Star Wars actress Keri Russell says she escaped The Mickey Mouse Club with her “sanity” and “dignity,” and that “not everyone got out alive.”
“I was there at a time when there were a lot of famous kids there. And I say this completely, truthfully like I was literally the least talented one there. I’m not kidding,” Russell, who played Zorii Bliss in The Rise of Skywalker, told W Magazine of her time on The Mickey Mouse Club.
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“When you look at those kids, I’m like, why in the world did they pick me? It’s crazy. But, you know, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling, and Britney Spears. It was wild,” she added.
After being asked if she saved anything from her time on the show, Russell said, “My sanity. My dignity. Not everyone got out alive.”
The actress did not elaborate on her experience at The Mickey Mouse Club or what happened that resulted in her co-stars to losing their sanity and dignity.
Russell is not the only actor to call out a Disney entity. Last year, Cole Sprouse, who starred on the Disney Channel series The Suite Life of Zack and Cody that began about a decade after The Mickey Mouse Club went off the air, said female Disney Channel stars were “heavily sexualized” by the network when he was growing up in the industry as a child actor.
In 2019, actress Bella Thorne told BUILD that if one reads her book, “The Life of a Wannabe Mogul,” they will “be like, ‘Haha transitioning from Disney to this was fucking easy.'”
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“I don’t know getting molested for fucking — from your six to you’re 14 seems like way harder circumstances, or being physically abused all of the time seems like a much more difficult situation than to fucking have paparazzi following you since you were 12,” the actress added.
“I was still being molested when paparazzi were still fucking following me,” Thorne said.
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