R.I.P. Actor Brad Renfro

[fairy]

I sympathise with your intentions Anna. However, I DO think that people who make bad choice after bad choice, for no apparent reason, and flaunt it are bad people. I do however agree that bringing it up at a time of death is inhuman. With regards to Brad, if you look at his background, there are a reasons aplenty why he fell into bad habits. It is a pretty sad childhood in a climate without the kind of education and intellectual pursuits many of us take for granted. And those bad habits aside, he was by all accounts a really good guy. He wasn't a 'junkie' as far as I can tell, be he was a user, there is no denying that. He would have been more suseptible to OD. Junkie's are experts at that crap. And he was making excellent progress at getting rid of those habits. Till whatever happened happened.

If I have gone beyond the realms of what is ok on TFS, moderators are welcome to edit.

yes, agreed

 

[SiennaInLondon]

And I feel really bad that I feel Brad is getting overshadowed by Heath. I shouldn't be thinking like that but I do...

 

[fairy]

it is kinda bad...
i think not many people knew Brad Renfro..
and that Heath died so shortly after him, maybe makes it worse...
no excuse though...i think both deaths are equally tragic...Brad was a father too

 

[LetThemEatCake]

Just a week apart, the deaths of two fabulous YOUNG people. So unnecessary.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

s. u made me cry!!!

MJ I love you

 

[m.j.]

MJ I love you

i love you too!!!!
i just played sid vicious 'my way'
whatever people may say, brad did it his way!
may he rest in peace, he will not be forgotten!!!

 

[novella]

I thought that I posted here but apparently I didn't.

I was wondering what happened to Brad a few days before he died and I was shocked to see that he passed on! He showed immense potential in The Client and he was great in Ghost World. He was so young and it's always tragic when young people die. R.I.P. and my condolences to his family and friends.

 

[iluvjeisa]

^ Oh iluvJeisa why read beyond what we are told by the police and the families involved in these two deaths? Let's wait for the autopsies and believe what is released. You may be cleverer medically than all of us but I don't think it is nice to condemn. Because I can't help but read the implications in what you are saying. We KNOW Brad had these problems, what does it matter if it was or not the thing that tipped him over the edge on the morning of January 15th? I happen to think it was not. I happen to think that the cocktail of pills accidentally killed Heath. I do accept that that video is odd (the one you and I discussed on the Heath thread) but it could be a million and one things, not the one thing you are implying. It is kind of not adhering to the concept 'innocent until proven guilty' . And you work in pharmaceuticals am I right? I seem to remember having a discussion with you about it? I just happen to be wholly against many of the big business practices of the industry. I think the pharmaceutical and food industries work together very nicely to make a profit at the expense of humanity. And that does not mean I am saying that rolling around in nettles is the answer to everyone's problems. And it does not mean that i am saying that people with cancer should skip out of hospital and go on a yogic retreat. I am sure you realised that when you tried to make it seem like I was saying that.

Just for the record - I don't condemn anyone (except sociopaths). I don't even believe in free will. You are right, for both of them it could be something different. Especially Heath could be a case of untreated and incorrectly medicated mania. But statistically speaking...for people with their occupation, sex and age....it's probably something else.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

Ok cool ^

 

[Scott]

the thing about brad though is that most people probably only remember him from his role in the 'the client' and after he really fell of the radar after so much expectation doing only small unsuccessful film work. and then all of the drug problems overshadowed his film career. it's not that people don't care or think more highly of heath ledger,it's just that brad had ALOT of problems with substance abuse and as inhuman as you might think,it wasn't shocking. he tried getting help time and again and still he ended up in the same situations.

 

[shelley502]

And I feel really bad that I feel Brad is getting overshadowed by Heath. I shouldn't be thinking like that but I do...

In a way I think Brad's family is lucky that his death has not created much media attention. They need to grieve on their own, privately.

Heath's family has not been given that opportunity...

 

[SiennaInLondon]

Yeah yeah I know. It is a form of protection I guess. You want to protect him by protecting his family and privacy, and you want to protect him because you want to protect how his career and life will be percieved by the public at large. I guess people remember Jonathan Brandis and he didn't really do much. And Scott that is the misconception. His work wasn't unsuccesful but he was an indie actor. But yes, his problems did marginalise him when he should have been on top of his game. Of all the teen idols back then, only Brad and Leo had any depth. I mean you can role call JTT and Deven Sawa and Vincent Kartheiser and all the other but they weren't nearly on par.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

Bruce LaBruce should go to hell. These people are complicit in these deaths. This is why. And Brad's parents seem no better. Here is an article he wrote for Blab with the emboldened bits the bits I mean or the bits pertaining to Brad.

