Ariel Landrum 0:11
Hello, everyone, welcome to the Happiest Pod on Earth. I’m Ariel, I’m a licensed therapist who uses clients passions and fandoms to help them grow and heal from trauma and mental unwellness.

Stefanie Bautista 0:21
And I’m Stef, and I’m an educator who uses passions and fandoms to help my students grow and learn about themselves and the world around them.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 0:28
And I’m Jessica, also known as TramaineTok, I am a TikToker, Instagrammer and former Disney performer for several years.

Ariel Landrum 0:39
And at Happiest Pod, it’s a place where we dissect Disney mediums with a critical lens.

Stefanie Bautista 0:44
Why do we do that? Because just like we’re more than just fans, we expect more from the mediums we consume.

Ariel Landrum 0:50
So everybody, what are we discussing today?

Stefanie Bautista 0:53
Well, we have a special guest!

Ariel Landrum 0:56
She’s so special.

Stefanie Bautista 0:57
Thank you, Jessica, for joining us today. What an honor it is to have you and thank you for taking the time. And we are so excited to hopefully pick your brain a little bit about your experiences and you know, just another side of Disney that we personally do not have any idea about so.

Ariel Landrum 1:18
Yes, yes. Okay, so for our audience members, as Jessica mentioned, she is a TokToker. She is also a former face character at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. She’s also an actress and dancer for Universal Orlando Resort, and was a character performer even at SeaWorld in Orlando. So she’s going to share with us what it’s like to be a character at the parks and some of the do’s and don’ts in regards to character interaction.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 1:49
Awesome.

Ariel Landrum 1:50
So starting off the character you played with Lady Tremaine, who, for some of our audience members, in our villains episode, we talked about Lady Tremaine’s a very scary villain because she’s a realistic villain. Like I could see me walking up and actually interacting with somebody who has a very similar tendencies. Did you mean to be a Disney villain and specifically her? How does that sort of process go?

Jessica Lady Tremaine 2:14
No, essentially, the audition process is very generic. It’s what us in the entertainment industry would call a cattle call. So you go, there’s hundreds and if not 1000s of people at one audition, and they’re looking for kind of everything, or they’re not specific about what they’re looking for. And Disney is very good about being very ambiguous with what they’re asking for. So So I went to a general audition. So I was not setting out to be a villain. I didn’t even know that like, I kind of fit that type.

Stefanie Bautista 2:49
I guess that’s something you don’t really think about, like, which one? Do my features represent? I would. Now it got me thinking.

Ariel Landrum 2:58
Well, and even like that word, like type, like, how did they present to you like, “Hey, we think this is who you fit the best, or what you should be doing.”

Jessica Lady Tremaine 3:06
Well, I found out over the course of not only my audition process, but my callback process with which is what they call a face fitting. Essentially, I am you haven’t seen me in person, but I’m five foot 10. So I’m, I’m pretty tall. Um, they had me measured a little bit shorter. So I could do more fur characters, which we can talk about later. But so I’m very tall. I have a very long face with a lot of angles. So I have very strong jawline, very narrow cheeks. And I also have just like very long features. They were very particular about my eyes, my eyes are very large in relation to the rest of my features. And they really noticed me in the audition based on my facial expressions, I very extreme facial expressions, just naturally talking not even when I’m really turning it on. So that was kind of what I found out later was what they were looking at.

Stefanie Bautista 4:09
Interesting.

Ariel Landrum 4:10
I I’m like I’m hearing you describe your facial features and how detailed it is. And I’m I don’t even think I could describe myself in such detail, does it? I mean, I guess that’s part of being an actress. Like you have to kind of be able to really describe yourself and be able to understand what you might fit.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 4:31
Yeah, absolutely. And I will say that a lot of it comes from I mean, you’re therapist, it comes from a place of being criticized. So one of the most criticized industries is the entertainment industry. You know, I wasn’t just an actress, I was also a dancer. So I spent my entire life being told you’re too tall or you’re not thin enough or your proportions aren’t right. You know, all those said in polite ways are not really great to hear, but it resonates with you when you’ve heard it for so many years, so it’s easy for you to point it out.

Ariel Landrum 5:08
Okay. Okay. I think that’s really interesting to note that you have to sort of pivot your mind around what criticism is going to be because you’re stepping into a profession where it is part of the profession. There’s no real like, gentle way to say things. And I can see that being a level of self awareness, but also so like, do you feel like you have to have like a tough skin to be able to enter entertainment?

Jessica Lady Tremaine 5:35
Yeah. And actually, it it actually is helped with now being on social media. But when you especially are a villain, you are heckled from the moment you walk out onto set until the moment you walk back/

Stefanie Bautista 5:48
For sure.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 5:49
And it would happen to my face. Like I’ve told this story on my Tik Tok, where a dad told me, I was a size four at the time. And I’m 5’10”. So it’s pretty tiny. So I am, I was a size four, and a dad told me that I was fat and ugly, to my face in front of his wife and children, and a hashtag came out of it on a video that trended for a while, called “Cinderella is Savage,” Because my friend was Cinderella, my friend was Cinderella for at the time, and I told her, and she went over and said something to him. And I don’t know what she said to him. But he came over and apologized to me. So I don’t know what she said.

Stefanie Bautista 6:33
She said something.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 6:34
Yeah. So so. So so in order to cope, you have to either disassociate or something like almost have like an out of body experience? Because if you don’t, you’ll you’ll go crazy.

Stefanie Bautista 6:49
I mean, it seems like you use that as a strength for you. I mean, and that carries in your social media, because I mean, a lot of your followers do say, you know, you’re really brave for speaking up and speaking out on behalf of cast members. And I think that’s the most I mean, you can say that for any profession, but especially in a profession where you’re being scrutinized from every single angle, to be honest like that. I mean, I really appreciate it. I know all your followers do. And I mean, did that did those stories inspire you to share your experiences as a cast member just to kind of get it out in the open? Or what really was the spark to say, “Hey, I’m going to just give a little bit of truth to this.”

Ariel Landrum 7:30
Yeah, make it really public, because a lot of the things that you’ve shared on your Tiktok, they were like, shocking to me. But then it made sense. Like, okay, you’re a public, you’re in the public. I should have, I shouldn’t be shocked to yet I am shocked.

Jessica Lady Tremaine 7:45
Yeah, so I actually started to share my story on accident. So I created my Tiktok. Honestly, I had a friend of mine who wanted to send me videos, and she was like, “Oh, I can just send them through the app easier.” So I wasn’t really making content. And so I did end up making my first real video, back in April, like April 29 of last year. So it’s fairly recent, where I told the story about my first time going viral as a character. So I was the character that went viral on YouTube, to the tune of like 18 or 19 million views. And that was several years ago. So a long time ago, but um, I essentially talked about that interaction. And from there, it sparked like that went viral in a matter of two or three days. And I all of a sudden had all these questions that I didn’t know anybody ever wanted answers to. And so I just started answering them. I know it’s silly, but I just started answering them. And then as I kind of went through, I was able to process things that had happened to me that were really, really damaging in a way that my therapist hadn’t really been able to walk me through them, because he just didn’t really it’s not that he wasn’t able to understand because he was doing his best, but he had never been in that position. So the coping strategies are not. They don’t fit in with a lot of other issues that people would have like unless you have experience treating people who are in the entertainment industry, it’s v