Former Disney Channel Stars Sound Off on the Experience: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

As the Disney Channel celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, look back at what some of its biggest stars have said about their time with the network

Since Disney Channel first began 40 years ago, its programming has included some of the biggest franchises for children and in turn launched the careers of numerous stars.

Though a lot of stars have admitted to having a hard time behind the scenes, other young performers have also expressed they enjoyed being on the kids' channel, as it opened many doors. Cole Sprouse, Zendaya and Brenda Song have all said that it was the opportunity of a lifetime, while other stars like Demi Lovato and Olivia Rodrigo revealed they had a difficult time being teens and also helming an entire production.

Check out what some of Disney Channel's biggest stars had to say about their time working for the network.

Cole Sprouse

In a 2023 sit down with Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Cole Sprouse opened up about his childhood and his experience on the channel.

“Funny enough, I get asked about Disney a lot because I think a lot of people want to sort of poke the bear and see, you know, how atrocious the channel was,” Cole said. “By the time my brother and I got to the Disney Channel, we were good. It was a huge boon to us. It was in very many ways, a life-saving show. It provided us with an amount of stability and consistency, and routine, that really was needed for my brother and I at the time.”

Cole told The New York Times in 2022 that he is also aware of how his experience leaving Disney was different than others – especially the girls.

“My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, ‘Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!’ No,” he said. “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.”

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.”

Sabrina Carpenter

Sabrina Carpenter said her move away from Disney projects was really just a matter of “growing up.”

“It’s so funny to me that it’s become this huge stigma over the years that there has to be a transition,” she told Clevver News in 2020. “They put so much pressure on that point from when you’re done being on a Disney Channel, on a show, to whatever you do next. Honestly, I was just always doing what I loved and I continue to do what I love and follow the projects and follow the things that my heart kind of tell me to and my heart lead me to.”

She continued, “It was very natural for me, I really just wanted to be focused on music as I exited out of [Girl Meets World], and sooner than later I was introduced to some projects that became very close to my heart and that I wanted to be a part of as well... From the outside people probably see it very differently than I see it. I just see it as me growing up like I normally would.”

Dove Cameron

Dove Cameron’s career with Disney started in 2013 when she landed the roles of both twins on Liv and Maddie. Since then, she has appeared on numerous other projects for the channel including The Descendants film franchise. Despite her prolific Disney resume, Cameron told the Los Angeles Times that she didn’t feel like she fit that mold.  

“I never had that moment where I was like, 'I am a Disney girl.' I never looked at Miley or Demi or Selena or Zendaya or Bella or anybody — Hilary Duff or anybody that came before me — I never looked at them and thought, 'You and me — same,'” Cameron, who has since launched a solo music career, said.

“I was always the strange outlier who doesn’t belong and who will never fit in. I had huge impostor syndrome. I felt like I was wearing a rubber mask or something. So I don’t really look to anybody else for a roadmap. I mean, this whole narrative that I was on Disney and then found my way out with a pop song, it was a total f------ accident.”

Jessica Simpson

As many know, Disney's The Mickey Mouse Club served as a springboard for the likes of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling, but what some might not know is Jessica Simpson once auditioned for the show and was up against other soon-to-be-famous faces.

In her memoir, Open Book, Simpson recounted the experience and said that while she made it through the initial auditions in the early 1990s, they told her she needed to "work on" her acting and sent her to learn from Chuck Norris.

"You have too much expression," she remembered the Walker Texas Ranger actor telling her one day. "From then on I had to do all my scenes with my eyebrows taped down," she wrote. "I already hated going, but now I really did. It wasn't torture, it was just embarrassing."

She also recalled meeting Timberlake, Gosling and Christina Aguilera at the Disney casting camp following her time with Norris. "Ryan was my first hard crush," she admitted.

When it was time to perform, Simpson was slated to go right after Aguilera and says she has "blocked out some of the details" of what happened next.

She wrote that while her own singing was "fine," it was the dancing that really tripped her up. "My choreography was completely off, and then I couldn't remember lines from my monologue. I stared at the camera, and knew I'd blown it completely," she wrote.

After Spears' performance, Simpson said she "knew it was over."

Years later, though, Simpson writes that she reunited with Timberlake after her divorce from Nick Lachey, and the two "shared a nostalgic kiss." He promptly grabbed his phone and explained that he and Gosling had a bet all those years ago about who would kiss her first and needed to tell him.

"Well then tell Ryan you won big," she told him as he called. "Cause the odds were definitely in his favor."

Ashely Tisdale

In a video shared to TikTok in 2021, Ashley Tisdale shed some light on what her experience at Disney was like. Tisdale, who starred on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody from 2005 to 2008, also appeared in all three High School Musical movies as Sharpay Evans.

