“If I die tomorrow, always remember what I told you.”
This was the most memorable thing Michael Jackson told her, his daughter Paris says in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres airing Thursday on “Ellen.”
“I took his advice, and I remembered everything he told me,” Paris adds.
Michael Jackson died at the age of 50 in 2009.
Paris, 13, will star in an upcoming live action-animated film called “Lundon’s Bridge and the Three Keys,” based on the young adult fantasy book series by Dennis H. Christen.
According to her publicist, Paris wanted to do the film because half of its and the book’s profits will support schools, and because of its environmental message, a cause Michael Jackson espoused as well.
In the interview she says Michael Jackson inspired her interest in acting.
“My dad was in the movie ‘Moonwalker,’ and I knew he could sing really well, but I didn’t know he could act,” says Paris. “I saw that and I said, Wow, I want to be just like him.”
Michael would do improvisation exercises with Paris, she says.
“He would give us little scenarios. He would say, ‘O.K., in this scene you’re going to cry,’ and I’d cry on the spot.”
When asked about wearing a mask in public, a practice Michael enforced to protect his children from media attention, Paris says, “I’m like, this is stupid. Why am I wearing a mask? But I kind of realized the older I got, like, he only tried to protect us, and he’d explain that to us, too.”
Perhaps surprisingly, given how little surrounding Michael Jackson can be described as “regular,” Paris says, “I do have a regular childhood.”
She says she loves school, and that when she started at her current school, “They didn’t know who I was. I was like, Yes! I have a chance to be normal.”[abcnews.go.com]
