Heeb

Text by Maxwell Williams

“Should I stone-y him up?” asks the groomer, a quiet blonde, as the Heeb Magazine photographer snaps away.

They’re in my living room shooting precocious 15-year-old Alexander Gould for the Heeb 100. Gould plays the equally precocious Shane Botwin on Showtime’s hit dramedy Weeds, a show about a whitebread, half-Jewish family from the Valley that finds themselves smack in the middle of the suburban marijuana trade.

“Are you comfortable with that?” Gould’s press lady asks him about posing as a stoner. She throws a look over to Gould’s mom.

“It’s OK,” says Gould, who is sitting on my couch with a bottle of Hershey’s syrup in his hand.

“You sure, honey?” asks mom, her head cocked rather expectantly. Her hair is neat and newly dyed, and she’s got a little bit of a Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom thing going on. She’s prim and proper—definitely no white after Labor Day for her. And I get the feeling she’d prefer him to just say no to the stone-y-ing.

“Yeah. Well, whatever,” he shrugs. “It’s all acting,” he says. He shrugs again.

Gould comes from Santa Clarita, the master planned city of cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac uniformity that supplied the backdrop for Weeds’ first few seasons. He started acting just two years after he was born. (Gould’s younger sister, Kelly, acts, too, having worked on the equally adult-themed HBO comedy Lucky Louie.) “The first thing that I remember was on [the set] of Malcolm in the Middle,” says Gould of his early acting days. “I was ‘Egg,’ a friend of Dewey’s.” He parlayed these early roles into voice acting, finding his first taste of fame as the voice of Nemo in Finding Nemo, the highest grossing G-rated movie of all time. “It’s weird [to look back on that stuff],” he says, shrugging once more. He seems perpetually bored. Or maybe he’s just jaded from already having worked a dozen years, longer than most actors’ entire careers. (Or maybe, he’s in fact, stoned? Nahhh … )

Gould’s eyes wander when I ask him about sex and drugs, topics dealt with heavily on Weeds. Actually, with his mom perched on my couch arm, her hand cupped over her ear so she can hear the interview, I have to quickly rephrase my questions so they’re only vaguely dangerous—instead of “Do you prefer bongs or edibles?,” I ask, “Are you starting to form a political take on marijuana laws?”

“Kind of,” he says. “Obviously, there’s nothing real on the set.”

Unlike Shane Botwin, who struggles weekly with his identity in the maelstrom of drug culture, Gould is ridiculously together for being a show biz kid. On the show, he is a preternatural pot dealer with a lesbian best friend. In real life, he enjoys learning how to fight with swords from one of Hollywood’s premier swordsman coaches, and his best friends play video games with him. On the show, he is often ignored and left alone as his mother. On the show last season, Botwin lost his virginity in a threesome with two goth chicks. In real life, well, I dare not ask him in front of his mom. That’s just rude. Plus, there are nine people milling about my shoebox-sized apartment like clowns in a Pinto—there’s Gould, his mom, the PR agent, the photographer, his dad (who weirdly acts as photo assistant), the groomer, Heeb’s publisher Josh, my girlfriend and me. “They still keep me very sheltered on set,” he admits sheepishly. “I still can’t watch some of the [scenes on the show].”

His mom nods. She keeps a close eye on her son, not only at the shoot/interview, where she’s in manager mode, but also in life—unlike the largely unsupervised Shane, Gould is home-schooled. The groomer ends up not doing the stone-y make-up. We have some great set dressing anyway—I dropped by the grocery store earlier and picked up M&M’s, cookie dough ice cream (“No dairy!” yelps mom when I pull it out of the freezer), rainbow-colored Twizzlers, tortilla chips (no potato, as I have been advised by his publicist he’s allergic) and salsa and other “munchies.” That, along with the piñata and the ‘80s teen sex comedy poster my girlfriend—our de facto set dresser—grabbed from my room, ought to make him look stone-y enough. Stonier than Shane Botwin, even.

Off to the side, Gould’s mom and publicist are chatting about how Weeds just wrapped its fifth season the day before, and how they just signed on for a sixth next year. But until the next season starts production, Gould’s life will get back to skateboarding and video games around Santa Clarita. “Also,” Gould adds, “I’m involved in a Jewish youth group called USY [United Synagogue Youth],”—a Conservative Jewish teen organization—“[and] I’m attached to a movie called Hairbrain, that doesn’t have full funding yet. It’s a crazy story about a genius kid that goes to college and his roommate is this 37-year-old, and there’s this weird friendship.” He looks at me. He has such a young face. He’ll be playing kids younger than him for years to come, but his eyes betray him with clarity. “Usually my, what I would say, forte is weird stuff, offbeat kids.”

I keep having to remind myself, he’s just a kid who happens to know how to slip into character and hold his own with much older actors. The words on Weeds have been written for him—he just needs to act them out. Yet, when I ask him about when what he wants to do with his life, the Shane Botwin in him finally comes out. “I’m not sure really what I want to do when I get older. I know I want to major in philosophy.” And we all know that Descartes was totally fried out of his gourd when he came up with that I think therefore I am business. Well, maybe not, but it’s definitely more fun to read that way …