Cole Sprouse, the Former Disney Star, Has Gone on Record to Say That Hollywood Promotes its Worst Qualities and Unfortunately Financially Drained his Mother

Cole Sprouse is an established child star, achieving fame through the movies “Big Daddy,” TV shows such as “Friends” and being part of Disney Channel’s success story with his twin brother Dylan in “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”

Although there were some shadows of difficulty in his home life, Sprouse has recently opened up about these struggles during an interview on the “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. Surprising to many, he began acting at only eight months old when his mother Melanie cast him for diaper commercials.

“It started for me financially,” he said of his acting career. “Single mom, two twin boys, put food on the table. She is still able to be a mother while we pursue a sort of improvement of our lifestyle, and in very many ways she was living vicariously through the success of her children.”

When Cole Sprouse was just a toddler, his parents divorced and he only has one vivid memory of them being together. Subsequently, the court awarded custody to his mother so she could take good care of him and his brother.

He was asked if he felt like he was “pushed” into acting, and he answered, “I would hardly call it pushing because I was eight months old. I don’t even think I knew, you know, I was onscreen, I don’t remember much of … the diaper commercials and things like that, so the choice never really existed. I was there. That’s it.”

Cole Sprouse has opened up about his complex association with celebrity culture, describing fame as a form of trauma.

“My mother was, still is, the kind of tortured artist type, she struggled with, in very many ways, her place in the world,” Sprouse continued. “I think she found a tremendous amount of self identity through motherhood and tried to turn it into a profitable business at the same time … so that’s what she did.”

He said that while it made “financial sense” to his mother to put her sons into the acting business, “it satisfied some sort of narcissism that she had to be recognized as this sort of artistic success … but as time went on I think the entertainment industry just sort of broke her.”

“This industry in very many ways encourages the worst qualities of you as a person — narcissism, selfishness, greed, a lot of these things that we’ve come to know as practically cardinal sins, it’s one of those things that encouraged a kind of selfishness that was directly opposed to the very fundamental idea of motherhood,” the “Riverdale” star explained.

Sprouse said that eventually things got to a point where “the court had to step in and rend my brother and I towards our father, who is an incredible guy, but that selfishness is something that the legal system also observed and said that she was unfit.”

Looking back on everything now, the “Big Daddy” star admitted, “I see a person that grapples with mental illness, drug abuse, but primarily narcissism. A wicked narcissism, the inability to perceive anything outside your own perspective would probably be the biggest sickness I see. And that just doesn’t work with being a mother, it doesn’t work with being in a family in general.”

The host of the podcast asked Sprouse when he realized that his mother’s behavior wasn’t normal, and he answered, “I mean I guess when social services came knocking is usually when it happens. I don’t know, I would go over to my father’s house, because the court gave primary custody to my mother … it certainly should have been my father taking custody.”

Though he did not necessarily enjoy his father’s rules to eat nutritious meals, stay active, and stick to a schedule at first, the young man now acknowledges that those regulations made him feel more secure and content than when living with his mother—a guardian who gave in whenever they wanted “to do whatever the f— we desired.”

He refused to go further into how his mother was deemed unfit to maintain primary custody because “I don’t ever want to be perceived as a victim of it. I am not, and never will be, a victim of any circumstance that I am in. I don’t like to wear victimhood on my shoulder. I don’t like to act like I am my wounds, to repeatedly be reminded of my wounds. What happened in my youth happened and carved and forged me into the person I am today.”