Disney Child Stars: Then and Now

They made their names as fresh-faced youngsters dancing to wholesome tunes… but time changes even the most cutesy Disney child stars. We catch up with the all-singing, all-dancing youths of yesterday to find out what adulthood had in store…

Zac Efron

Impossibly preppy as hoop-shooting schoolkid Troy Bolton in the ‘High School Musical’ series, Efron did his growing up pretty fast as soon as he graduated from the Mouse House. He famously dropped a condom on the red carpet at the premiere of ‘The Lorax’ and checked himself into rehab in 2013, citing problems with drug abuse.

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His cinematic output as an adult has been sporadic but shows promise, mainly from his turn in Lee Daniels’ steamy potboiler ‘The Paperboy’, in which Nicole Kidman urinates on him. Zac will return in the sequel to ‘Bad Neighbours’ and plays the starring role in ‘We Are Your Friends’, a new drama from that Max off MTV’s ‘Catfish’.

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Lindsay Lohan

As the 12-year-old star of ‘The Parent Trap’, Lohan was the quintessential Disney kid – smiley of face, freckled of cheek and red of hair, li’l Lindsay was a poster child for good behaviour. That image could not be sustained once she was old enough to buy her own alcohol. Movie cherub segued into party girl turned into jailbird – Lohan was jailed (for one day) after being caught in possession of cocaine and driving under the influence. To be fair, Lohan seems to have turned the corner of late, impressing critics with her turn in David Mamet’s ‘Speed The Plow’ in London’s West End, but she’s not had much luck on the big screen, 2013’s ‘The Canyons’ the closest she’s come to a wide release in years.

Ryan Gosling

You wouldn’t think it to look at his recent output, but Ryan Gosling – he of ultra-violent, poker-faced dramas like ‘Drive’ and ‘Only God Forgives’ – was once a member of TV’s ‘Mickey Mouse Club’. The Gos used Disney as a springboard to become a major heartthrob (he was everyone’s favourite mentally unstable dreamboat in ‘The Notebook’), before becoming a serious actor with roles in award-worthy pictures like ‘Blue Valentine’ and ‘The Ides Of March’. Rather wonderfully, if rumours are to be believed, Gosling is about to come full circle and will return to Disney as the Beast in Guillermo del Toro’s live-action remake of ‘Beauty And The Beast’, opposite Emma Watson’s Belle. Swoon.

Vanessa Hudgens

As the apple of young Zefron’s eye in ‘High School Musical’ and indeed in real life, Vudgens was yet another Disney kid off the production line – bright and peppy with a voice to die for and a face capable of selling a million soundtracks in HMV. Life outside of The Walt Disney Corporation wasn’t quite so wholesome; first, she had private nudes hacked from her phone and leaked online (leading to the baffling situation of Vanessa apologising for them existing in the first place), but then she played up to her image of good girl turned bad in ‘Spring Breakers’, playing a bikini-clad diamond thief alongside fellow child stars Selena Gomez and Ashley Benson. Hudgens recently made her Broadway debut in a revival of ‘Gigi’ and has been getting rave reviews.

Justin Timberlake

Mickey Mouse groomed Timberlake for stardom from an early age: it was on ‘The All New Mickey Mouse Club’ in 1989 where he made his entertainment debut alongside girlfriend and partner-in-pop Britney Spears. The transition from squeaky-clean TV moppet to Sexy/Back singer was gradual – intermediate boyband N*SYNC were about as edgy as a tangerine – but Timberlake even managed to one-up his status from credible musician to credible actor, thanks to roles like Sean Parker in David Fincher’s Facebook movie, ‘The Social Network’. Trousersnake is married to Jessica Biel, herself a child star, and is prepping to star in Spike Lee’s new movie, ‘Spinning Gold’. Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line, his hair ‘magically’ stopped being curly. Hmm.

Miley Cyrus

The single ‘Wrecking Ball’ was apt: Miley Cyrus, the formerly gummy teen Queen of the Disney Channel, has smashed her ‘Smiley Miley’ image to smithereens in recent years, courtesy of drug episodes, naked pop videos, racy photoshoots and an unsavoury episode at the MTV Movie Awards where she gave pop’s creepy uncle, Robin Thicke, the best view in the house.

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Disney, wisely, cut all ties with their Hannah Montana star, and Cyrus continues to explore her sexuality in weird yet strangely compelling ways – she single-handedly brought the word ‘twerking’ into our every day vocabulary. Thanks for that.

Selena Gomez

The star of fantasy show ‘Wizards Of Waverly Place’, child star Selena Gomez followed the template laid out by Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and her ilk – although Selena managed to avoid most of the pitfalls that befell her forebears (drugs, DUI, stress-induced head-shaving, that sort of thing). Harmony Korine’s ‘Spring Breakers’ seemed like a pretty good way to draw a line under her relationship with pop sparrow Justin Bieber – it was a girls-just-wanna-have-fun-type explosion of frenzied feminism. She obviously made an impression on co-star James Franco, as Gomez will star in his new movie ‘In Dubious Battle’, about a labour movement involving Californian farm workers in the 1930s. We’d settle for ‘Spring Breakers 2’ if we’re being honest.

Hilary Duff

Now there’s a name you probably haven’t heard in a while. The Duffster did fall off the radar a little once the ‘Lizzie McGuire’ well dried up – after the movie in 2003 and the final episode in 2004, pickings were slim for our Hilary. She’s yet to tailslide into the tabloids, thankfully – the closest she got to scandal was when a photo of her accepting a wedding proposal looked a bit like she was giving her boyfriend a… special treat. These days, you can see Duff in TV series ‘Younger’, the latest glitz and glamour telly show from ‘Sex And The City’ creator Darren Star. The Lizzie McGuire revivial petition starts here.

Shia LaBeouf

Even before he was the human star of Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ franchise – personally recommended by executive producer Steven Spielberg – Shia LaBeouf was in the biz as the star of Disney Channel series ‘Even Stevens’ and feature film ‘Holes’. A bizarre career trajectory took him from teen-friendly fare like ‘Disturbia’ to avant garde art exhibitions and Lars von Trier’s sex odyssey ‘Nymphomaniac’ via paper bags and plagiarism. Late last year he claimed he was raped while giving public penance in a performance piece in LA, but LaBeouf has regained a semblance of normality, explaining away some of his more bizarre  antics on the press trail for David Ayer’s 2014 WWII movie ‘Fury’, in which he was excellent.

Christina Aguilera

Always the bridesmaid to Britney’s bride during the great pop wars of the 2000s (cameras cut away to Timberlake as she too snogged Madonna at the MTV Movie Awards), Xtina too came from a Disney background on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’. Aguilera had a surefire talent for stage and screen and memorably played a “slut with mutant lungs” in camp classic ‘Burlesque’ opposite the almighty Cher. Her Dirrty days well behind her (along with one failed marriage), Aguilera juggles life as a mother with a pop career and a stint as an expert on the US version of ‘The Voice’, but she still finds time to grace cinemas: she’ll star as Evita Peron (!) alongside Hugh Jackman in the Bryan Singer-directed ‘Broadway 4D’ in 2015, which frankly makes ‘Burlesque’ seem sensible and reserved in comparison.

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Image credits: Disney/REX/Press Association/20th Century Fox/Universal/Warner Bros.