There are faces that are etched like fire at the first spark, although the wood of that bonfire never crackles again. The one of Michael Conner Humphreys It is one of them. He was a child of only eight years old when he stood in front of a camera, paper in hand, to play the character of his life. Maybe I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s how it was. His face has gone down in film history and the annals of Hollywood for being that of a young man. Forrest Gumpstill a child and with a trot that the seventh art will never forget, who had fictitious years left to become the Tom Hanks that everyone remembers, with his box of chocolates and his grayish beige jacket.
He was born in Mississippi. His stardom, in Alabama. It all started with an innocent casting call that was looking for a child with problems walking and difficulties articulating words, but with a peculiar disposition and clear eyes. He convinced. And during filming he became so touching that his face became Forrest’s, that boy with orthopedic devices on his legs whose “very best friend” was little Jenny. The scene in which she yelled at him and he ran, and ran, without his heels being able to touch his butt and with those bicycles cutting him meters off the ground, made it last forever. His future in the industry was signed in indelible ink. And so it was that from one day to the next, Hollywood’s greatest promise disappeared from the city of stars.
The boy who left Los Angeles because he knew he was a boy
He entered the cinema through the front door and exited through the same frame. She did not want to appear in any other film than the one directed by Robert Zemeckis back in 1994. She left of her own free will, because that little world was not hers. “I’m not sure I wanted to be a child star; It doesn’t always seem to go so well for many of them. I think I’m right, seeing some of them today.”Michael said in 2019, in an interview for The Sun. 25 years had passed since the release of Forrest Gump, although for the once proclaimed promise of the big screen it could easily have been a lifetime.
“Honestly, I think it was a good thing, since I never thought of Hollywood as something glamorous or fame as something I wanted to pursue. It was the complete opposite.”, he qualified in those statements, which somehow became a revealing return of Michael to public life. But what was this ‘quite the opposite’? “I loved my house and I was only interested in having fun and playing with my friends, especially because I liked school. Offers came in, but I wasn’t too worried about trying to get more roles.”, he confessed. Because sometimes kids just want that. Be children.
I didn’t want to be near Los Angeles. Not that way. And in an act that overflowed with poetic irony, she completed the paradox of his character. It was 2004 when he enlisted in the United States Army. Just like Forrest. And he served four years there, of which he spent one and a half in Iraq.. From this stage he said that he did not want to be recognized for that role that made him immortal. And yet he couldn’t help it.
I graduated in International relations. And he did it, as if Forrest’s shadow was chasing him, running and not cycling, through the University of North Alabama. In 2011 he knocked on the cinema door again. He participated in a discreet film called Explorers, in the company of strangers. She ventured to the theater: on that stage she debuted and she is now under those spotlights. Aside from everything. His story is that of a young boy who left Los Angeles because he knew he was a child. That he gave space and pause to his life when everyone was shouting the same thing at him. ‘Runs’.