BLAB 2001
BRUCE LA BRUCE ON YOUNG HOLLYWOOD AND BRAD

It's all about paedophilia these days, we all know that. From JonBenet to Pokémon to little Aaron Carter (Backstreet Boy Nick Carter's sizzling hot younger brother), youth culture has never been at such a premium. So when I was presented with the opportunity recently to hang out with not one but three movie stars under the age of 20, I really couldn't find the strength to say no, despite my notorious aversion to celebrities in general. My friend Esthero had already introduced me to the dazzling Bijou Phillips, of whom I gave you a thumbnail sketch several months ago, and now to be added to the mix were the lovely Dominique Swain, star at of Adrian Lyne's updating of Lolita , and cute as a button Brad Renfro, so mesmerisingly convincing in the vastly underrated Apt Pupil . Interestingly, both movies are about nubile 14 year olds who may or may not know just how adeptly they can control middle-aged men by ingenuously utilising their own considerable sexual charms. Appropriately, all three starlets are in town to appear in the movie Tart . Who am I, a homosexual and filmmaker in a perpetual state of arrested development, to say no?

I get the call from local music industry figures Mutt and Jeff - er, Mark and Jeff - to hook up with them and the famous kids in question at the Cibo Matto show at Lee's Palace in Toronto. As my Soviet dissident poet-cum-hustler friend had been playing the new Cibo Matto CD practically non-stop the last time I was in New York, I couldn't wait to see them live. Jumping the guest list, I enter Lee's to find a shockingly small yet enthusiastic crowd gathered around the stage. I grab a beer from handsome Starvin' Hungry behind the bar - who incidentally looks ravishing in the naked portfolio I took of him for Honcho - and head for the front. I am soon joined by the trouble twins, Mark and Jeff, and our hot little stars minus Dominique, who will materialise later. After a rousing good show, Bijou, who is friends with the band - she is in fact the most connected young lady I have ever met, and at this rate could replace Kevin Bacon in the Six Degrees of Separation game - leads us to the inevitable tour bus, where we have some milk and cookies. That's right, milk and cookies. What did you expect, Special K?

It's eerie yet exotic to be in the same bus with the respective offspring of Papa John Phillips and Papa John Lennon (Sean is, of course, a member of Cibo Matto, and apparently dates either Hatori or Honda, I can't remember which). Darling Bijou sings me an entire song right there and then. Timo, their percussionist, is trying to pick up Leyla again. He's so nice, and cute in his Playgirl T-shirt. I met him before, at the Up and Down Club. (No, that's not a euphemism for sex, but it should be! - as in, when referring to someone you've just had sex with, "I just ran into her at the Up and Down Club.") Also in attendance: several members of the Toronto sensations Robin Black and the Intergalactic All-Stars. Someday you'll clamour for their glamour.

We Sebastian Cabot over to the Bovine Sex Club, where various illustrious people have congregated, including sensational Sasha the stripper scribe and our mutual publisher Sam Gutter, his pal Mary-Anne who is an editor at Bomb magazine, and her boyfriend Luis Guzman, the ubiquitous actor whom I had just scene in a double bill of The Bone Collector (which would surely make a better p*rno movie) and The Limey (big Lesley Ann Warren fan). Someone who shall remain nameless has already virtually forced an E down my throat, so you'll have to excuse me if from now on I have the memory of Sporadicus.

I think I'd just knocked over a couple of beers and stepped on a few toes and whatnot when all of a sudden in a flash of pink and blond Bijou grabs my arm and floats me out of the club and into a cab. For the next 15 minutes or so, on the way to her hotel, I sit transfixed as she speaks into her flashing pink cell phone. She reads a passionate, epic love poem into the futuristic little instrument, then modestly dismisses it as piffle. She stretches out her long legs and nestles cat-like into the seat as if she's in a perpetual state of limousine. I gaze in wonder at a girl who has the world at her little feet. Her sloe eyes refract the street lights like white diamonds. I think I'm in love. If only I were 20 years younger, and not a ******.

Somehow everyone who is supposed to arrive at her hotel room does. Dominique enters in a faux fur affair, her red hair in pigtails, her face aglow with youth and beauty, pure and simple. Bijou and another young actress and I sit on the bed and watch the end of What's Love Got To Do With It? Snuggling ensues.

It's time to move on, but Bijou - who, oh yes, can be a terror, make no mistake - deigns not to participate. Who knows what psychodramas play behind the scenes of every waking moment of her existence? Mark and Robin ****in' Black and Fro (that's Brad) and Dominique and I end up at a party somewhere uptown where we have some ice cream and cake. Well, it is a birthday party after all. Now I'm really flying, so naturally we have to go glow-in-the dark bowling. Yet another cab takes us far out into the suburbs where we rendezvous with other members of the birthday party (alas, sans Nick Cave) and throw multi-coloured balls at distant pins that seem to be wobbling (too much birthday cake?).

