Christopher Backus Shares Parenting Advice from Paul Sorvino (Exclusive)

Christopher Backus and Mira Sorvino share the important parenting advice they once received from their late father Paul Sorvino.

The actor, 43, and the Romy and Michele The 57-year-old actress spoke to PEOPLE about her upcoming film Damn stateand shared some of the great parenting advice he received from Sorvino.

Backus and Mira are parents to daughters Mattea (18) and Lucia (11) and sons Johnny (17) and Holden (14).

“Mira’s father once said to me: ‘You imagine that someone has taken a hair from your child’s head. It’s a rage. You can feel it.’ “When something happens to someone else somewhere in the distance, you say, ‘That’s really sad,’ but it doesn’t really have the same impact as the one strand of hair being taken from a child’s head,” Backus recalls.

“So it’s about finding the right balance to play against this team,” he says.

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Mira agrees and says that her father once made a film with the title Survive about a teenager’s suicide and made the mistake of relying on the fantasy of one of his daughters dying to reenact the scene.

“And he said he never slept through the night again. “He never slept through the night without nightmares again,” she says.

“So he warned me never to use my own children,” Mira remembers. “So I try to imagine that in this story we have this son Bryce. And I’m trying to imagine who Bryce is and what I love about Bryce and what’s special about him.”

“And I love my own children so much. It’s easy for me to imagine loving this other pretend child because the love I feel for her is so great,” she continues. “But strangely enough, it suddenly happened while we were filming this because my phone now does this thing and shows me random pictures from my albums as a screensaver because I don’t choose screensavers.”

“And somehow I press something and it keeps showing me images of young Johnny when Johnny was the age of this Bryce character. They came over and I was like, ‘No, get out!'”