TRENDING

A native Californian, Nathan’s mom got him into acting at the tender age of three. After doing a few voice-overs (he was in Babe, Pig in the City!) Nathan got burned out. “I got tired of missing school and missing my friends, and I just told my mom ‘I want to get out of it,’” he explains. “So we dropped the manager and the agent and resumed regular life and I went to a regular school.”

Flash forward to fifth grade, when Nathan won the lead in his school play. Sure enough, the acting bug bit him, so he convinced his mom to home-school him so that he could audition for acting jobs. Small parts came first, until Nickelodeon execs cast Nathan as Freddie Benson in iCarly in 2007, and the rest is history.

But life as a television star isn’t as glamorous as you might think. While the average teenager might balance a part-time job with regular schoolwork, Nathan’s role as Freddie Benson is a full-time job, which keeps him on the iCarly set for ten hours every day. “One of the things that people don’t really realize is how much work it is,” he reveals. “They think you sit around, read a script then act it out and it’s easy. But it’s actually getting the script Monday morning, memorizing it by Tuesday night and performing it by Thursday and Friday for cameras.”
 
Meanwhile, his school lessons (science and geography are favorites) are crammed into a three-hour time slot—from 4 am to 7 am! “It’s hard to have a full time job, then squeeze your high school life into three hours a day,” he admits.

But that’s not to say that Nathan doesn’t enjoy his job. “It’s a really good camaraderie on set,” he says of costars Miranda Cosgrove, Jennette McCurdy and Jerry Trainor. “When we get on set we all just flow really well.”

And in his new movie, Gym Teacher, Nathan stars as Roland Waffle, a tech savvy comic book geek, alongside Christopher Meloni (Elliot on Law and Order SVU), who plays his hard-bodied, super intense gym teacher, Mr. Stewie. The two butt heads when clumsy and uncoordinated Roland joins Mr. Stewie’s gym class, which is stocked with the school’s best athletes. Nathan promises a happy ending, so make sure to tune in to the premiere of Gym Teacher on September 12 (Nickelodeon, 8pm ET), and don’t forget to watch Nathan as Freddie on iCarly when it returns for Season 2 on September 27.

—Amy Wilson

9/10/2008 5:05:00 PM