Before you can say "it seemed like a good idea at the time" we're back in the cab and hurtling toward the afore-not-mentioned-which hotel. You see, the jacuzzi beckons. It's six a.m. and still dark, but we are hoping it's already open. While the others change, I accompany Fro to his room as he is only 17 and needs constant chaperoning. By design, we instead enter the room adjacent to his, where his grandmother and guardian Joanne smokes nervously and awaits his homecoming. When he confesses that he's had too much birthday cake, she reams him out but good for squandering his allowance and staying up until all hours of the night. She speaks, as does her grandson, in a deep Tennessee drawl, is wrapped in a cotton night-gown, smokes a Cool in a cigarette holder, is pissed off. He praises her as the most precious woman in the world, sings, in fact, her praises until she softens a little, but not much. They pose for my camera, family photos.

Here and there I hear snips of the young stars' stories. Brad was discovered at the tender age of ten to appear in Joel Schumaker's The Client , shot in and around Brad's hometown of Knoxville. His parents have a shady past, something about the illicit selling of milk and cookies and birthday cake and ice cream. There's a bizarre story about one of his relatives putting out a contract on the life of his little sister and his grandmother, of both being shot and both surviving. There's the fact that he has to go back to Tennessee to face charges of grand theft auto and possession of cocaine and marijuana, which I only mention because it's already all over the internet. He's such a sweet boy though. He adopts me as his Aunt Bruce ("you must admit you're pretty effeminate, and you should be proud of it," he learns me), probably because he's used to being adopted by gay director types (Joel Schumaker, whom he's stayed with; Bryan Singer). He promises his grandmother he won't leave the hotel again tonight.

We're on the way to the jacuzzi. Four of us have made it this far; Robin ****in' Black has gone missing. Fro brings his guitar and Dominique brings the cigarettes, Mark and I bring our tattoos but the stolen Jägermeister has gone missing. We hit the jacuzzi in our underwear as several middle-aged men ride stationary bikes and run on tread mills on the other side of the room. The lights of the city lay before us in the darkened morning. Dominique surfaces and smiles.

Back to Dominique's room for some mini-bar candy. We decide to head to my apartment because we can't get beer from room service until 11 a.m. and it's only seven-ish. Brad puts on his pyjamas and his parka and his black oxford shoes. He looks like an eight-year-old kid who's just come back from the drive-in. He plays and sings his guitar, bluegrass, for me and Mark and Dominique and the cabby in the umpteenth cab of the night. He's in love with Dominique; she fends off his charming barrage of sweet-talk like a seasoned pro.

At my apartment the morning sun pours in through the windows. We head for the kitchen and the beers. Brad freaks out at the photo montage of River Phoenix that hangs over my kitchen sink, which includes the photo published in the National Enquirer of River in his casket. You see, people often compare Fro to the late, great Phoenix. Fro tells me I'm morbid, then shakes it off. As we drink our cold Coronas, Dominique dances dreamily to Iggy and the Stooges in the new light of day. She is going to sail through all the bull**** of life and Hollywood in her boat of grace and beauty. She's angelic. We like the way she moves.

http://www.exclaim-canada.com/articles/brucelabruce.aspx?csid1=1

This BREAKS my heart. How can you help but hold this chain smoking grandmother who yells at him for spending money and NOT what he has been doing and the parents and people like Bruce LaBruce who KNOWS he is 17 years old, has a troubled past and looks like an 8 year old in a parka? I can't bear it.

Here is what Bijou Philips said in an interview with Bruce LaBruce.

BRUCE: So tell me about the movie you just shot in Toronto.
BIJOU: Tart. It was fun. It was kind of nuts.
BRUCE: You were hanging out with Dominique Swain.
BIJOU: And Bradley.
BRUCE: Brad Renfro. Tell me some Bradley stories. Bradley's a nut.
BIJOU: I've been sworn to secrecy.
BRUCE: He's seventeen.
BIJOU: You like Brad.
BRUCE: I like Brad. I have a good picture of his penis.
BIJOU: How'd you get that?
BRUCE: He was peeing in his hotel room and he let me take a picture.
BIJOU: And you're like, "Can I take a picture of your c*ck?"
BRUCE: Well, I didn't say "****."
BIJOU: Guys don't like the word "****." Why is that?
BRUCE: I don't know. It sounds dirty. Guys like "dick."
BIJOU: Or "penis."
BRUCE: So now you tell me a Brad story. What was he like to work with?
BIJOU: He has such a big ego that he makes it difficult to act with him. He'll either take it to a hundred or go way low.
BRUCE: Way below the speed limit.
BIJOU: He'll either way overact the scene and ruin the moment and not let it be fresh for the camera, or he won't even give it to you. He'll just be a dick about it.
BRUCE: You and he and Dominique are interesting because you've all lived really hard before the age of eighteen.
BIJOU: Yeah, it was the first time I've been in a situation where people were way more crazy than I was. I've calmed down now, and they haven't, so it was weird.
BRUCE: But Dominique is pretty level-headed. She was discovered when she was thirteen or fourteen, and Brad was only twelve. His stories are insane. He had ****ed-up parents too.
BIJOU: Yeah, he's a crack baby. Poor Brad.

