Everybody knew Michael Jackson could sing. His own daughter didn’t know he could do anything else.
Paris Jackson is Michael’s only daughter, the middle of his three kids. She was still little when her dad was around the house, and like a lot of children she figured she knew everything about him. Then one day she sat down and watched one of his movies.
It was “Moonwalker,” the 1988 film where Michael plays a character and runs from the bad guys. Paris had heard him sing her whole life. Seeing him act was brand new. “My dad was in the movie ‘Moonwalker’ and I knew he could sing really well, but I didn’t know he could act,” she said later. “I saw that and I said, ‘Wow, I want to be just like him.'”
She got her wish, in a way. Michael already liked to play pretend with all his kids at home. He’d make up little scenes and hand each of them a part, almost like a game. “We would do improv together,” Paris remembered. “He would give us little scenarios.” Improv just means acting out a scene on the spot, no script, the way real actors warm up.
Then came the one scene that stuck with her.
One of those made-up scenes asked her to do something that isn’t easy, not even for grown actors. “‘OK, in this scene, you’re going to cry,'” Paris said her dad told her. And she did. “I’d cry on the spot.” A little girl, crying on command, just because her father asked her to pretend. That’s a tough thing to pull off, and she pulled it off.
Paris told that story in December 2011, on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” She was 13, and it was her first time doing a TV interview on her own. She talked about her dad and about those living-room acting games, and it’s warmer than you might expect.
Watch her face when Ellen asks about her father and the scenes they’d act out together.
Paris Jackson’s first solo TV interview, where she tells the acting-game story
There’s a reason the acting bug bit her so hard. The movie that started it leans on one long sequence most fans know by heart. In it Michael isn’t just dancing. He’s playing a character, telling a whole story with his face and his body. That’s the acting Paris saw at home on the screen.
The “Smooth Criminal” scene from the film that made Paris want to act
Years before the Ellen chat, Paris had shared another quiet memory with Oprah. “One time, we went on the roof [of our house] when we were in Las Vegas, and we just saw the Luxor lights,” she said. Small stuff. The kind of thing a kid keeps forever.
She held onto the acting dream after that. The home acting games stayed with her too, especially the one where her dad asked her to cry and she just did.