She has said, looking back from 2018, that the experience of becoming that visible at that age required her to work things out at a speed that was not entirely comfortable. “Because of the success of that show, I was put in a place where that journey was sped up,” she told Porter. “I had to figure it out quickly and with not a completely developed mind to discern between what’s real and what’s not.”
The specific challenge of figuring out what is real and what is not, for someone who has been working in an industry built on the construction of convincing fictions since the age of ten, is not a trivial one. The industry in which she had spent her entire professional life was organized around the production of images that were not reality. The character she was playing every day was not her. The attention that came with the character’s success was directed at her. The people who were suddenly around her, as she noted, had arrived in response to the character’s visibility, not in response to hers.
She has said she found it easier to navigate the celebrity environment because she had been working for a long time before the show began. The years of guest roles and auditions and commercial bookings — the years during which she was a working professional in the industry but not a recognizable name — had given her a baseline knowledge of the industry’s mechanics that more sudden arrivals to fame sometimes don’t have. She knew, in a structural sense, what the job was and what it wasn’t. The fame was new; the work was familiar.