16-year-old Miles Heizer plays the introverted, mature-minded Drew Holt on the NBC Tuesday-night drama Parenthood. Although Drew’s sister, Amber (played by Mae Whitman), is a novice singer-songwriter with a giant-sized Tegan and Sara poster on her wall, Under the Radar learned, while looking into the show’s occasional Tegan and Sara references, that Heizer is passionate about music and a fan of numerous indie-rock bands, with Beach House currently reigning supreme among them in his estimation. This writer spotted Heizer at a Lykke Li show in Los Angeles last month and struck up a conversation with him about music prior to the performance. With the season finale of Parenthood set to air tomorrow night, now seemed like a good time to find out more about Heizer, to continue the conversation about music, and to settle the mystery of the show’s Tegan and Sara connections.

What’s the deal with your imdb photo? How old were you when that was taken?

Do you have any idea what it looks like? My favorite photo of myself on imdb is one where I am embracing Jennifer Love Hewitt. We’re both holding each other, and I’m not quite sure how the photo came about. It wasn’t casual. We both had our arms around each other’s waists, and I feel I was like 11 at the time. But yeah, the imdb photo, I haven’t updated it or anything, and so I’m still very, very young in it. I haven’t had new headshots in a long time, also.

Yeah, you’re wearing a red jacket.

Yes, I did a McDonald’s commercial, and they gave me that jacket, and I remember being really excited, and I wore it to take my headshot. So yeah, that’s definitely the one. [Laughs]

On the other hand, the photo of you in the opening credits to Parenthood looks like it’s not that old.

Yeah, I don’t know where that picture came from. I think it’s on set. I’ve definitely looked at it, and it appears that I’m in a transpo van maybe, and I think Max is sitting beside me. Because it’s not that old. They asked for family photos to put in there, and I gave them a lot, but definitely not that. I think they took that of me unknowingly, and now there it is. And I’m smiling with my teeth, which is such a shock, ’cause I never do that.

Maybe that’s what they wanted, a contrast with your character.

Yes, definitely.

What can we expect from tomorrow night’s finale? Will there be some bombs dropped? In the ads, we’ve got Adam, Peter Krause’s character, digging in the trash and finding a pregnancy test.

There are definitely some surprises that I am not at liberty to give away, but there’s definitely some resolutions, which is a good thing. Everyone likes when issues are resolved. I think it’s gonna be really good. I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure it will come out very good, as most of the episodes do.

You had some intense scenes with Mae Whitman that aired a few weeks back, when Drew’s dad (played by John Corbett) came back into the picture. On a show with so many characters and story arcs, do you get much time to prepare for those scenes and rehearse with Mae?

We definitely have time. We rehearse, and we could work on it outside of work, but at this point, I feel like Mae and I, especially, are extremely comfortable together, that we don’t necessarily need a lot of time. A lot of our scenes are like that, where we’re either mad at each other or discussing something with Lauren or about Lauren, so we’re kind of used to that at this point. So I don’t feel like we need as much time, but we definitely have time of we need it, which is very nice.

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