'Meet the Parents' star Teri Polo comes home to Delaware; making new film in First State

Long before she became Pam Focker for the "Meet the Parents" trilogy, Delaware native Teri Polo dropped out of Dover High School and began her career as a 17-year-old model/actress/dancer.

And for about a decade after that, she would regularly take Amtrak back forth between New York City and Wilmington to visit her Delaware family as she broke into the world of television and film.

Those were the memories flooding into the actresses mind as she looked from her Wilmington Riverfront hotel window last month as she was wrapping her starring shoot for a Delaware-made film.

What she saw was the Senator John E. Reilly Sr. Bridge, which crosses the Christina River and connects to the now-named Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station where a teenage Polo would hop onto trains.

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"I just went, 'Holy s--t!,' excuse my language," Polo says from her new home in Stafford, Virginia, where she lives with her fiancé Jason Booth. "It was full circle in a way, thinking of all I have done in the past 37 years.

"To look at that bridge at 54 years old, it was kind of crazy. It was very emotional for me."

And all it took was her first-ever Delaware project, a new movie called "Relative Control" by a first-time Delaware filmmaker, which survived delays due to both COVID-19 and Hollywood's twin strikes by actors and writers.

'Dover was a nice place to grow up in, but also move out of'

Polo grew up in Dover with two older brothers as the daughter of Jane, a stay-at-home mother who later worked for Catholic Charities, and Vince, a stereo engineer.

She found her future early in life, immersing herself in theater at Dover High School and dancing with Delaware Ballet, known as Delaware Regional Ballet at the time.

Having already spent a summer in New York at 13 for a School of American Ballet summer program, she returned there for the summer after her junior year of high school for acting jobs, linking with an acting agent. She also signed on with Elite Model Management's petite division ― the high-profile modeling agency that discovered everyone from Gisele Bündchen to Cindy Crawford.

"I got my foot in the door and then school time came," says Polo, a good student who got the support of her parents and the school's principal before deciding to forgo her senior year, promising to get her GED.

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Since she had already spent time in New York, the culture shock of going from Dover to the Big Apple wasn't quite the whiplash you might expect.

In fact, she found herself happily absorbed in her new world.

"I loved the energy and already had fallen in love with it, so I was quite happy being there," says Polo, whose first television gig came on the ABC soap opera "Loving" at 17. "Dover was a nice place to grow up in, but also move out of. I was bored and knew what I wanted to do.

"I remember everyone asking, 'You're not going to college?' And I was like, 'No. Why be told what it's going to be like when I'm already doing it and experiencing it for myself?'"

These days, Polo still goes back home to Dover from time to time, visiting her mother and eldest brother, both of whom still live there.

Back in Delaware. This time for work.

After 15 years in the acting world, including a run on CBS' "Northern Exposure," Polo shot to prominence as the wife of Ben Stiller's character in the 2000 blockbuster "Meet the Parents" and its sequels "Meet the Fockers" and "Little Fockers." Combined, the three films have made more than $1.2 billion at the box office.

She also co-starred in such films as "Domestic Disturbance" with John Travolta, Vince Vaughn and Steve Buscemi, along with "Beyond Borders" with Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen. And most recently, she fronted a five-season run of ABC Family's "The Fosters," ending in 2018.

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As her career inched toward the four-decade mark, Polo's managing agent had an interesting project come across her desk with a very familiar location: the First State.

"Relative Control," a full-length feature film written and financed by Rockland's Charlene Davis, tells a story that Polo could relate to.

The family drama follows a middle-age corporate attorney whose life spirals out of control as she juggles the demands of her aging, headstrong and accident-prone father, played by Patrick McDade ("Silver Linings Playbook," "Mare of Easttown"). All this while defending her client from a corporate takeover in the largest case of her career.

Polo, who has long worked in a very different, yet very demanding business, now finds herself watching as her own aging mother is in and out of the hospital ― and wanting nothing to do with moving to a retirement community.

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"Life is imitating art for me in a way and it really hit home," Polo says. "And I was grateful for a role that was basically my age. You see scripts where the characters are 45 and I'm not sure I can squeak by. Or they are in their 60s and I'm not there yet."

After talking to both director Dafna Yachin and Davis, who also serves as executive director, Polo signed on and packed her bags, homeward-bound.

Retired 40-year Wilmington corporate attorney-turned-filmmaker

Davis' path to a film set sounds like a movie script in and of itself.

A one-time U.S. Assistant Attorney, the former federal prosecutor retired as president of Wilmington-based corporate law firm Bayard, P.A. five years ago, intent on turning her first script into a feature film.

Her script largely shadows her own experiences as an attorney who found her time torn between a pressing profession and family ― taking care of increasingly frail parents.

She had a mixture of both sad and comical stories that grew from her time tending to her parents and pitched her film idea to her movie-making son J. Davis. After he told his mother it's her story to tell, she enrolled in screenwriting classes nine years ago at Philadelphia's University of the Arts while still at her law firm and taking care of her mother.

"I had the legal experience, which lent itself to the script, and I would say about a third of the family storyline is probably related to something I experienced with my folks," says Davis, whose parents both passed away at the age of 94. Her father had mobility issues late in life, much like the character in her film.

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After the pandemic delayed casting, filming finally got rolling this summer after entering an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA to keep work going on the independent film despite the acting strike.

At first, it was a lot for her to take in as she watched part of her own life unfold before her eyes.

"I would envision my mother and father in these family scenes," says Davis, who spent 10 years managing their medical needs as they declined. "But after a day or two, the actors were so good, they really own the characters and I was watching it in a little less emotional state."

As Polo adds, "Sometimes she would be crying. Plus, she was like, 'Holy crap. This is finally happening after trying to get it off the ground for five years."

Scenes filmed everywhere from Abessinio Stadium to Fieldstone Golf Club

"Relative Control" was filmed almost entirely in northern Delaware, ranging from Abessinio Stadium, Fieldstone Golf Club and Wilmington University's Brandywine campus to Wilmington's Lorelton assisted living facility, Holly Oak's Bar 13 and her former law firm Bayard, P.A., located on King Street near the Leonard L. Williams Justice Center

Davis declined to divulge the cost of the personal project, which is currently being edited and should be completed by the end of the year. From there, she will begin searching for a distributor, possibly through the film festival circuit.

"We're considering all options and calling on connections that everybody on the team has," says Davis, who expects to roll out a website and social media pages for "Relative Control" soon.

For Davis, her labor of love was worth the years of hard work it took to get her to this point: "The whole process was really much more complicated and interesting than I thought it would be. It was pretty satisfying."

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As for Polo, she walked away with plenty of admiration for the attorney-turned-filmmaker determined to turn her later-in-life dream into a reality.

"There are so many people out there who have that dream who never achieve it," she says. "I'm really happy she stuck to it, funded the majority of it herself and accomplished it."

Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (Twitter) (@ryancormier).

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Teri Polo teams up with Delaware indie filmmaker for a family drama