Ian McKellen wrote on his blog:

His success in Joel Schumacher's The Client had lifted him out of his disadvantaged life in Tennessee and swept him into the film industry when he was only ten years old. He told me how the Knoxville police department had recommended him to the casting director, as a reward for having written and produced a short film against drugs, even though he was no stranger to them.

http://www.mckellen.com/

What kind of parents ARE these?

And lastly, from a fan fic site, where the father of one of Brad's girlfriends has posted a script in honour of Brad, he also posted his recollections on meeting him. This is part of what he said:

"Isolation made life off the set an increasing strain. It wasn't in Hollywood where he fell into drugs and alcohol, it was in those long periods between pictures when he returned home to Knoxville and all of the old frustrations and conflicts resurfaced.

He turned to alcohol and marijuana, and, eventually, cocaine, and those habits led to run-ins with the local police. It was only when he was working that he stayed clean and sober. His bout with addiction was made worse by the fact that he told me his father and grandfather both had abused drugs and/or alcohol. He also saw it "growing up on the set" and tended to accept such behavior as a "normal" part of life. That coupled with his own hyperactive, moody nature, inward-looking personality and isolation from mainstream life made him very susceptible to addiction."

...

And yet he was so gracious:

"He counted himself fortunate that his grandmother was a devout Christian and his uncle a Baptist preacher. It provided him a spiritual context of sorts and all of my conversations with him on the farm were generally peppered with spiritual tomes of one kind or another.

"I can't complain. Everything bad that happened to me, I brought about myself. It brought me closer to God. Jesus said the healthy aren't the ones in need of a physician.""

http://www.talltalestogo.net/BradRenfroBio.htm

I hope this is ok with the mods. I would be so upset if it was removed. People blame him. It was clearly never his fault. He was clearly surrounded by nasty, vicious bloodsuckers from day one. There should be a ****ing prison for people like them. There should be bits of the law that recognises the different ways in which people can be killed. Or there should be an afterlife where people get what's coming to them. Or there should be something. I don't know what.

 

[sojou]

^
I thoroughly feel what you are saying there. I've read so much Brad info and my brain is bloody saturated with it (if only I was this dedicated to my studies)...but what constantly comes through it all was that he came from such a messed up background and that hanger-on's only made things worse. I thought my childhood was messed up! Makes me grateful that's for sure.

Brad was truly such a tragic figure, that's why I find his death so deeply saddening.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

I can't shake it either. And I need to be concentrating on my degree also. I don't know what this week's US Weekly will say. How do you get closure on someone you don't know? Accept that what happened is the best that could have happened for them? I don't know.

 

[smartarse]

honestly, i only remember him via "The Client". it's unfortunate his personal demons ruled his life soon after. He could've been the first young Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. He was that talented of an actor being an non-actor before The Client.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

I think the people who remember him most were the girls who were in love with him. We were the Brad Renfro/Devon Sawa/Vincent Kartheiser/Leonardo Dicaprio/ generation. Or and some people would throw JTT and Elijah wood into the mix. He is considered a good actor because well he was decent and he made good film choices. No pointless horrors like Idle Hands or no endless kiddy movies.

He is soooo incredible in this Bully interview and sooooo funny!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgD0Qq61rQs

 

[silk skin paws]

Wow his childhood was messed up. But it seems like Hollywood tends to attract child actors from not so stable environments.

 

[sojou]

I can't shake it either. And I need to be concentrating on my degree also. I don't know what this week's US Weekly will say. How do you get closure on someone you don't know? Accept that what happened is the best that could have happened for them? I don't know.

I don't think US weekly will say anything new and interesting. I have yet to see any mainstream articles/obits to Renfro which haven't said the same old tired blah-blah things about that damn yacht and the 'sting on skid row'. He was so mysterious and I didn't know him personally...but that's particularly why it's so hard to have closure with someone like him because you feel like you don't really know anything about who he really was...despite all the info out there. And yet I obsessed over this person in my really formative years...it's weird and hard to forget. Maybe what happened was for the best like you say.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

OMG

I have just seen this thread. I dont read tabloids,or watch entertaiment news,have just recently thrown out my TV(will buy another one,hahah),so i had NO idea,none about this.

My god i LOVED him in Client,and Sleepers,Apt Pupil, i really liked his(hope this is not to weird)voice,it was so beautiful and melodic.And i thought he was a great actor,what a shame that a life this young ended.


I will forever love his work,R.I.P.