As is the case with many teenagers, Freddie Prinze Jr. routinely escaped the pressures of the real world through a fantasy life.
With his first movie starring role, in the new teen comedy "She's All That," set for release tomorrow, Prinze is poised to attract, rather than repel, new fans. But Prinze's memories of isolation and peer pressure, and a fantasy world that kept him from succumbing to those pressures, are never far from his thoughts.
Among those stress factors: Prinze's legacy as the son of comedian-actor Freddie Prinze, whose meteoric rise in show business during the mid-1970s culminated in death through a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 22 in 1977.
Ironically, the day "She's All That" opens across the nation is the 22nd anniversary of Prinze's death.
Whether that will affect Prinze Jr. remains to be seen. He says he has reconciled himself to his father's life and death ("I'm much better with it now than I was, like, two years ago"). But Prinze, a likable, plain-speaking young man who is 22 himself, also admits there are times when something will spark a memory of his dad that will bring him down.
"The thing with my pops was like, I didn't even know him, so I never missed him," says Prinze, who was only 10 months old when Prinze Sr. killed himself.
Prinze Jr.'s mother, Katherine Cochran, moved her son out of Hollywood when he was almost 4, partly so her son could have a more normal upbringing than would have been possible in the town that claimed her husband's life.
The younger Prinze grew up in the deserts of Albuquerque with his mother and grandmother. Even though show business was in his genes -- and Prinze Jr. performed in some productions with a kids' theater group while in grade school -- he didn't develop his love for acting until he performed in 1997's "The House of Yes" with independent movie queen Parker Posey and "She's All That" co-star Rachael Leigh Cook.
Posey "made made me fall in love with it because she was so amazing," says Prinze, who initially took up acting to help provide for his family. "It was like this whole new experience for me. So I couldn't help it, I just fell in love. And then I was addicted."
But before Prinze, whose first movie was the 1996 film "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday," discovered acting as an outlet for his emotions, he found comic books.
"I would always pretend that I was this new member of the X-Men. This kid, this young boy, who really didn't fit in with society because he couldn't control his power," Prinze says.
"I named him Prism because he would absorb emotion from other people. Like, if they were mean to him . . . it would be released in all these different directions, and he wouldn't be able to focus his energy."
That, Prinze says, was what he felt from others -- sensations of anger, resentment, cruelty. "I would kind of lash out sometimes," he says.
When he wasn't doing that, he turned inward.
He would take to the soccer field of La Cueva High School as his superpowered alter ego, and fight off imaginary attacks from such X-Men rivals as Magneto and Apocalypse. Prinze went "running and diving and trying to dodge magnetic blasts," he says, his peers looking on in disbelief.
"Kids thought that was really strange. And it is, okay? I know that I'm weird and I'm the first to admit it. But that's what I loved to do."
As the perhaps inevitable result, Prinze was hassled by other students. Instead of imaginary power blasts, he was sometimes beset by punches -- of the real variety.
"That's how I lived my life all through high school," Prinze says, "and still {do} sometimes today. I still fantasize about those kinds of things. So even back then, I was acting, I just didn't know it yet."
Prinze had another demon to contend with: the life and death of his father.
Freddie Prinze Sr. was a charismatic and gifted comic who played off his Hispanic background. He appeared on "The Tonight Show" at 19, and won the lead of NBC's "Chico and the Man" about five months after that, in 1974.
But during the third year of "Chico's" successful run, Prinze, who was said to have abused Quaaludes and who was despondent over his impending divorce, put a revolver to his right temple and shot himself. Thirty-three hours later, he was dead.
When he was young, Prinze Jr. was shielded from the events surrounding his father. He never deeply felt the loss until his early teens.
"There was this huge need for a father figure, and this search for who my father was," Prinze says. "And nobody could really talk to me about it, because everybody was kind of like scared and they didn't know the right words to say, because they didn't want to tell me that my old man did drugs and shot himself."
Finally, Prinze Sr.'s manager, Ron DiBlasio, sat the youngster down and told him about his father, "the great stuff and the bad stuff," Prinze says. Although he felt "cool" upon hearing about the events, Prinze later felt pangs of anger and abandonment.
"You're like, What the hell? Why wasn't I good enough for you to stay?' And stuff that really isn't your fault, but when you're 16, 17, there's no other alternative."
So Prinze slipped into his world of make-believe villains and heroes, doing the role-playing that later became his life's work. "Now," he says, "it's considered creative or artistic, instead of weird or strange."
Prinze used those experiences of peer pressure to positive effect in "She's All That," a "Cinderella"-"Pygmalion" update in which Prinze's character, Zach, is a popular high school kid who makes a bet that he can turn any nerdy girl at his school into a prom queen. (Cook, whom Prinze was eager to work with again after "House of Yes," plays ugly duckling Laney.)
"I tried to step out of myself and look at me, and look at Laney, and the way my former student body looked at me," Prinze says. "And somehow figure out in my head how they were able to sleep at night calling me freak' . . . or whatever their name of the week was. And I had to figure out how that was okay with them. And it was something I was never able to do."
Prinze was so affected by not understanding how one person could treat another so cruelly that in the scene where Laney finds out she was nothing more than the subject of a bet, Prinze broke down and cried.
"He was devastated, he was really emotionally overwrought for about a half-hour afterward," says "She's All That" director Robert Iscove, who adds that Prinze "brings honesty and integrity to anything he does."
Even now, Prinze feels his dad is helping him:
"My old man taught me a lot of stuff in his death that I don't even know if he would have been able to teach me had he been alive. And that was to never do stuff that can jeopardize the people you love and hurt them. And I would never want for my girlfriend or my friends to feel the way I felt when I was young, just to have this huge void in your life. I wouldn't want anybody to feel that." CAPTION: Freddie Prinze Jr.: "I know that I'm weird and I'm the first to admit it." ec
