At the tender age of 10, Ahmaogak Sweeney was at camp in Colorado when representatives from the film "Big Miracle" began to seek him out. His mom, Tara, had tried to get Sweeney into the initial round of auditions but was told there wasn't room for him.
"Sorry, we weren't able to get you in," she told her son before sending him off to camp.
But a few weeks later, when they were struggling to cast the role of Nathan – an Alaska boy who helped in the 1980s effort in Barrow to save three stranded whales – the casting crew revisited the emailed photo of Sweeney and called Tara back.
Though he wasn't due back from camp for a few weeks, Tara mailed her son a script with a sticky note that essentially said, if you still want to try out for this movie, learn these lines and don't show the script to anyone at camp.
After that, it was a "series of missteps," Tara said. Sweeney finished camp, studied his lines, and returned to Alaska.
Though many weeks had passed since the first auditions for the Nathan character, the studio hadn't found anyone, and continued to encourage Tara to bring her son in. They were on the verge of doing a national search, Tara said, but were making every attempt to cast an Alaska Native in the role.
"The day of the audition I was deathly ill, my husband was gone, and I almost didn't drive him in," Tara said. Her husband was running Lisa Murkowski's reelection campaign at the time.
But they made it. And Sweeney's school play experience and intrinsic charm paid off.
"I was nervous in the first one, I had little time to remember my lines," he said. "I got a callback and it was still more nerve-wracking."
Nerves aside, Sweeney soon joined a number of fellow Alaska residents in the film. That includes John Chase of Kotzebue and John Pingayak of Chevak, who played Nathan's grandfather in the movie.
Filming took place over about two-and-a-half months, mostly in Anchorage, where Sweeney got to know celebrity actors Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski.
"It was really fun, no doubt," Sweeney said. "I figured out that John and I have a lot in common when it comes to sports and stuff. We both like Boston teams and can't stand New York!"
The Sweeneys live in Anchorage, though Tara is from Barrow and is the Vice President of External Affairs for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. She took most of the two months off from work, as life revolved around the film, she said.
"During the filming, I had no social life whatsoever," Tara Sweeney said. When he wasn't busy with Big Miracle, he was keeping up with academics with his tutor. Law requires that children on movie sets not work more than nine hours a day, and spend at least three hours on classwork — even if they aren't attending regular school hours.
Sweeney missed his friends, but said the experience was a good one that taught him a lot, lessons he is taking with him into an acting future.
"My friends at school were really excited for me," he said. "I thought it was fun. I got new lines every night to remember, and my acting coach made it easier for me."
Sweeney currently has an agent in Los Angeles, which he just recently visited, though he declined to comment on any upcoming projects. He and his family also traveled to Washington D.C., for the movie's premiere, taking the red carpet walk most of us only see on television.
"I think I had a certain perspective of what it was going to be like, and it was that times 10," Tara said. "It was a bit overwhelming, the cameras, the attention. While it was fun, it certainly took a lot of energy — and we're just the parents!"
While the movie has riled some Alaska critics in terms of accuracy, Tara noted that it's important to remember the film is based loosely on real events.
"When you go into it with that mind set, it's a great family flick," she said. Tara was a young teenager when the three whales became marooned in the sea ice off of Barrow, just a few years older than her son, a sixth-grader at Bear Valley Elementary, was when he became a part of the retelling.