Cole Sprouse has no regrets about child stardom: "I’d probably do it again"

The public hasn’t lost their fascination for the Golden Age of Disney Channel, which peaked when the network hosted stars like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, and the Sprouse twins. There’s still a craving for behind-the-scenes drama within the House of Mouse, and a morbid interest in how working there might have damaged the psyches of its young performers. For Cole Sprouse, though, The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody was a “life-saving” opportunity that provided him and his brother much-needed stability.

“I think there’s two types of kids within the child acting business,” Sprouse reflects on a new episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast. “There’s, like the thespian children who choose to do it, and then there’s the working class kids that, in our case at least… I mean it started, really, as a means to put bread on the table. And also allow my mother at the same time to be a mother, but to make her main focus and her job our careers.”

Unfortunately, the Sprouses’ mother (with whom Cole says he no longer has a relationship) suffered from mental health issues and was not a reliable custodian, losing nearly all the income that he and brother Dylan brought in from early breaks like Friends and Big Daddy. The court eventually awarded custody to his father, and later when the Disney gig came along, “it was like the golden ticket from Willy Wonka. … It was a great means to an end,” Sprouse says.

Though their father “desperately wanted them to be normal kids,” he also saw the twins’ acting career as a valuable financial opportunity, and Suite Life “provided us with an amount of stability and consistency and routine that really was needed for my brother and I at the time,” Sprouse shares. They “had a great time” filming the show, and he acknowledges that the brothers escaped some of the scrutiny to which their peers were subjected.

“I think in very many ways, my brother and I were lucky mainly because we were young boys. Like, the fascination when we were younger, at least on the Disney Channel, was like, of Miley and Selena and a lot of these girls, because they were heavily sexualized, which is another huge fucking issue,” he says. “But the fascination which was young womanhood… My brother and I in very many ways went through all of the same trappings, except the lens wasn’t on us as tightly, which I’m very, very grateful for.”

This isn’t to say that his experience was completely smooth sailing; Sprouse describes himself as “an angry kid” and observed the way “that celebrity and success and, you know, financial excess or surplus in a single generation is an elected trauma in very many ways.” But while he harbors some of his own resentments, he doesn’t relate to other Disney kids who are more critical of the company.

Without “delegitimizing” other actors’ experiences, Sprouse says he finds other accounts of Disney child stardom interesting: “Because a lot of those kids came from privilege. You know, I find that a lot of the times it’s much easier to complain about the business approach of a larger studio when you don’t need the money as much.” (He didn’t have many friends at Disney, by the way, partially because as an atheist teen he liked debating his Christian colleagues. “[That’s] a fucking annoying kid… The kids thought I was quite radioactive, as I recall.”)

Sprouse, for his part, is frank about how the money that came with success changed the course of his family’s life. “I don’t regret it at all,” he says of child stardom. He sees working through his childhood as the trade-off for a life of financial stability and surplus today, and “if I were given the same choice again, I’d probably do it again.”