Former Disney Channel star Dylan Sprouse is getting candid about how he feels about his career as a child actor.
During a recent episode of his podcast, “Wildmen,” the 34-year-old actor told his co-host, Brendan Columbus, that he was looking forward to speaking with their guest for that episode, Mark Indelicato, about the demands placed on child actors, calling it “child labor.”
“I definitely want to dive in and talk with him a little bit about some of that, how he’s coped growing up in the industry because, essentially, we’re beating around the bush, but it’s child labor,” Dylan said. “Like, when you work at that age, some kids used to work in coal mines and guard the mine cart door when they were 15, we just sang and danced. It’s still child labor!”
He added that he still deals with his own “mental hurdles” when it comes to working in the entertainment industry as an adult, saying he finds it difficult to be “in the same industry I’ve been in forever.”
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“I act like a kid anyway. So, I wonder if I’m just always chasing that,” he said.
Sprouse brought the topic of child labor back up when he and Columbus were joined by Indelicato, who starred as Justin Suarez on “Ugly Betty” from ages 12 to 15.
Sprouse compared acting as a child to working “a full office job,” saying he grew “up in the industry with this kind of workaholic attitude.”
“I’ve described this to people a lot before – when you’re working on television, it’s a day job,” he said. “You go in, you clock in, you clock out, you have a cubicle … it’s different, but it’s the same hours. You work it like that.”
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Sprouse and his twin brother, Cole Sprouse, made their feature film debut at six years old when they shared the role of Julian in “Big Daddy” alongside Adam Sandler. Prior to that, they shared the role of Patrick Kelly on “Grace Under Fire” from when they were infants to when they were five years old.
The two then shot to stardom when they landed the roles of twins Zack and Cody on the Disney Channel show, “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” and then its spin-off, “The Suite Life on Deck.” Following the end of the spin-off, Dylan stepped away from acting, attending Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he studied video game design.
Since graduating in May 2015, Dylan has returned to acting, although he has appeared in projects more sporadically than his brother, and he spoke to Indelicato about feeling like there was a “void” each time a project ended as a kid.
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“It feels like my self-esteem, for a long time, was tied integrally to my ability to work and be on set,” he explained.
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His brother Cole has spoken several times about their mother’s decision to get the brothers into acting, telling “The Diary of a CEO” podcast in March 2023 that “it made a lot of financial sense for her” at the time, adding, “I think it satisfied some sort of narcissism she probably had.”
“[My father, Matthew Sprouse] desperately wanted us to be normal kids, and my mother wanted us to be a bit more of a caricature of two normal kids,” he said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast in March 2023. “When my father was given forced custody, we had pretty much lost everything from the youngest parts of our career. That would be ‘Friends’ and ‘Big Daddy.’ My mother was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman, but she was financially the most irresponsible person ever.”
