Mara Wilson penned an emotional tribute for her childhood friend, Michelle Trachtenberg, who died at 39 in late February. In the essay for Vulture, published Tuesday, the Matilda star revealed that the late Gossip Girl actress was bullied as a teen.
Mara Wilson recalls Michelle Trachtenberg being bullied in 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 b***h,” Wilson wrote in her essay titled, My cool friend Michelle.
The 37-year-old actress shared that back then, she would tell Trachtenberg’s haters that “She’s not [mean],” adding, “She’s really nice!” Wilson revealed that during her first one-on-one conversation with the Harriet the Spy actor revealed she was being bullied in middle school.
“Are the kids here mean to you?” Trachtenberg asked Wilson after pulling her aside in the school hallway in 1999. When the latter confessed that students were mean to her “sometimes,” the Ice Princess star told her, “Because they are to me.”
“They call me Harriet the S**t, Harriet the B***h, Harriet the B***hy Spy … and so much worse. They never stop,” Trachtenberg told Wilson, who explained in her essay that she had never seen the Euro Trip star “cry before” that conversation.
Wilson admitted that seeing Trachtenberg cry was surprising to her as she was “perfectly composed and confident.” A Simple Wish star went on to say that she later realised why the kids called the late actress “mean.” “…They said she was “mean.” Because they were mean to her first, then when she went on the defense, they called her a b***h,” she added.
“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,” Wilson noted.