We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn’t return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the U.K., it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn’t date. That was one thing my parents made very clear.
I actually hope people don’t react to ‘Impossible’ in a way where they think it’s terribly retro. The plot needed to do what it needed to do. But I’m a little surprised to find myself looking a little bit like an advocate of teen marriage. It takes some exceptional circumstances for that to be a reasonable idea.
When I was a teen, I was never really into the captain of the football team or the student body president. The guys I liked were quirky and different: They listened to music I’d never heard of, never had lunch or gas money, and could always make you laugh.
As I got older, I had a bunch of friends that were various teen stars. I’ve always known people in the spotlight and people who just grew up in L.A. and had nothing to do with the industry. It’s not a glamorous thing to me. It’s just a different type of business.
I have a very large shoebox overflowing with lyrics I’ve been writing and collecting since my teen years and into my late 20s, with lyrics from all walks of my life. Darkness, being in love, being heartbroken, finding yourself… and lyrics that I’ve been sitting on for, like, seven years, that I haven’t done anything with.
Honestly, I’ve never had anybody with ‘Teen Mom’ ever be anything but great to me. Except the editors – they suck. Everybody from the crew, I love them, they’re like family to me… I’ve never had a problem with any of them. Except the editors.
In my teen years leading up to the Olympics, I loved having the excuse to skip out on parties because of skating. Partying wasn’t my thing anyway. Mostly I hung out with other skaters. We were all buddies, so it’s not like I missed out on socializing. I was really enjoying myself.
In our country, being from immigrant parents, growing up black in the South, coming out at 16 years old, being a teen parent… you would assume that my life would amount to nothing. And here I stand today. So, if I can do it… you can, too!
I don’t really think I feel pressured to become a teen sensation because that’s not really my goal in life. It’s not really about being star, being popular or having lots of girls. It’s really about continuing to be able to act and have fun, and do what I like to do.
I instinctively dress a bit tougher because I’ve spent a lot of time in the U.S. and I realised there was a certain image projected of me here. I’ve always been an absolute rebel. When I was in my teen years I had piercings and wore all black.
Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think ‘We don’t need to be as diligent with the razor blade,’ but they do.
I think if you ask people why they watch me, there would be some common thread among all of them that I’m somewhat of an awkward older sister. I have a teen, mostly female demographic. How that happened, I don’t know. But I think they see me as some sort of bizarre role model, and I’ll keep trying to do that for them.
I think if we were going to worry about teen pregnancy being glamorized, we should worry about shows like ‘Teen Mom’. If people are going to want to have children at a young age because they see it on TV, I think that depends on the type of person you’re dealing with.
This is actually something no one knows, but my mom was really the one who created the entire style for ‘Teen Witch.’ I’m dead serious. She was super involved, and is super creative, so I wore a lot of my actual clothes in the movie. Truly, Louise was my mom’s vision. She really created an iconic character.
Because of people like that guy in San Francisco who told me it changed his life, ‘Teen Witch’ is my most favorite thing I’ve ever done. I see how happy it makes people, and that makes me happy. The great thing is that no one realized it was going to become all these things when we were making it. We thought we were making a very serious movie.
I didn’t know what was going to happen with ‘Teen Wolf.’ I was only scheduled to do four episodes for them, but they kept me on, and I was like, ‘Sweet! I’m still employed! That’s awesome!’ And then, they let me know that they were considering having me for the second half of the season.
I think teen girls will like ‘Geek Charming’ because they really focus on the ‘populars’ and nerdy people and people who are in between the nerds and between the populars. So it really hits every category of what girls are going through in high school.
I first read Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ as a teen in school, like you did. I read the book alone, eating lunch at my locker, neatly scored oranges my mother divided into five lines with a circle at the top, so my fingers could dig more easily into the orange skin. To this day, the smell of oranges reminds me of ‘Mockingbird.’
‘Pretty Little Liars,’ you know, it’s a teen show that grew to be something bigger. I think you had girls from ages 7 to, like, 20 watching the show, and that was the predominant audience. Then it grew to be for girls, boys, men, women, people who are 7 to 35. I think that’s crazy.
I so think it’s limiting to define an audience ahead of time. This is something I’ve brought on myself by being like, ‘There are no ’real’ teen publications! That’s what I’ll do!’ But then it’s like, well, if I want ‘Rookie’ to be successful and popular, then people will invalidate the realness by saying it’s popular and mainstream.
Mrs. Palin is history in a dress. And her script is straight out of Hollywood – like those teen movies with the cliched ending featuring the female valedictorian delivering the speech of a lifetime projecting a bold and transformative future with an independent-minded woman in charge.
I didn’t know too much about his comic book history. I know that in ‘Teen Titans,’ he’s much more the comedic relief. But after reading the comic book iteration of Cyborg in ‘The New Teen Titans’ from the 1980s that Marv Wolfman and George Perez had worked on, I saw that there was a lot of texture to the character.
Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at ‘Teen Vogue.’ We were willing to lose some to have more.
As a teen, every major moment was preempted by a torturous, hours-long hair-straightening session. Sleek, silky strands made me feel prettier. And the truth is, I was completely clueless about how to deal with my curls! When they weren’t flatironed into submission for special occasions, they were practically glued down with gobs of gel.
I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn’t because we didn’t like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.
