Carly Schroeder Goes Into The Eye of the Dolphin
January 7, 2008

A veteran of dozens of installments of episodic television, from the soap opera Port Charles to Dawson’s Creek to Lizzie Maguire, 17-year-old actress Carly Schroeder takes her talent to the big screen in the

The winner of Best Drama and Best Child Actor (Schroeder) at last year’s International Family Film Festival, Eye of the Dolphin concerns a troubled teenager (Schroeder) who travels to the Bahamas to live with the father she never knew and discovers that she has a gift for communicating with dolphins.

I spoke with the perky Ms. Schroeder about making the film, which was shot on location in the Bahamas over the course of a month. Obviously, the most fascinating aspect of the shoot for the actress was getting up close and personal with her dolphin co-stars.

“Originally, there weren’t going to let me do any of the stunts with the dolphins. But as soon as I got down there, they say how comfortable I was with them and I ended up doing a lot on my own,” Schroeder recalls. “The training was an every day kind of thing--in between the shots, they’d bring me over and show me how to give the dolphins vitamins, how to use hand signals and how to reward them by giving feed them a little fish.”

Unfortunately, the work and fun in the Bahamian sun and seas also yielded encounters with some not-so-friendly aquatic creatures.

“I got stung by a jellyfish when I was down there and I was kind of a little weirded out by that. I was kind of little weirded out by that,” she said. “And one time, I slipped on coral and sliced my heal open! I couldn’t go in the sun after those things—they had to have umbrellas over me at all times!

Posted by Laurence Lerman on January 7, 2008 | Comments (1)