Star Wars Actress Keri Russell Admits She Escaped ‘The Micky Mouse Club’ With “My Sanity. My Dignity. Not Everyone Got Out Alive”
John F. Trent
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Actress Keri Russell, who played Zorii Bliss in The Rise of Skywalker, recently admitted that she escaped The Mickey Mouse Club with her sanity and dignity. Not only did she reveal she escaped with those intact, she bluntly stated that not everyone who was on the show did.
Keri Russell as Zorri Bliss and Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Lucasfilm
Russell recently performed an interview with W Magazine’s Lynn Hirschberg who noted that Russell was a Mouseketeer. The actress responded, “Some of those people are still my best friends—Ilana [Miller] and Lindsey [Alley]. 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.”
She elaborated, “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.”
Jeremy T. Thomas and Keri Russell in the film ANTLERS. Photo by Kimberley French. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved
Hirschberg then questioned, “Did you save anything from your time on the show?”
Russell replied, “My sanity. My dignity. Not everyone got out alive.”
Russell did not elaborate on what took place during her time at The Mickey Mouse Club that would result in her costars losing their sanity and dignity.
However, Cole Sprouse, who starred on the Disney Channel series The Suite Life of Zack and Cody that debuted nearly a decade after The Mickey Mouse Club went off the air, accused The Walt Disney Company of sexualizing his female peers.
He told The New York Times in April 2022, “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 [Disney Channel] 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.”
Cole Sprouse and Casey Cott speaking at the 2018 San Diego Comic Con International, for “Riverdale”, at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Sprouse elaborated, “And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma.”
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.
“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,” he stated.
American actor Cole Sprouse Photo Credit: Condé Nast (through Vogue Taiwan), CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
RELATED: Former Disney Child Actor Bella Thorne Claims She Was Molested From Age 6 to 14
Bella Thorne who featured in the Disney Channel series Shake It Up told BUILD in 2019 that was molested and abused in the time frame she was on the show, “If you read the book you’ll be like, ‘Haha transitioning from Disney to this was f****** easy. Getting molested for f****** from when you’re six to your 14, seems like way harder circumstances. You’re being physically abused all the time. Seems like a much more difficult situation than f****** having paparazzi following you since you were 12.”
Thorne added, “I was still being molested when paparazzi were still f***ing following me. So it’s pretty hard in my mind to think about these big flashlight photographs, and everyone thinking they know me and talking about me, but having no idea the type of mistreatment that I was still dealing with at that time. That everyone around me saw and did nothing.”
RELATED: Ricky Garcia’s Mother Details Alleged Sexual Abuse Suffered While Working at Disney
The mother of Ricky Garcia, Tammy Garcia, alleged her son was sexually abused by his manager while working for The Walt Disney Company to Tiffany FitzHenry.
She said, “There are pedophile rings all throughout Hollywood. We stumbled into one of those rings. The one thing that can fix this is talking about it, but Hollywood doesn’t want to talk about pedophilia.”
A lawsuit filed by Garcia in 2019 also alleged that he was assaulted “on an almost weekly basis” by his former manager Joby Harte. Garcia’s lawyers also issued a statement to USA Today in 2019:
“Our client, Ricky Garcia, was a preteen and teen music and acting star in the making. Tragically, and as alleged by him under oath in the complaint, high-powered male entertainment industry executives, led by his former manager Joby Harte, who were responsible for nurturing his career, instead sexually preyed on his economic and emotional vulnerability, and sexually assaulted and raped him. In twisted fashion they inflicted injuries and shame on our client that have derailed his promising career and that will take him a lifetime to recover from. Mr Garcia has bravely stepped forward to join the #MeToo movement, to reclaim his dignity and declare that victims like him must be heard.”
Garcia also posted to Instagram in September 2019, “Today was one of the most difficult days of my life. It was through the support of my family, friends, all my supporters, and most of all God that I summoned the courage to speak out against the executives who sexually abused me as a child.”
He continued, “Sadly, I know my experience is just one of many and I hope my actions today will help others who experienced abuse to know that they are not alone and that there are people in this world fighting for them.”
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