassed when he talks about her and says he has no idea why he likes her, besides that she’s pretty and she skips around the field at recess. He hasn’t liked her forever, only since the second month of school. They don’t hang out much because he likes being able to hang out with his friends. He says it’s too early to say if he and Megan will marry someday.

Turning nine was important for Jack’s career, because, under California law, he can work longer hours. Of his sixty-five auditions so far this year, most have been for feature films or television pilots. Others were for cartoon voiceovers and modeling gigs. During the four to five weeks of pilot season, in March, Jack had a lot of pages of script to memorize. “That’s just a hard thing for him to balance—school, friends, and lines,” his mom says. When he has lots of lines to learn, his parents practice with him for ten minutes at a time. “He has a great memory retention, so that helps a whole bunch,” Kelly says. Sometimes he surprises himself, as when he memorized his friend Jacob’s mom’s phone number right after someone said it. When he had to re-record an audition script for a TV pilot, he still knew his lines cold two weeks later.

Because Jack works so much, his parents worry about him being a kid. “And that’s our priority—him being a kid,” says his mom. “Everyone says, ‘I can’t believe you are doing that to your kid.’ We hear that all the time.” She is quick to point out that not all child actors are bad apples, citing the examples of Jodie Foster and Ron Howard. And she insists that her children’s education, safety, and well being come first. If the kids reach a point where they don’t want to act anymore, they don’t have to. The Kaedings and their advisers are very selective about the roles they choose. “Last week, they wanted him to audition for a feature and asked me what I thought, and it was going to be a really hard script to do,” Kelly says. “His manager, in the end, decided he shouldn’t do it because the script would be too disturbing and she didn’t want to put Jack through something like that.”

When people read Running with Scissors, with its graphic depictions of sexual behavior, mental illness, and alcoholism, they gave the Kaedings a lot of negative feedback. “Everyone is so conservative in the Midwest,” says Kelly. “You don’t talk about the things that are in that book. But you go to the West Coast and that is normal and everyday life and nobody has a problem and everyone thinks the book’s great, the author’s great, everything’s great.” In Minnesota, some family friends were critical. “They were concerned for Jack and what we were doing to him,” says Kelly. The Kaedings maintain they are helping their children and don’t want them to grow up and ask why they didn’t make the most of the Hollywood opportunity.

The Kaedings don’t tell a lot of people that Jack acts. His teacher knows because she has to sign a work permit. If he has an audition, he tells his classmates that he has a doctor’s appointment or has to babysit. This doesn’t happen very often, since California law doesn’t allow kids to miss much school to work. In fact, Andrew has had to take more sick days and missed more school than Jack’s missed for auditions. Jack says he can keep secrets, so it’s not hard for him to keep his acting career private. However, he has told his friends Jeric and Edward that he is going to be in a movie and, he says, “they’ve spread it to all my other friends.”

Not that Jack doesn’t care about popularity. Every Saturday, the fourth-grader checks his standings on The Internet Movie Database, an online bank of millions of actor and filmmaker biographies, photographs, and filmographies. The profiles are ranked inversely by the number of people who view a person’s page. In a matter of weeks following the first appearance of a Running with Scissors trailer in theaters, Jack’s ranking jumped from 1.6 million to 22,000.

Before Running with Scissors shooting began, Jack went to Paramount studios for an entire day of trying on clothes for the role. Written on the inside of one of the pairs of pants he tried on was M. Culkin.

If Jack had his way, he’d sleep till noon every day, but while shooting the film, he often had to get up at 5 a.m. because he had an hour commute. Every day, his mom drove him to the movie set, where he worked for four hours, attended school with a private teacher for three, and played for one. The movie was filmed in six weeks. Jack’s part took only a week and a half to shoot, which he thought was pretty quick.

Jack learned about his character—who “adores his mom and her poetry”—by reading the sidelines of the script when there was nothing to do on the set. He thinks he’s different from young Augusten because he doesn’t “really like reading poetry and stuff.” Plus, he says, “it’d feel weird if I was doing some of those scenes in real life, acting like that.” Referring to a scene in which his character compulsively polishes the coins he receives for his allowance, he asks, “Who in the world would do that except for a kid that’s six?”

When Jack filmed his scenes, he says, “they’d pretend it was practice, and then they said they’re done and I got all curious. I couldn’t figure it out. I’m like, ‘Why are we done with practice and done with that scene?’ ”

While the crew was changing camera angles during Jack’s first scene with Baldwin, Jack bit into a piece of licorice and lost a tooth. “My mom had to dig it out of the trash can,” he says. He was bleeding and a front bottom tooth was missing, but they decided to proceed without it.

Jack says people on the set asked him if he’d done any other movies before. “I said, ‘No, this is my first one,’ and they said, ‘Wow! You are real good at this. There should be more than one movie.’ ”

On the set, Jack had his own trailer—about the size of his grandma’s kitchen table, according to Jack—with a TV, bathroom, table, and small couch. Baldwin had a bigger trailer, but Bening’s was the biggest.

Wearing makeup was weird. “I felt like a girl,” he says. Even so, he really wants to do another movie, “because, you know, when you do a movie you meet lots of famous people,” he says. “I learn more stuff from famous people than normal people—not about them, but about acting.”

Before the movie, Jack had seen Baldwin a couple of times, but isn’t sure if he’d seen Bening. “I learned lots of stuff from them because when I wasn’t doing my lines I just watched them to see what they were doing, and I thought it was real fun just meeting them and doing the scenes with them.”

When he grows up, Jack wants to be like his two favorite actors, Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. “They’re really funny, and they’re in all these funny movies that I know of, like 50 First Dates, Bruce Almighty, and Liar Liar,” he explains. Jack would love to film a movie in Minnesota, but if he could film one anywhere, he’d probably pick Florida, because in Florida “it’s hot and I’d get to go to the pool every day.”

Jack says there’s no difference between acting for work and playing make-believe with his friends. Then, after he thinks about it for a moment, he decides there is a difference. When you’re with your friends, he says, you could be pretending to be a giant monster and just be goofy, but when you’re acting, you have to act real. “When you’re just playing make-believe, it sounds more fake than when you’re acting,” he says. “I know I do my best when it feels real.”  

Mpls.St.Paul online editor Megan Wiley wrote about Design Institute director Janet Abrams in the April issue.

Read more in the article “Running with Scissors”