In addition to the three movies, the High School Musical cast also set out on tour to perform songs from the films as well as some of their own music.

In October 2021, Tisdale duetted a TikTok of a fan dancing along to her 2007 single "He Said She Said," and revealed "Disney made me change kissing like that to 'dancing' like for the HSM tour" given that the lyrics were a little more suggestive than the kid-friendly network liked.

Brenda Song

Brenda Song, who starred alongside the Sprouse twins and Tisdale on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, said she looks back on her early projects fondly.

“I feel like I’ve been very lucky and can look back and say I haven’t done a project that I haven’t been proud of one way or another,” Song told W magazine in 2019. “I’m proud of them for different reasons.”

“All of the stuff at Disney, I am so grateful that they truly were colorblind casting at that time and giving this little Asian American girl a chance in Hollywood. They were giving me my own TV movies when people weren’t doing that,” Song, who also starred in the Disney Channel original movie, Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior, continued. 

Song explained that while growing up she “loved to audition” the opportunity to do so wasn't coming along frequently

“It wasn’t until I got into the Disney family that they were so very open,” she said. “So I feel really proud of that because for me, growing up I didn’t see a lot of girls who looked like me on TV and it was a little disheartening because I was like, ‘I’m not Jackie Chan. I’m not Jet Li. How am I going to do this?’

Olivia Rodrigo

In an August 2021 GQ profile, the "good 4 u" singer reflected on her Disney years, which started wtih 2016's Bizaardvark and continued with High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.

"It was not fun," she recalled of being asked to define her brand as a young teen. "I just remember being 14 years old and being like, 'I literally have no idea who I am. I don't know what my personal style is. I don't know what I like. I don't know who my true friends are. How am I expected to cultivate an image?' That was always hard for me. Even now, I have no idea. I try, but my image today is not going to be the image that I'll probably like tomorrow."

Zendaya

According to Zendaya, Disney lets young stars have a say. When she moved on to K.C. Undercover, she was able to nab a spot as a co-producer and have more creative control over the show. "Now I'm able to really have a vision," she told Yahoo Style. "I can say what I want and be assertive. I can have a really, really strong voice and presence on my own show and be listened to. That's the coolest part. I have more control; I have more freedom to make [K.C. Undercover] something that I'm proud of."

In a 2021 chat with Carey Mulligan for Variety, she doubled down on her praise for Disney after Mulligan questioned if Zendaya's work on Euphoria has cleansed her of her "Disney kid" roots.

"The thing is, I am [a Disney kid]. And to a degree, I am grateful for that," the actress said. That's where I started, and I learned so much from that experience."

"It's just kind of been this slow progression, and I am happy that it's all been to prove it to myself and not to anybody else, you know?" she added. "I embrace it a little bit. It's part of my heritage to a degree."

Bella Thorne

They played best friends on Shake It Up and were BFF in real life, too, but the odds were stacked against Thorne and her costar Zendaya, the former claimed.

"Zendaya and I were put in a very unfortunate position where we were kind of forced to compete against each other [during Shake It Up], which made the whole first season of the show just very awkward for us," Thorne told J-14. "We wanted to love each other, but yet we were constantly being put against each other. It was, 'Who's better at this?' and 'Who's better at that?' " Thankfully, they had a heart-to-heart at the beginning of the second season, and their friendship blossomed from there.

Thorne had more career challenges to overcome when it came time to move on from Disney. "Not only did fans pigeonhole me, but casting directors wouldn't read me anymore," she told Harper's Bazaar of her post-Disney days. "They were like, 'No, we don't want her to come in because she's so Disney.' I had to literally beg for an audition." Eventually, the actress was able to prove there is more to her than her child star past. "[A casting director] shook my hand in the audition and was like, 'I'm really sorry, I totally misjudged you, you're a great actress,' " she told the mag.

Christy Carlson Romano

In a 2019 essay for Teen Vogue entitled "My Private Breakdown," the former Kim Possible and Even Stevens star revealed her very personal post-Disney struggles.

Romano said that growing up in the theater and on TV sets, she developed an obsession with wanting a normal childhood, and dreamed about the perfect college experience as her chance to feel normal.

"I worked full days and would go home and be tutored in a different subject every night," she wrote. "The idea of one day having a college life became my greatest fantasy. I would watch teen movies and become intensely jealous of 'normal' kids, feeling, at my moodiest, like a misfit."

She also remembered being told that leaving acting after Even Stevens ended would ruin her career.

"In retrospect, it probably did. But in my heart, I was running away from the responsibility of fame and toward a glamorized fantasy of adolescence," she said.

