‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ star visits Arlington School

Jen Cowart
Posted 7/30/15

Students in grades three and four at Arlington Elementary School were excited recently to welcome movie star Robert Capron to their classrooms.

Down-to-earth and humble, Capron got his acting …

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‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ star visits Arlington School

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Students in grades three and four at Arlington Elementary School were excited recently to welcome movie star Robert Capron to their classrooms.

Down-to-earth and humble, Capron got his acting start in the well-known annual rendition of “A Christmas Carol” at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence as a young boy at the age of eight. He is currently a high school student at Scituate High School.

Completely engaged and armed with questions galore, the students listened intently to Capron as he filled them in on his experiences filming the movies they all knew well – the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movies, based on the popular books by Jeff Kinney.

In the movie, Capron plays Rowley Jefferson, and as he talked, Capron read from one of Kinney’s latest books, “The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary,” a non-fiction book chronicling the making of the 2010 “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movie giving students insight and a behind-the-scenes look at how a film is made.

The movie was made in Vancouver, Canada, which is known as “Hollywood North,” Capron said.

“Normally when people audition for a role, they talk about getting the call that they got the part, but I never got a call like that in real life,” he said. “I didn’t know it then, but they cast me on the spot for the role of Rowley, but they didn’t have anyone to play Greg yet. They spent the next three months doing a bunch of other auditions with potential Gregs because you cant really have a ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ movie without Greg, but the entire time, I had no idea they’d cast me on the spot.”

Capron explained that a large part of casting a part is seeing how the chosen actors interact with the other actors.

“They needed to see, could the boys pass as best friends,” he said. “That’s the difference between writing a book and making a film.”

The students were intrigued by what was real life versus what was acting when it came to the movie – what had actually happened, and what was done through editing tricks – and Capron was happy to share some of those types of secrets with them.

One of their burning questions had to do with the infamous scene involving a slice of cheese and its gradual decay over time, prior to the moment that Capron’s character must take a bite out of it. During the pre-production weeks, they had an actual piece of cheese outside of the production offices, right on the ground. They had wire over it and they watched it over time to see what happened, to see how it changed, Capron said.

But in the movie, they didn’t use an actual piece of cheese. They used a piece of silicone and aged it to look like the real piece of cheese had looked when it aged.

“I bet you’re all wondering how I ate that; I didn’t actually have to eat it,” he said. “I held it up to make it look like I was eating it and they filmed it from behind me to make it look like I was eating it, but I was actually biting air.”

Capron explained that all of the scenes in one particular spot in a movie are filmed at once, versus filming the movie in order.

“So for example, scenes in the school are all filmed at once, all out of sequence, and you have to change your outfits a lot of times between scenes,” he said. “It’s actually kind of boring – there is a lot of waiting as they get the cameras and lighting ready, and they make you say the same things over and over again. Sometimes they make you say it in a happy voice, and other times they make you say it in a different voice to see what sounds better. Altogether, you film about two minutes of a movie a day.”

Capron explained that the night before shooting, the actors and actresses are notified as to which scenes will be filmed.

“The night before, they have these things called call sheets, and they tell you the time you’ll be picked up and brought to the set, the time you’ll begin filming, and what scenes are being filmed the next day,” he said. “Usually I’d be up by 6 a.m. and in the car by 7. You find the scenes, memorize all the lines and all the other people’s lines so that you know when to come in. When I was four, I used to memorize entire ‘Thomas the Tank’ episodes. It paid off, but it used to drive my parents crazy.”

Other tricks Capron shared from behind the scenes included times when a portion of a scene is filmed in one day, with the rest of it filmed on subsequent days.

“One time we filmed the first part of a scene in August, but we filmed the second part in late September. I had zinc sunscreen on my nose in the first part, so they took digital pictures of me so that they’d be able to check for accuracy when they filmed the second part. It’d look weird if I had zinc across my nose in one scene and then all over my face in the other scene,” he said.

Capron also addressed the issue of young actors who grow and change between the filming of one movie and the next.

“During the third movie, most of us came back looking the same, but Zack came back looking and sounding very different. It was crazy, he’d changed a lot,” he said. “Now, we’ve all changed so much, we all look a lot older now and sound a lot older. There’s a rumor of a fourth movie, but they’d have to have a whole new cast, and my character, Rowley, is not on the road trip with Greg in that book, ‘The Long Haul,’ which is the ninth book.”

Capron compared the author’s techniques in dealing with aging characters in the “Wimpy Kid” books to the techniques used in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books.

“In the ‘Harry Potter’ books, the author consciously made the characters older as she wrote,” he said.

Capron said that despite the fact that the movies are no longer filming, he still maintains contact with some of the characters.

“Greg is in California so I havent seen him in a while, but I still play video games with Fregly [Grayson Russell] and he might be coming to Rhode Island this summer to visit me,” he said.

Capron noted that prior to filming the movie, he’d never been out of the country before.

“It was the first time I’d been out of the United States, and I spent a year of my life there,” he said, explaining that the three movies each took 45 days to film, and that while out of school for entire quarters of the school year, his father served as his tutor.

“He used to be a history teacher in Lincoln High School and I still had to go to school while I was filming, so its not like it’s a get-out-of-school-free card,” he said. “Every time they were working on the cameras, I’d run off and do my school work. The school would mail out my work and I’d do it and mail it right back. The first time I came back, I’d missed the entire first quarter, but I had all As and A plusses. School is important. I couldn’t not do it.”

Currently, Capron is enrolled in high school and takes part in many extracurricular activities, including the drama club, band, tennis and the National Honor Society.

“You get to do a lot in high school,” he said.

In addition to his high school responsibilities, Capron still acts and auditions for parts, recording his auditions in his basement and sending them in for consideration, and he’s appeared in other roles.

“I have a recurring character that I play on the CBS show ‘Elementary,’ and I go to New York City for that when I’m called. I was in ‘Bride Wars’ and I also had a line in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ and in the ‘Three Stooges’ movie where I played the young Curly,” he said. “I’m also attached to a movie called ‘Nantucket,’ possibly for the fall, so if it makes budget, I’ll work on that. I think my favorite roles were the ones in ‘Elementary,’ and in ‘The Way, Way Back,’ because although I’ve done a lot of comedies, I really wanted to do something more dramatic.”

Capron looks forward to the work he’ll be doing on his upcoming senior project – making his own movie.

“I’ll be writing, directing and filming my own movie this summer,” he said. “I’m looking forward to going to college in the future, and down the road, I think I’d like to be like Clint Eastwood, writing, directing and acting.”

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