Cole Sprouse is known for being a child star with roles in movies like “Big Daddy,” shows like “Friends” and the Disney Channel hit “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” co-starring his twin brother, Dylan.
But behind the scenes, there were some dark things playing out at home, and Sprouse is opening up about the difficulties he faced in an interview on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast.
Spouse first started acting at eight months old when his mother Melanie put him in 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.”
Cole Sprouse is opening up about his estranged mother. (Rodin Eckenroth)
Adam Sandler with twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse at the premiere of “Big Daddy” in 1999. (Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.)
Sprouse’s mother and father divorced when he was very young, so young that he said he only has one memory of the two of them together, and at the time, the courts gave his mother primary custody 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.”
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“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.”
Dylan and Cole Sprouse pose together as children. (Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Cole Sprouse as Ben Geller with Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green on “Friends” in 2001. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
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.
Cole Sprouse is grateful to have financial stability, even after a difficult childhood. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Kodak)
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.”
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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.”
Cole Sprouse and his twin brother Dylan have been acting since they were infants. (Lionel Hahn/Getty Images)
Although he didn’t necessarily appreciate that his father made them eat healthy foods, be active and stick to a routine, he said he now appreciates that those rules made him feel safer and happier than being with his mother, who let him and his brother “do whatever the f— we wanted.”
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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.”
