Jessica is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she covers TV, movies, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in Bustle, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, and more. She lives in California with her dog.
The prospect of pregnant Mouseketeers made the House of Mouse nervous, according to former Mickey Mouse Club member Keri Russell.
The Emmy-nominated star looked back at her time as a cast member of the All-New Mickey Mouse Club on Tuesday's episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson's Dinner's on Me podcast, where she quipped about the age cut-off discrepancies between girls and boys of the Disney variety show.
"Was there a cut-off age where like, after you turned 17, you can no longer be on it?" Ferguson asked Russell, who appeared on the show between the ages of 15 and 17 in the early 1990s.
"Yeah, it's usually girls who look like they were sexually active, which probably I was one of the first," Russell said, joking, "They're like, 'She's out. Oh, she is out.'" Meanwhile, "The boys stayed till they were 19," she said. "I was like, 'By the way, I had sex with that person, so I know that they've had sex.' For real."
"You know, girls and sexuality," Russell added. "And by the way, me, I [had] like a 12-year-old boy body. There's nothing really sexy about me, but I think that was what [made Disney] nervous. Pregnant Mouseketeers aren't on the roster."
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There's been a lot said about former child actors on Disney growing up too quickly. Russell said she believed that the she was able to get "out alive" because she was mostly surrounded by peers her age. "I think the creepiest part of kid acting is usually it's one or two kids with all adults, and so that really accelerates the adultification of everything," she said. "And for the Mickey Mouse Club, there were 19 of us. The adults were invisible to me, you know what I mean?"
Russell believes she was cast because Disney sought out "normal" kid actors. "Some of my friends were going to a giant casting call for Disney at the downtown Denver Convention Center," she recalled. "And I went, I stood in line and did my little nerdy dance, and they had me read a little skit like about a mermaid brushing her teeth or something."
"I just happened to get it," she said. "I think back then Disney was looking for kids that were kind of just normal."
On the variety show that included the likes of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling, Russell appeared in seasons 4 through 6 alongside JC Chasez, Dale Godboldo, Rhona Bennett, Josh Ackerman, and Nikki Deloach. Speaking to W Magazine last year, Russell said she considered herself the "least talented member" of the star-studded bunch.
"I was there at a time when there were a lot of famous kids there," Russell recalled at the time. "And I say this completely truthfully: I was literally the least talented one there. I'm not kidding. When I look at those kids, I'm like, why in the world did they pick me? Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling and Britney Spears. It was wild."
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