TV URBAN LEGEND: Tina Majorino got her role as Mac on Veronica Mars based on a promise Rob Thomas made her when she had done a book report on him years earlier.
Before he was a television writer, Ron Thomas was a popular writer of young adult novels....
In 1998, he received an e-mail from a teenager who wanted to interview him for a book report after having read Thomas' Rats Saw God.
During the Kickstarter for the Veronica Mars movie, Thomas recalled one of their online conversations:
One of her questions was, “What do you want to do next?” I replied that I was hoping to transition into the TV and film business. She responded that she’d done some film work herself.
A girl with big dreams of being an actress! How sweet! I thought to myself. I should say something encouraging!
I wrote back asking her, politely I hoped, what movies she’d been in.
“Waterworld,” she wrote. “Corrina Corrina. When a Man Loves a Woman.
She was very sweet, though. She told me I should keep chasing my dreams.
The girl, of course, was Tina Majorino, a popular child star who was the little girl in Waterworld and the star of Andre, that movie about a girl who befriends a seal...
Majorino had temporarily "retired" from acting to finish up high school. She and Thomas actually met for lunch when she was 14 and discussed her future plans. She explained to Jason Cohen of the Texas Monthly...
“Looking back on it, that’s such a cool thing. It was kind of just fated. Why would I pick up Rob’s book? We said, let’s promise each other that we’re going to work together someday. So all those years later, when Veronica Mars was coming up, and they contacted me, and they said, ‘he’s written this part for you,’ I was like, man, this is so cool. He’s just one of the rare people in Hollywood that means it, when he tells you something.”
The part, of course, was on Thomas' then-new TV series, Veronica Mars...
She was Veronica's IT expert friend, Mac...
She eventually became a full cast member on the series and she even appeared in the crowd-funded Veronica Mars movie!
Sadly, she did not show up for the recent Hulu revival.
What a cool story.
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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