Lava Girl Returns: Taylor Dooley on Fame, Family, and Acting Again
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Taylor Dooley’s breakout role as Lava Girl launched her into sudden fame, but it also came with pressures few young actors are prepared to handle. By her late teens, she stepped away from Hollywood to live life outside the spotlight. Years later, Dooley returned to reprise the role that defined her childhood in Netflix’s We Can Be Heroes. Here, Taylor opens up about the challenges of child stardom and the joy of reconnecting with her character as an adult.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. |
| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.6 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:26.6 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.6 | Music This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. |
| 0:51.8 | From the arts to sports and from business to history and everything |
| 0:54.7 | in between, including your story. Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. |
| 1:01.2 | And now we bring you the story of Taylor Dooley. She's an actress most known for her role as |
| 1:06.6 | Lava Girl in the Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, the 2005 film. |
| 1:13.2 | She has returned to acting today in the Netflix film We Can Be Heroes. |
| 1:17.7 | Here's Taylor with her story. |
| 1:23.5 | I was just a little girl with a big dream when I was probably 10. |
| 1:30.4 | I was about 10 when I caught kind of the acting bug a little bit. |
| 1:35.2 | I had been through a few modeling classes and was modeling and having fun. |
| 1:40.9 | My dad saw this thing to be able to take some acting classes and thought, hey, maybe |
| 1:46.2 | you might like that as well. So I did absolutely fell in love with it to my parents' dismay. |
| 1:53.1 | They didn't know anything about the acting world or anything about it, nor wanted me really |
| 1:58.8 | to be into it much. But once their daughter fell in love with it, |
| 2:02.2 | they kind of just really pushed me through that. We were living in Arizona at the time, |
... |
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