On the first page of her memoirs, Stori Telling, actress Tori Spelling (Los Angeles, 49 years old) tells that at the age of twelve she asked her mother: "Mom, am I beautiful?" She replied, "You will be when you have nose surgery." Opening an autobiography with that memory denotes that Spelling knows how to tell stories, that she is aware of the origin of her traumas and that she is willing to turn them into entertainment for her audience. Last Wednesday she appeared in the Spanish version of Mask Singer (Antena 3), after having gone through the American, French and Australian editions of the format, another example of the extent to which Tori Spelling has assumed that the role of her life is Tori Spelling. The road to this conclusion, however, has not been easy.
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His childhood is part of Hollywood folklore. Aaron Spelling was one of the television creators with the best intuition to give the public what they wanted (Holidays at Sea, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Dynasty) and at home he also deployed his magic: at Christmas he rented artificial snow machines and on his birthdays he hired small planes that flew over the family mansion with a banner and throwing gifts from the sky. Spelling built the largest house in the state of California. It was said that there were two rooms intended for wrapping gifts. Tori does not corroborate whether she had 123 rooms as the press claimed. "I never counted them," he clarifies. The hugs of the Spelling house, yes, only happened when dad managed to sweep the audience with a new series.
"For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be accepted," she confesses. "Dad gave me little roles in his series and the applause was like the sound of approval. They applauded me because I was the producer's daughter, but I didn't realize it at the time. The feeling of making people happy is hard to replicate. That attention made me feel very good."
Tori Spelling and Brian Austin Green, that is, Donna and David, television couple, in 1992.Ron Davis (Getty Images)
Aaron Spelling launched Sensation of Living and gave his daughter, who was already 17, a small role: the naïve Donna Martin. But as the character appeared in more scenes, Tori Spelling became the most iconic nepotism case of the decade. "There are many people who come from good families, many actors whose parents work in the Hollywood industry," he says. "They never suffered that criticism. But with me, even today, it's as if I have no right to complain. I don't know why."
Most attacks against her focused on her physique. "Bug eyes", "toad" or "horseface" are the ones she still remembers, because they pushed her to compare herself with her companions Shannen Doherty (Brenda) and Jennie Garth (Kelly). "They were so beautiful... I felt so ugly that I cried in the makeup room while they put on my makeup. I cried so much that they had to put on my makeup again. I didn't know what I could bring to the show. Donna had hardly any dialogue, so I started adding details of comedy and the writers said, 'Well, hey, you're funny.' I'm glad they decided to incorporate him into the character, because Lucille Ball was my idol and that was the way I had to stand out," he explains.
Physical comedy came to characterize Donna. In one episode she dressed up as a mermaid for Halloween and could not even walk, in another she wore to the spring ball a red dress so big that it did not fit in the limousine. But most of the time I wore tiny tops. "They called me 'the sexiest virgin in the world' [Donna's virginity had been Aaron Spelling's idea and on Tori's first cover, in Sassy magazine, the headline was 'America's virgin'; the subtitle, "Poor Rich Girl."] Donna's looks were crazy, but the truth is that they were my idea. Since people didn't look me pretty, the only thing that made me feel confident was my body. That's why Donna wore so many tops, because that was the only part of me I was comfortable with," she confesses. For her first red carpet, at the 1992 MTV Awards, Tori stuffed toilet paper into her bra.
Aaron Spelling, his wife Candy Spelling and little Tori Spelling at a party in Beverly Hills in 1984. Paul Harris (Getty Images)
On Saturday Night Live, the country's most popular comedy show, comedian Melanie Hutshell parodied her as a silly, irritating, despotic daddy's girl to her servants. Tori loved to imitate her imitator. "And it was incredible," he says. "I nailed it. Even years later I was still doing it to my friends. It was like 'Daddy...', well now I don't get as good because of botox."
The actress remembers the first time she felt ridiculed by a magazine. The Globe analyzed his aesthetic operations by comparing a photo of him at age 12 with another at age 17. They even interviewed their schoolmates as "close sources." "I have never denied that I had surgery on my nose at 16, but they said I had implants in my chin and cheekbones. The thing is, my face was rounder at 12. I called my father crying and he always told me, 'Baby, if they're talking about you, things are going well for you. Worry when they don't talk about you. A cover is a cover," he recalls.
In the mid-nineties, Death of a cheerleader, Sleeping with danger or Student by day, prostitute by night made her the highest paid actress in telefilms, but also a muse of kitsch. One day he received the script for the casting of Scream and found that the character he aspired to, Sidney Prescott, made a joke at his expense: "As lucky as I am," Sidney lamented, "surely if they make a film about crimes my role is played by Tori Spelling." "Of course they weren't going to give me the role. Look what they thought of me. But that didn't stop me and I went to the casting," he says.
