Corey Feldman can currently be seen in The Birthday, the cult hit which is having a 20th anniversary re-release. He began his career at the age of three, starring in a McDonald’s commercial, and has remained a fixture in the entertainment industry ever since. With over 100 film credits to his name, Corey built his career with roles in film such as The Bad News Bears, Time After Time, Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand By Me and The Lost Boys. As a musician, Corey recently wrapped up his final solo U.S. tour, performing to sold-out crowds. He is preparing for a world tour next year to promote his latest album Love Left 2: Arm Me With Love, which has already produced two Billboard Top 40 hits. Corey is also a New York Times best-selling author, having released his autobiography Coreyography in 2013. He continues to be a dedicated advocate for victims of child sexual abuse, serving as National Ambassador for CHILD USA and helping drive the movement for statute of limitation reform. For more information, visit coreyfeldman.net.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the 20th anniversary one-night-only screenings on October 1 of the cult classic The Birthday, starring Corey Feldman in a career-best performance, the iconic former teen star shared some of the most important and meaningful things in his life. — N.D.
Equal Rights for All
The idea of equal rights to all beings that live on this planet, that’s what brings me joy. Sharing the planet equally and coexisting in peace and unity. And what a great concept that would be! At this time, there’s maybe only a few people on this earth who think that way, as 99 percent of civilization is selfish and self-centered and believe they’re the most significant being on this planet. And everything else is secondary. But I hold the opposite belief.
I believe all of God’s creatures are created equally and we should all have a shared philosophy of respecting life. As a survivor of various types of abuse – physical, mental, sexual, gang stalking, terror – I’ve been through a lot. I’ve never understood why we as humans would spend our time tearing people down, as opposed to building people up. And don’t get me started on factory farming and the environment and the ways that our selfishness and self-serving nature is destroying the planet! To me, it’s just a flagrant disregard for the gifts we’ve been given. But we’re just too selfish to look at it that way. Instead, we’d rather say, I want to take what’s mine … and what’s yours, too.
I’ve been fighting for equality for all my whole life. I’ve always tried to lay that into my work, whether it’s an interview, or my writing a book, songs or scripts. I always try to make sure I’m spreading positive messages, because we all need to relearn compassion sometimes. We need to hear stories of compassion, to take some time out of our own personal lives to give, to offer our services to somebody else, to offer a kind gesture, a selfless task: help a lady across the street, hand somebody a dollar because they need it, go pick up an animal and find it a home, or donate your time to a charity.
I do things to help that I don’t really talk about, like putting groups of people together and going to a park and cleaning up litter. Or donating my time at a homeless shelter where I can make sandwiches. Or bringing a truckload of food and, and medical supplies down to Skid Row, for people who desperately need a blanket or shoes or a shirt. There’s so many ways we can all give back. If each of us made a little list of things we could do to give to somebody else, to do one thing every day to give something back to the world, maybe we’d all feel a bit better about ourselves and the world.
Harmony
I love harmony. I love hearing people sing in harmony and musicality that’s harmonious. But what I love more is the subliminal message of harmony, the idea that we can all think alike and we can use our collective thought process and collective mind power to create a better reality. People don’t understand the idea of manifestation, but it is a reality. There’s a book that I read many years ago called The Secret. It is all about the idea of harmonious thinking and manifestation, that if we’re at peace with ourselves and strongly believe an idea, we can create our own reality, we can manifest it. And the secret to life is being happy and having everything that we want by being able to create it through our imagination, through our mind and through our belief system.
Just imagine if we were able to expand that into helping others or being selfless. And if we could all be on the same page, imagine what that would feel like. A great example is if you’re in a room of 200 people and somebody’s playing an acoustic guitar and everybody’s singing the same part together. Hearing everybody hit those notes together creates a beautiful, elegant vibrato in the room, just lighting up with this sound wave of everybody collectively being on the same page and the energy that brings, the beauty and the joy of feeling all those people on the same wavelength as you. And especially carrying that note, that specific frequency we all reach when we find that note together and we all bring it together. Imagine what we could do if we could take that musicality and invest it into our way of thinking, into our life processes, into our daily planning and we just tried to build, through a harmonious avenue, the ability for all of us to be on the same page, to be on the same street, to be moving our vessels in the same direction.
Love
At the end of the day, love is the answer. When equality and harmony join together, it brings us to the concept of love. But everybody has a different concept of what love means, so if somebody says, “I love you,” you have to stop and ask them, “Well, what does love mean to you?” Because what love means to me may be vastly different than what love means to you.
The idea of love for me is that I care about you equally or more than I care about myself. That’s what love is. Love is giving. Love is tolerating. Love is understanding. Love is having compassion. Love is not being self-invested or self-interested, it’s caring about someone else equally, or maybe even a bit more, as you care about yourself at that moment. And maybe loving yourself, too. It’s OK to love yourself. But the point is, if we all got on the idea of love, instead of hate, and we started focusing on that, and the idea of compassion, and of understanding and forgiveness, imagine how much happier and more peaceful this planet would be.
Love is about wanting to lift someone to a higher place. And doing all we can to make that a reality, to bring it to fruition. I think a lot of times people love in selfish ways – “I’ll love you if you do these things for me” – rather than selflessly loving because they care, because they’re concerned, because they want to be there. We shouldn’t be forced to love. We shouldn’t be manipulated to love. We shouldn’t be paid to love. None of these things equate honest, caring love. The only thing that actually generates love is the internal belief system of pushing your own needs, wants and thoughts aside for a moment to wholeheartedly give your full attention to the person you say you love.
If we nurture a relationship with love, the chances are we’re going to get the growth process out of it we’re looking for. Because at the end of the day, if we love someone who doesn’t love us back, then it’s going to die, because love needs a connection to continue. It’s got to follow through the energy we put forth, to find that love and then circle its way back around to where it originated. But if we don’t have a connection to keep it flowing, then it just stays within one person. And that equates to selfishness. But if you’re sharing your love with as many people as possible, and those people are able to pay it forward, then that love keeps regenerating and creates an aura we can collectively understand and that allows us to collectively share these ideas and feelings together. And that, to me, is love.
