Vice President Kamala Harris is starting a new series of videos on YouTube aimed at promoting NASA to children, but was found to have used child actors in its very first video instead of regular children, Fox News reports.
The first video of the YouTube Original Series, “Get Curious with Vice President Harris,” featured five child actors who have already appeared in other productions in the past. Among them was Trevor Bernardino, a 13-year-old child actor who described in detail the application process to be part of the production.
Bernardino told local outlet KSBW TV that he submitted a monologue, and eventually was asked to do an interview for a part in the video. “And then after that, like a week later,” Bernardino recounted, “my agent called me and he’s like, ‘Hey Trevor, you booked it.’”
Bernardino went on to give his opinion on Harris, describing her as “super charismatic” and “everything that I ever thought of her, plus more.”
“She made me feel like one of her peers,” he added. “And at the time, I felt super important. I was talking to her face to face.”
The other child actors featured in the video included Derrick Brooks II, Emily Kim, Sydney Schmooke, and Zhoriel Tapo. The video, produced by the Canadian production company Sinking Ship Entertainment, was filmed back in August in order to be released during World Space Week.
Despite being actors, the children pretended to be as amazed by the presentation as regular children would have been. The video features a virtual meeting between the children and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, who is currently stationed in the International Space Station. Through the Zoom call, Kimbrough led the child actors on a “scavenger hunt” for components to build a telescope, before the actors then got to meet Harris at the Naval Observatory.