AT the height of their child acting career, the Sprouse brothers’ characters in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody were household names.
Being child actors with his twin brother, Dylan, Cole Sprouse told the New York Times that the duo worked so tirelessly that they were officially burned out by the time they turned 18.
After quitting acting, Sprouse chose to study archaeology at New York University.
It wasn’t until he decided to fulfill a promise he’d made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions before quitting for good that he ended up booking a starring role on the CW’s Riverdale in 2017, which is currently filming its seventh season.
“I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture,“ Sprouse said, adding that he saw the “trauma” of fame firsthand growing up as a child star.
“My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, ‘Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!’ No,” he said when asked about surviving early stardom.
“The young women on the channel we were on were so heavily [objectified] from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences”.
“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.”
“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,” Sprouse said.
Once Riverdale comes to an end, Sprouse hopes to do one or two movies a year, and photography the rest of the time.
“The logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing”.