Romano said that she tried going back to theater after feeling like a misfit in college, but that her loneliness stayed.

"I became a bit harder-edged, binge-drank more at loud nightclubs, and started to accept the transient natures of love, sex, and friendship," she said. "Growing up, I entertained thousands of families only to feel completely lonely. People were as replaceable as they had deemed me to be. Imposter syndrome had stiff competition against my self-hatred at that point."

Thankfully, meeting her husband and growing their family turned her life around. "All that matters now is my amazing family," she said. "When I look back I can see that it's all I ever wanted."

Selena Gomez

Gomez, who got her big break on The Wizards of Waverly Place, said that spending her teen years on the Disney Channel wasn't all that different from how she would have spent them otherwise.

"It was a blessing," she said of her time on the network. "It was beautiful and tragic. It was everything that every teen goes through, just on a bigger scale. It literally was like high school." (In a 2017 interview with the New York Times, she reiterated that sentiment, calling it "the biggest high school in the world.")

It had an impact on the sort of work she sought after leaving, too. "Disney is a machine, and I'm grateful for it, but I feel like being part of that environment made me crave the reaction from other projects even more," she told the Times.

Hilary Duff

Lizzie McGuire was a huge hit — so much so that in the years after it wrapped, Duff couldn't shake the association with her Disney on-screen persona, saying in an interview with PrideSource that it was at times challenging, but ultimately a positive thing.

"As torturous as it has been at some points in my life to be Lizzie McGuire, I think that when that show came out, it was such a part of who I was, I didn't feel like I was playing a part," she said. "The writers all knew me so well and were writing things that were happening in my life and things that I would say, and I was dressing exactly like I wanted. It was so me."

Demi Lovato

Lovato ended up leaving her own Disney Channel show, Sonny with a Chance, to seek treatment for an eating disorder. A year after beginning her recovery, she tweeted that she was angry with the company for making light of an eating disorder on an episode of Shake It Up.

"I find it really funny how a company can lose one of their actress' from the pressures of an EATING DISORDER and yet still make joke about...that very disease..... #nice." She later added, "And is it just me or are the actress' getting THINNER AND THINNER.... I miss the days of RAVEN, and LIZZIE MCGUIRE."

Disney's PR team later tweeted that they were taking the episode out of circulation.

Joe Jonas

Looking back, Jonas didn't love having to act like he was much younger than he actually was on his show, Jonas, he told New York magazine. But what kept him going was the thought this was his chance to make it in the industry.

"The thing about the show was that some of the writing on it was terrible," he said. "It just ended up being some weird slapstick humor that only a 10-year-old would laugh at. I had to shave every day because they wanted me to pretend like I was 16 when I was 20 (when the show was done, I cut my hair off and grew as much of a beard as I could). We went along with it at the time, because we thought Disney was our only real shot, and we were terrified that it could all be taken away from us at any moment."

Raven-Symoné

Symoné is now open about her sexuality, but back in her Disney days, she says she felt she needed to hide it because of her fame — and her career on the Disney Channel.

"I knew I couldn't say it out loud because 'Oh my god, Little Olivia is gay? This is crazy!' " she said. "I had the number one show on Disney, I had multiple albums, I was on tour with 'NSYNC. People had bucket lists, my bucket list was finished at 18. I didn't want to deal with that." She never thought she'd come out because "my personal life didn't matter," she said. "It was only supposed to be sold as the Raven-Symoné brand."

Miley Cyrus

She became a superstar on Hannah Montana, and even though she had her dad by her side, it wasn't all positive memories of the show for Cyrus: She told Marie Claire that being on the series messed with her body image.

"I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show," said Cyrus. "I was made to look like someone that I wasn't, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn't on that show, it was like, 'Who the f--k am I?' "

She also told Harper's Bazaar that it forced her to grow up quickly, leading her to act more childish as she entered adulthood. "I was an adult when I was supposed to be a kid," she said. "So now I'm an adult and I'm acting like a kid."

Dylan Sprouse

Sprouse said that ultimately, his experience with Disney was a positive one — and that usually, he had creative freedom. But it ended when he and his twin brother, Cole, tried to pitch a new spin for their show The Suite Life to studio execs — who weren't on board with the idea.

"[We thought], 'If we're going to do one last season, it's going to be on our terms. We're going to produce it, and it will be a setup for a new show,'' he said. "It would [also have] set up all the cast and crew we worked with for six years so they wouldn't lose their jobs over our decision to go to college. They pitched us our idea, in Miami, with Selena Gomez. And Cole and I turned to each other … we basically laughed in their face and walked out. That was the last meeting we had with Disney. We were just like no, that was the end."

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.