David Dorfman is well aware of the “Disney curse.” Too often, young actors who achieve fame early in life later fall prey to self-destructive impulses.
But either thanks to sheer luck or wisdom beyond his years, Dorfman avoided the usual pitfalls. “A lot of child stars get in trouble with the law. I get to write the laws,” he said.
Dorfman, now 31 with a hint of the baby face from his movie and TV days, is perhaps best known for his role as Aidan in “The Ring,” the sullen-eyed, ashen-faced son of Naomi Watts’ character trying to outrun a videotape-dwelling demon.
As he landed other film and TV roles throughout his childhood, Dorfman parlayed his experience into an unlikely career path, taking him from Hollywood, to Harvard Law, to the halls of Congress. Most recently, as lead Democratic counsel on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, he helped draft the law to force the divestiture of TikTok, which could effectively ban the popular app in the U.S. by early next year unless its Chinese parent company complies. An appeals court upheld the law last week, though it faces further challenges.
He could not have done it without the education he received on set.
“As an actor you really have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of a character and understand their circumstances, understand what that character goes through. If you’re not able to have that empathy, your performance won’t seem authentic,” Dorfman said. “I think one of the most important things on Capitol Hill is that staffers do that very same exercise. Put themselves in the shoes of the people who will be impacted by the work they do.”
‘A set is, frankly, not fun and games’
It wasn’t always clear to Dorfman that he’d end up working in Congress, though he describes himself as “patriotic almost beyond words.”
“I’ve just always felt in the fiber of my being, this deep, deep gratitude for the opportunities that this country alone could afford,” he said.
A voracious learner, Dorfman — a West Coast kid who says he didn’t have any preexisting Hollywood ties — used his early years in acting as a springboard, finding interests in unlikely places.
“A set is, frankly, not fun and games,” Dorfman said. “It’s serious. There’s a lot of responsibility.”
Hideo Nakata, the filmmaker behind the original Japanese “Ring” films, directed the American sequel, in which Dorfman starred in 2005. Acting in that film amounted to “the best crash course in the region a kid could ever ask for,” which ultimately led to a period studying in China, working as an attorney in Hong Kong, and later, staff jobs on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House and Senate Homeland Security committees and the select China panel.
Dorfman started acting in commercials when he was a toddler, before appearing in movies like the 1999 comedy “Galaxy Quest” and the 2000 crime drama “Panic.” He was best known for his work in horror, even as he relished parts in legal TV dramas like “Ally McBeal” and “Family Law.”
“I was known as the horror-movie kid, but I was also the legal kid,” Dorfman says. “There were so many projects I worked on that were about lawyers, so it actually got me really interested. And one thing leads to another.”
As a law student, another experience solidified his desire to work in public service. Dorfman was at Harvard at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and was a pre-trial clerk for the prosecution team.
“That led to me spending a year at the Department of Justice’s National Security Division,” Dorfman said. “The work I do is not really driven by anything other than national security. It’s sort of what’s defined my path.”
It’s also created a sharp contrast between Dorfman and his former Los Angeles colleagues, some of whom are now TikTok influencers. “And here I am leading the negotiations and bipartisan strategy for the law that will divest TikTok from ByteDance,” Dorfman said, describing it as one of his proudest moments.
Stranger than fiction
Dorfman both leans into the uniqueness of his young life and also rolls his eyes when asked to comment on some of the oddities.
“I know what you’re going to ask,” Dorfman interjected, as the conversation turns to his enrolling in the UCLA at the age of 13. “It’s like, ‘How was it in the classroom?’”
With some prodding, he elaborated on his time as an underage undergrad, where he studied geography and film and graduated with a perfect GPA.
“It was probably weirder in reality than I recognized at the time,” Dorfman said. “I was so used to being in really adult environments that it honestly did not phase me one iota. But I’m sure if I was one of the college students sitting in that class with me I would’ve been going, ‘Huh?’”
While still in law school, Dorfman helped draft a motion picture tax credit system for the Philippines. In Hong Kong, he said he worked on “very weighty, multibillion-dollar matters at the age of someone who is still essentially a kid.” And in 2019, he landed on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for law and policy.
Asked whether he was ever discounted because of his age, Dorfman shrugged: “Results speak for themselves. People look at the results.”
Dorfman gave up acting when he was still a teenager enrolling in Harvard Law and said he doesn’t miss it. His committee work keeps him plenty busy. And the twists and turns of a former child prodigy turned congressional lawyer have a cinematic quality.
“I grew up doing movies,” Dorfman said. “Sometimes my life feels like a movie.”
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