Cole Sprouse is not here for the public’s response to Disney Channel stars going “nuts” after soaring to fame as children!
The Moonshot lead first shot to fame in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody alongside his twin brother Dylan Sprouse. But he’s been acting since he was just 6-months-old in hits like Grace Under Fire, Big Daddy, and Friends. So if anyone was going to struggle through as a teen, it should have been him, right? Wrong, according to Cole!
In a new interview with the New York Times published on Monday, the actor opened up about why he hates being complimented for growing up in the public eye “unscathed” and why he and his brother NEVER had it as hard as the other stars in his orbit.
Reflecting on the major differences between his experience versus the successful female celebs who were also popular on the network at the time — think Suite Life co-stars Ashley Tisdale and Brenda Song as well as Disney starlets Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato (who came out as non-binary last year) — the now-29-year-old expressed:
“My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, ‘Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!’ No. The young women on the channel we were on were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t dealt with his own “trauma” following his Disney days, he just recognizes that his hurdles were very different than those the women around him had to jump over.
And he can’t stand when he hears the general public judging these girls. Sprouse explained:
“When we talk about the child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma.”
Fame is a trauma. Huh. Wow. He continued:
“So I’m violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I don’t feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover.”
Whoa!
The Riverdale star, who has experienced a whole other level of stardom in the last six seasons of The CW series, sadly thinks that the effects of fame will never change, no matter the age of the person experiencing it. He noted:
“And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, I’ve noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when they’re older.”
Not many people can compare the experiences of getting famous both as a child and separately as a young adult. So he knows better than most, and if that’s true it means even the twentysomethings who come to stardom later in life are facing that same trauma.
Cole wasn’t completely caught off guard by that. Since he’s been around the block a few times, and done well to keep up his reputation, he once considered never returning to acting after saying goodbye to Mickey Mouse. After graduating from NYU for archaeology, the only reason he auditioned for Riverdale was to fulfill a promise to his team — otherwise, he likely would have vanished from the screen! Cole admitted:
“I started acting when I was so young that I hadn’t actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance. When I returned I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.”
After witnessing the ups and downs of so many child stars, it’s not hard to imagine why he doesn’t love celebrity culture. TBH, though, we love how protective he is of the females he grew up with — if only more people would speak out against the sexualization of young girls then maybe it wouldn’t be such a rampant problem!
Thoughts? Let us know all your reactions (below)!
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