Milan Ray, one of the young stars of Troop Zero talks about working with other kids, staging a food fight, and what she’d tell the universe.
Welcome back to More of a Comment, Really…, a weekly interview podcast hosted by Clint Worthington! Every episode will feature interviews with actors, filmmakers, producers, and more, giving you the skinny on the latest films and TV.
Child stars can often have a rough road in their early roles, especially if they’re ‘the kid’ of the film, surrounded by adults and thrown into the daunting challenges of a film set. For Milan Ray, co-star of the Amazon Original MovieTroop Zero, having a group of other kids on set helped; even so, Troop Zero is just the beginning of her career, with a couple of episodes of Boomerang and the upcoming Charm City Kings already lined up.
As Hell-No Price, the headstrong bully-turned-best-friend of McKenna Grace’s dreamer Christmas in Bert & Bertie’s quirky kid dramedy, Ray had the unenviable task of putting forth a strong, boisterous personality while also allowing for key moments of vulnerability. Drenched in the sun-soaked affectations of 1970s Georgia (period outfits and Southern vernacular and all), Troop Zero gives its young stars plenty of whimsy to work from, and Ray (with her killer comic timing and emotional dynamism) is a particular highlight.
Prior to this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I caught up with Milan while she was in Chicago attending a screening of Troop Zero to talk about her life at the beginning of your career, her then-upcoming Sundance premiere of Charm City Kings, and what it’d be like if she got to fulfill Hell-No’s goal of recording a message to send into the cosmos.