14
TheIndustrystar insists she was still very anti-establishment.
Myhala Herrold and her mom are tight.
But when Herrold was 14, the pair found themselves in a puberty-fueled rough patch.
Yet despite their spats, she never stopped championing her daughter.
Like any other 14-year-old, insecurity ran my life, Herrold says.
But the thing that helped me not totally succumb to that was my mom.
They must have a quota.
But her mother was always there to remind Herrold that what made her different was also her superpower.
She was like, Just wait.
Now 26, Herrold is one of Hollywoods most exciting rising stars.
And I got out of it alive.
Take me back to 2010, when you were 14.
How were you feeling about life?
[It was] devastating.
So all of those things were challenging for me, because I was always expressing myself on the outside.
I remember during my freshman year, I had blonde braids.
So then it was my goal to be asborderlineas possible.
Was your hair your primary vehicle for self-expression?
My first two years of high school, I was making a lot of my own clothes.
My grandma was a seamstress and I learned how to sew from her.
But they were all really cute.
I hand-painted a cat on the front of one of them.
We weren’t allowed to wear were tight jeans, skinny jeans, or leggings.
So I had a lot of those arguments.
I was also in our Christian rock band.
I’m taking us to American Apparel and we’re going to find something that is in dress code.
Hold up, you were in your schools Christian rock band?
Yeah, it was really weird.
The leader of the band also happened to be the principal, who was 80 years old.
We played all the masses, which was entirely foreign to me.
I was singing worship songs and whatever.
Outside of finding style inspiration, was Tumblr a big part of your life?
There would be pictures of people with bruises, or just weird stuff.
Unfortunately, the principal found my Tumblr.
I was like, “Well, you are right now by invading my privacy.
Then a female administrator coerced me into telling her about my eating disorder.
And they tried to accuse my mom of encouraging some sort of weird thing.
They were like, “We called CPS just to verify.”
It was the worst day of my life.
What a horrific experience for both you and your mom.
So it was pretty insane.
I just felt all these feelings and had no way to express them.
Did you always know you wanted to pursue the arts?
I’ve always known that I wanted to be a performer of some sort.
Then when I went to college [at Carnegie Mellon] for musical theater.
When I graduated, I still believed that I was going to go and do musical theater.
But in the musical theater world, there weren’t many options.
That world is incredibly small and the same 100 people are in the same things all the time.
Musical theater is my first love, but TV and film is just really doing it for me.
What do you think your 14-year-old self would think of your life now?
I think she might be like, What happened to you?
You used to be so much fun!
I’m a huge homebody.
I love to be home with my tea, my man, and my cats.
I love an early bedtime.
So she might be like, What happened?
Why are we not going out?
Then I hope she would be like, Damn, you really did that.
I hope she would see me and be excited about what our life’s going to look like.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