Promotional portrait of Tori Spelling from 1990.Harry Langdon (Getty Images)
The actress who landed the role, Neve Campbell, felt so guilty about the joke that she tried to remove it from the script. When he failed, he called Spelling to apologize. "I thought it was fun," he says. "At that moment I realized that I was able to laugh at myself. My attitude was: if you can't win them, join them or, better yet, get ahead of the jokes and make them yourself. That played completely in my favor, because when Scream 2 was launched, director Wes Craven asked me to participate in the sequel. I could get on the train and laugh at myself or... What other choice did I have?" In Scream 2 Spelling played herself as Sidney in the fictional film Stab.
The end of Sensation of Living in 2000 seemed like an opportunity to launch a career as an adult actress. He was backed by a couple of critical successes at the Sundance festival (Twin Souls and Trick), an iconic Rolling Stone cover honoring Psycho on the occasion of the premiere of Scream 2 and a new image suggested by his representative. "They told me to darken my hair and dress more covered. More girl next door. They would say, 'You're too sexy with that platinum blonde hair.' So I did. And I hate it," he confesses. In this new stage, he came to receive courses to behave appropriately during interviews.
The only role he got was in Scary Movie 2, the parody of Scream. Her improvisations during filming ("During that shoot the dirtiest shit you can imagine came out of my mouth," she proudly boasts) transformed a small role into a protagonist. Or so she thought: on the day of the premiere she discovered that it only had a couple of scenes. The producers of the film, the Weinstein brothers, had tried to convince her to undress for the scene in which a ghost raped her and, upon her refusal, they took revenge by eliminating most of her scenes.
Tori Spelling with her mother Candy Spelling in Los Angeles in 2015.Tibrina Hobson (Getty Images)
That disappointment coincided with a series of rejections. The casting directors confessed to her that they were not able to forget that she was Tori Spelling. And so, the actress was caught in a paradox: she was supposed to have everything easy because she was Tori Spelling but she couldn't get a job because she was Tori Spelling. "So I thought, 'You know what? If you're just going to see Tori Spelling, I'm going to give you Tori Spelling.' I collected several magazines with reports about me and started to appear on all the television channels," he explains. The result was the sitcom So NoTORIous, in which she played a parody of herself.
"At that time, my reality and perception of me intersected," he explains in his autobiography. Today social networks and reality TV make it easier for celebrities to laugh at their public image, but in 2006 it was not so common. If with Scream 2 Spelling she showed that she was able to join the joke, in So NoTORIous she confirmed that she was also able to tell it herself. Today the actress admits that she felt that this telecomedy would make everything she had suffered, all the jokes at her expense, the parodies and ridicules, finally make sense. That all those humiliations would have served a purpose.
However, the network cancelled So noTORIous after one season. It was cheaper to produce reality TV. "I think a lot of people thought, 'Wow, she can laugh at herself!' but that didn't stop others from insulting me. It didn't change the course of my career," he laments. However, the good reception of So NoTORIous showed the actress that she had found the role of her life: herself.
Tori Speiing had already participated in other editions of 'Mask Singer'. In the image, in the American. FOX (FOX Image Collection via Getty I)
Since then, Spelling has starred in and produced five reality shows about her life: in Tori & Dean she ran a rural house with her husband (she met Dean McDermott during the filming of the telefilm In the mind of the murderer when they were both married, today they have five children), in Cabin Fever the couple reformed cabins, in sTORIbook Weddings they organized weddings and in True Tori They were trying to save their relationship after his infidelity. For Tori, anything can be turned into TV content.
The arrival in the 2000s of reality television extended the lives of celebrities like Spelling. And the popularity of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian showed that the public, just like when they watched Dynasty, was curious to observe the lives of millionaires. Although the truth is that Tori Spelling may be the rich girl with the least money in the world: after the death of Aaron Spelling in 2006, each of his children received just under a million euros of a fortune estimated at 500 million.
In a phenomenon similar to that of Tamara Falcó in Spain, thanks to reality television the public decided that Tori Spelling was not a repellent posh girl, but a very funny posh girl. Spelling acknowledges, with some sadness, that she is better at being a celebrity than being an actress (her only credit as an actress in the last five years is a stellar appearance in the sixth installment of Sharknado) and knows that, as much as she likes to provoke laughter, they are not always healthy. On Twitter he reads jokes like "Tori Spelling has had another child, but she's only going to use it to collect body parts", "The only authentic part of Tori Spelling's show that strange space between her fake tits", "I feel bad that Tori Spelling fell on a grill, her face has probably melted and she will have to buy another one".
Are you not wondering whether it would have been easier to choose a less exposed profession? "No," he replies sharply. "I wouldn't bear to stop getting care. I would feel sad. Seriously. It's all the life I know. Look, when there are photographers chasing me I hate it and I think I would like to be normal and be able to take my children to school quietly, but if nobody took a picture of me again, if they never took me out on television programs ... It would be really hard. I don't think a day goes by when you don't want to like people. When I was young I thought, 'If people could know me, I think they would like me,' and I think I've done that today. Today I want to like you. Did you like me?"
– I actually spent the interview thinking that I wish I had played with Shannen Doherty.
– Believe me, you wouldn't like it.
*This interview took place at Madrid's Ritz Hotel in February 2023, when Tori Spelling came to secretly record her appearance in 'Mask Singer'. The star invited the journalist to a cucumber sandwich.
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