![]() ![]() Neither would his long-coveted chance at a leading part. Not even voice acting in “Frankenweenie” could free Capron from chubby comic relief. I felt like life was being handed to me on a silver platter.”īut, when the “Wimpy Kid” franchise began earning him supporting roles that depended upon his weight, Capron’s awareness outgrew that of his blissfully unaware fictional alter ego. “You’re having relationships with all of these people independently of what’s onscreen,” he said. Whether throwing his weight to the ground to stop Greg’s teen-age brother, or tumbling from a chair while animatedly dancing along to Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK,” Capron rarely considered the image he was projecting. “His head, neck, torso, and legs sit atop one another like a stack of blocks.” At a shirts-and-skins game of gladiator, while another character laments the cruelty of forcing all the unathletic students to be skins, Rowley is off to the side, playfully manipulating his fat folds. “The word for Rowley is ‘thick,’ ” according to the publicly available script. Cheese” and “baby hippo”-for Capron to smilingly blink away. For, even as Rowley’s social ignorance enables the franchise’s “be-yourself” moral, it also lets the filmmakers deliver lacerating insults at the character-“Chunk E. And, although Capron was clearly born for the part, there’s a nagging have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too quality to the character’s conception. As the cheerfully dorky best friend of Greg, the titular wimpy kid, Rowley emanates inborn self-acceptance-a pointed contrast to Greg’s flailing efforts to become the coolest boy in middle school. “I was, like, an overly nice kid.”Ĭapron’s dewy-eyed confidence would vault him past all the other child actors who answered the casting call for Rowley Jefferson. I didn't correlate it with outside perception and I can’t recall anybody ever calling me fat,” Capron said, waving away assumptions about bullying. “ just seemed like a familial conversation. His steadily mounting weight played only a small part in his development. ![]() Presumably what caught the eye of casting directors was Capron’s sweet-faced, youthful presence. Early casting coups-“cutesy kid” walk-ons in films like “Bride Wars” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”-were likewise organic. Raised in Rhode Island by protective parents who, he says, knew “jack shit about Hollywood,” Capron came to his leading-man aspirations independently, inspired by after-school theatre classes and Jimmy Stewart performances. More frequently, he’ll look down at his phone and find Instagram messages from old Rowley fans: “I liked you better when you were fat.” The presiding impression that Capron casts these days is hardy, well nourished-a resting air of strength that he nevertheless struggles to internalize. Last seen in a 2018 arc on the television show “Elementary,” the twenty-three-year-old maintains a tight, wiry frame, with veins taut from bench curls and a face winnowed to a stern definition. Such adjectives no longer apply to Capron. ![]() I’m in a movie my entire sixth-grade class goes on a field trip to see. “Every critic is specifying that I’m fat: ‘chubby,’ ‘overweight,’ ‘moon-faced’-‘cherubic,’ if we’re getting a little artsy with it,” Capron said, the clipped repetition agitating the gentle hum of his voice. Packaged alongside the disappointment of each negative review was the unexpected confusion of being identified by body type-a queasy sensation heightened by the red warning lights of the Washington Monument visible through the window. It wasn’t until Capron settled into his Washington, D.C., hotel room to scroll eagerly through Rotten Tomatoes that his confidence began to dip. Robert Capron wasn’t thinking of himself as a “fat kid” on the day that Roger Ebert described the eleven-year-old as “pudgy.” Instead, riding high during the national press tour for his first big supporting role-Rowley Jefferson in 2010’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”-the young actor felt like a star on the rise. ![]()
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