Former child actor Cole Sprouse talks healthy balance in Hollywood

by

The New York Times

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to have this chicken sandwich while we talk,” Cole Sprouse informed me politely, sitting in the kitchen and wearing a baby blue sweater. The sandwich was already halfway to his mouth. “Mutitasking” is something he’s used to.

He and his twin brother Dylan began their careers as professional actors as children, and worked steadily throughout their childhood, sharing major roles in “Grace Under Fire and Big Daddy” with Adam Sandler.

Cole played the role of Ross’ son in “Friends” before returning to share the screen with his brother in “Zack and Cody: Twins in Action,” a Disney Channel comedy series. (Cole was cerebral Cody.) The show’s success when they were preteens led to spinoffs, a made-for-TV movie, and teen stardom for the two brothers. By the age of 18, the two were already fed up.

But after graduating from New York University in archeology, Cole Sprouse kept the promise he had made to his manager and gave television one more chance before leaving the business for good. He landed the role of Jughead Jones, a brooding, outcast, in The CW drama “Riverdale” and returned to work.

“I started acting when I was so little that, as an adult, I hadn’t even tried to think about whether I really liked the job,” Sprouse said of Vancouver, Canada, where he is filming the seventh season of “Riverdale.” He continued, “When I got back, I had to remind myself that I love the art of acting so much. But I still have a complicated relationship with celebrity culture.”

He learned to protect his private life. The rare comments he makes about his past (for example with Lili Reinhart, his “Riverdale” co-star) and current (with model Ari Fournier) relationships are scrutinized by fans and relentlessly publicized by the media. He created a secondary Instagram account where he posts photos of strangers who try to photograph him without him noticing. “It was an attempt to show that I could also play an active part in that situation,” he explained. “It was something that helped me a lot.”

His most recent role is in “Our Dreams from Mars” [“Moonshot”]from the HBO Max streaming service – please do not confuse with “Moon Knight” [Moon Knight”] (2022) and with “Moonfall”, which is still in production. The story takes place in the near future, when robots work in cafes and Mars is being colonized, and Sprouse plays Walt, a slacker college boy who rides a rocket to Mars with Sophie (Lana Condor) to try to find a girl who lives on Mars and that he believes might be the right woman for him.

Intermittently smoking an e-cigarette after finishing his sandwich, Sprouse talked about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame, and reaching 30. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.

“Our Dreams from Mars” is a futuristic interpretation of a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a fan of romantic comedies?

I have my favorites, and they vary greatly in style. I’m a big fan of “Hangover of Love”, for example. And while there’s a heavy romantic element to the film, most people would call it a comedy and that’s all — but given the boundaries of the genre, it’s a romantic comedy.

I think romantic comedies have been dismissed for too long as “girls’ movies,” cheesy stories that would only interest girls. Stories centered on male characters, such as “Love Hangover”, made some people rethink this concept.

The general art trend always starts with a large female fan base who falls in love with something. In many cases, we see this female audience breaking ground first, and then everyone else follows. In “Our Dreams from Mars,” what we tried to do was make a movie that didn’t take itself too seriously, that allowed for a lot of light fun, and we managed to create a long-married couple dynamic between Lana and me.

The film also strongly criticizes the billionaires’ space race: Zach Braff’s character, inspired by Elon Musk, admits that he could have used his fortune to solve the problem of world hunger on dozens of occasions, but instead chose to go to Mars. How do you feel about the current endeavors of space cowboys like Musk and Jeff Bezos?

Oh, I think they’re tremendously masturbatory. It’s a ridiculous thing. When I studied archeology, we used to talk about the resurrection of the mammoths. The conversation always ended up dividing the participants into two camps: those who just wanted to see the mammoths back on the planet. And those who said, “Hey, there are species that are going extinct right now. If we used the resources you’re talking about applying to the mammoth recreation and shifting the focus to the present, we could do much greater good.” I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. I am part of the field that prefers to focus our attention on the present. We have an active space that we live in and it is decaying, right now. We need to shift focus and resources to the now.

That is, there is not much likelihood that you will book a commercial flight to the Moon, for now.

No, I’m already weird and very paranoid when it comes to traveling by plane. I can’t imagine what this control freak nature of mine would do when it came time for release. I would be destroyed.

People like to talk about former child stars in terms of a dichotomy where they either completely lose control or somehow “get through it just fine.” Do you think it’s possible for someone to go through such an experience unscathed?

My brother and I used to often hear that “you survived well, you didn’t get hurt”. Is not true. The young girls on the channel we worked for (Disney Channel) were heavily sexualized when they were even younger than my brother and I, and there is no way to compare our experiences to theirs. And all the people who went through that trauma had unique experiences.

When they talk about child stars going crazy, what’s not really being discussed is the fact that fame is a trauma. So I’m violently defensive against people making fun of some of the young women who worked on that channel when I was younger, because I think people don’t adequately understand the human side of that experience, and the difficulty of recovery. And, to be quite honest, I’ve just gone through a second round of the same kind of fame as an adult, and I’ve noticed the same psychological effects that fame has on a group of young adults, just like I did when I was a kid. I just think people have a much easier time hiding those effects when they’re older.

After the announcement came out that “Riverdale” had been renewed for a seventh season, there were plenty of memes imagining his reaction to being told this. The general consensus on the internet was that you would be devastated to have to do a new season. Does it proceed?

(Laughter.) It doesn’t quite proceed. For starters, because I always assumed that we would fully fulfill our contracts, which were for seven seasons. Second, I think the internet assumes – because of how insane the show is – that we’re probably doing a little worse in our real lives than we actually are. It’s easy to forget that people love the show. And I think she will be much more appreciated in 10 years than she is now. It would be pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is something I’m not attracted to. But I won’t lie. Memes make me laugh.

You have created a parallel career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What, in photography, led you to dedicate yourself to this medium?

When I was at university, I traveled a lot for archaeological work, so I always carried my camera and took almost anthropological pictures of the people I met, the places I was. And later on, because I live in New York, I got involved in fashion work and created a portfolio. It was my main source of income until season two of “Riverdale.”

You will reach 30 in August. Will the new decade of your life represent the beginning of a new chapter?

Certainly. I think things are more aligned for me than at any time in the past. We’ll also see the end of the series I’ve devoted most of my 20s to, so there’s a world of possibilities before me at the end of this production, which I find both heady and incredibly compelling. And, I hate to let people down, but I’m not the only guy in my 30s who plays a teenager on TV.

You enter the university, in “Our Dreams from Mars”. Your characters are starting to age.

Little by little, slowly and steadily. In an ideal world, when “Riverdale” is over, I would love to do one or two movies a year and work in photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of these two things would be to become a director one day.

We are living in a moment of extreme nostalgia for the 1990s and 2000s. Do you see any chance of coming full circle and making a revamped version of “Zack & Cody: Twins in Action”?

I don’t think I’ll ever do that again. Not that I have any issues with other people making repackaged versions. But I strongly believe that if something was beautiful in the past, we should let it remain beautiful. Trying to drive this thing into the future is like reheating a really great meal in the microwave. It would be hard, after 30, to say (and he mutters gravely): “Zack and Cody are back, man!”

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