[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Kirk Cameron and Harvest Time”][/title]
Actor Kirk Cameron walks across the stage inside Harvest Time in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the 2,000 people who’ve come to see him break into applause. He stops at the tall table that will serve as his podium and flashes his signature smile. The teen star from the 1980s sitcom, Growing Pains, is aging incredibly well. If not for the smattering of gray in his hair, the forty-three-year-old could easily pass for someone much younger. He has a scruff of a beard. He wears a hoodie, gray pants, sneakers. He is not a tall man, and he jokes about looking bigger on television. There’s something generous and electric in the way he moves, as if there’s a great party he’s just been invited to and he can’t wait to get there.
Later in the evening, when his Love Worth Fighting For event begins, the subject will turn to marriage: the struggles, the need to be unselfish, the hovering fear of divorce. But now he’s warming up the crowd, talking about Mike Seaver, the mischievous character he played so well that people are still talking about him. He leads the crowd in a rendition of the Growing Pains’ theme song, “As Long As We Have Each Other.” It sounds as if everyone in this auditorium is singing along. He then rolls up his pant legs to mimic the peg-legged jeans that were in vogue at the height of his popularity, and in sixty seconds walks the group through some of the best known scenes from the hit show, which ran from 1985 to 1992. Laughter shakes the room.
Kirk is laughing too. He scans the audience. He asks the women to raise their hands if they had a poster of Mike Seaver on their walls when they were younger. He shakes his head, then runs his fingers through his hair, acknowledging that the curls he was known for have now faded. He makes fun of the mullet he once wore, the parachute pants, the Reeboks, the acid-washed jeans.
But he is not here to dwell on Hollywood; this is just his opening act. His life took a drastic turn while he was still working on Growing Pains, and that’s what’s led him here on this Friday night in April, to stand in front of this church and speak to people he likely would never have met otherwise.
He talks about his conversion to Christianity during intermission. We talk about the story of a fellow actor who asked him to go to church with her, at a time when he called himself an atheist. Behind the pulpit was Charles Swindoll, a well known conservative preacher and Christian author.
By the end of the service, Kirk’s life had changed. If he hadn’t attended, he doesn’t know where he might have ended up, although he’s certain his future would have been a dark one. And to drive the point home, he talks about those closest to him at the time.
“So, I was this young guy working on Growing Pains,” Kirk says. “There were a couple other guys on the side of me. River Phoenix, Corey Haim, we all auditioned for the same parts. Corey Haim died of a drug overdose [in 2010]. River Phoenix killed himself [in 1993], they found him dead on the floor in the Viper Room, a nightclub. My buddy [Andrew Koenig] who played Boner, my best friend on Growing Pains, killed himself [in 2010].
“You see these child stars and it’s like you can predict it. Like the sunrise tomorrow morning. Because, like I said, that environment is devoid of what you need to grow up and be healthy. What happened to me was I had someone who cared enough about me to say, ‘Hey, you’re not the most important person in this world. You’re a celebrity to everyone else around here, but if you want to know who God is, you have to come to Him on His terms. You’re not the celebrity in that relationship. He’s being kind and gracious to you. You’ve got some things to learn.’ And that set me on a whole different course than my friends.”
In the last season of Growing Pains, another young actor showed up on set. Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as Luke, a homeless boy who made his way into the Seavers’ home and heart. “He was about fourteen years old at the time. He was a little guy who was a talented actor and we all had a feeling he would go places in his career, and he certainly has.”
By the time DiCaprio joined the cast, Kirk had grown disillusioned with fame. At one point it’s estimated Kirk was receiving 10,000 fan letters a week. At home, he could talk about the pressure of being a child star with his younger sister, Candace Cameron-Bure, who was playing DJ Tanner on the sitcom, Full House. She is currently competing on this season’s Dancing with the Stars.
Kirk’s world now revolves around his evangelical work and his family. And he still does movies, working in the Christian genre. One of his best known roles was in the 2008 movie, Fireproof. He played Captain Caleb Holt, a firefighter who works to win back his wife’s heart. Two documentaries followed: UNSTOPPABLE and Monumental: In Search of America’s National Treasure.
His most recent release is Mercy Rule, a movie about “faith, family, and baseball.” He’s particularly excited about this movie, since his wife, Chelsea, stars in it with him. Those proficient in Growing Pains’ trivia will remember Chelsea Noble, who played Kate McDonald, Mike Seaver’s love interest. The chemistry both onscreen and off was genuine, and in 1991, Kirk and Chelsea married. In the years that followed, their family grew. They now have six children, four of whom are adopted.
“We love being a big family. I just love my wife. She’s amazing, she’s wonderful. My wife herself is an adopted child, so she had a real heart for adopting children,” Kirk says.
Tonight, his oldest, seventeen-year-old Jack, is with him. It is one of the great joys, having the flexibility to have his son along, since he and Chelsea home school their children. “We call it Sweet Freedom Academy,” he says.
The subject of family branches out, and soon the conversation turns to Camp Firefly, a charity that serves children with life-threatening illnesses, which began in 1989. “My family and I started Camp Firefly when we were working on Growing Pains. We met kids through the Make a Wish Foundation, and their wish was to come to the set, meet the cast, and get an autograph. I wanted to do something more than just sign a piece a paper. So we thought, How could we really help this family? The dad’s working two jobs to pay these medical bills, mom’s often at the hospital with the kids with cancer, or at chemo, or bone marrow transplants, and the siblings are being raised by grandparents over here. The whole family’s being ripped apart. We thought, Let’s bring them together for a weeklong, all-expenses-paid vacation. Give them time to be together, get away from needles and chemo and bills and work and just be together as a family.”
As he’s explaining how the camp works, the music from the auditorium starts to wind down. It’s Kirk’s cue that intermission is almost over. He mentions his upcoming movie called Christmas, which will be out in time for the holidays. He seems to work at a breakneck pace, although none of that shows when you talk to him. He leans in when asked a question. He sometimes pauses before answering, careful of his response. He is engaging, charismatic, polite.
When the subject of Dancing with the Stars came up, Kirk said he’d been approached about the show but wouldn’t want to compete. “If I’m going to dance with somebody, I’m going to dance with my wife,” he said, and then he smiled again, that crooked half-smirk that endeared him to so many all those years ago. When he returns to the stage, he’ll say a lot of things about marriage and how to improve it. But it is in his statement about dancing that he seems to sum up how we should treat the one we chose to spend our lives with: adore them, let them know it, and always choose them over everyone else.
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For more about Kirk, his Love Worth Fighting For marriage conferences, and upcoming movies, visit kirkcameron.com
