The secret life of a child star: how Alyson Stoner survived stalkers, starvation and sexualisation

The Guardian

a day ago

When Alyson Stoner was nine, a wardrobe assistant on the set of a TV show noticed the child actor's dark leg-hair and told Stoner it was 'dirty and unladylike', and that they couldn't wear shorts in the show until it was removed. 'I started to view my body in a detached way where it was just something to control, to fix, to manipulate for whatever standard was presented to me,' says Stoner. 'In this case, the extreme beauty standards of the industry.'
It was a lot for a nine-year-old to take on, but by then Stoner had been working for several years – they were a Disney regular, and appeared in films such as Cheaper By the Dozen – and were used to doing whatever adults asked. As a teenager, this would lead to an excessive exercise regime and an eating disorder requiring inpatient treatment.
Later, Stoner, who uses they/them pronouns, would embrace evangelical Christianity as a way of making sense of their life, undergoing conversion practices to, in the words of a church friend, exorcise 'the demon of homosexuality'. Eventually, Stoner, who is 32, would embrace themselves, come out as queer and become a mental-health practitioner and advocate. Their experiences as a child star meant, they say when we speak over Zoom, 'I didn't have a chance to establish any kind of trustworthy connection with my own mind and body.'
In their memoir, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, Stoner details all the ways being a child star makes for such a weird and damaging life. The raised hopes and rejections; the sense that you could be considered a failure before other children have even left primary school. And even if you're among the minuscule number of hopefuls who make it on to a TV show or film, you enter an adult world that requires professionalism along with the ability to cry on cue and the responsibility to develop into an attractive teenager. You are rewarded for being malleable and easy to work with, whatever that entails, whether it's putting up with the loopholes executives would find to enable you to work long hours on set, or shaping yourself into what the industry demands. For Stoner, that included being told to cover up in the sun so their skin wouldn't get 'any darker'.
As a child star, the livelihoods of adults – a parent or agent or any number of people you employ – depend on you. Then there are the stalkers and threats; Stoner was once the victim of an attempted kidnapping after their team almost sent them to meet someone they thought was a terminally ill fan. Their relationship with their mother was close but fraught; she was overinvested, Stoner writes, in her child's success: 'As long as I shined, she shined.'
Stoner calls the path of child stardom the 'toddler to train-wreck pipeline'. With their book, they say: 'My intention is less focused on trying to name, shame and blame individuals, and more to empower people with information. I'm choosing to believe that once we know more and know better, we will choose better, especially for children.'
They point out that as a child, making an informed decision to become a professional actor, with everything it entailed, was impossible. 'I deeply question whether commercialising my love for performing was my decision.'
Stoner grew up in Toledo, Ohio, the youngest of three, and for as long as they can remember, they loved performing. They write that they arranged the cages of the pets in their preschool classroom in a semicircle so they could perform numbers from Grease to them. When they were 'spotted' by the woman who also discovered the actor Katie Holmes, Stoner was marked as special.
'I think there were a lot of well-intentioned adults who just wanted to support what appeared to be a young person having a knack for something. If I could go back in time, I would strongly encourage non-commercialised, non-industrialised explorations of creativity. At the heart of it, artistry is a beautiful, deeply human expression.' A small, sardonic laugh. 'A corporation owning your name and likeness, less natural.' It isn't even as if Stoner has financial security from decades of work – thanks to mismanagement by adults around them, instead of the approximately million dollars they thought they had, they were left with nothing.
By six, and a talented dancer and actor, Stoner was entering child modelling and talent competitions, hoping to get the attention of casting directors and agents. Then Stoner and their mother moved to Los Angeles to pursue their career, a gruelling time of endless auditions and acting classes. In one acting lesson, Stoner was encouraged to dredge up real pain; in their case, Stoner imagined never seeing their father, who had become distant since the divorce from their mother, again. 'I thought it was an act of honouring the character's lived experience, to pull from real pain, to be able to access certain memories and emotions,' says Stoner.
'I noticed that my body started revolting against trying to access that degree of vulnerability,' they say of the effect, over many years, this caused. 'Instead of being open, I now had this callousness, this shield, where I could no longer feel emotions, let alone portray them.' Later, when they were having therapy, they were diagnosed with alexithymia, a difficulty in identifying emotions. It was, says Stoner, 'a response to accidentally traumatising myself on all of these auditions, and following the guidance of adults who had acting manuals that encouraged it'. This included auditions playing a terminally ill child, and witnessing a shootout being enacted for a job on an action film – and they were praised for being able to do it so well. 'Of course, right? What a bizarre experience, to be rewarded for acting out pain and horror. It's so confusing to a seven-year-old.'
Stoner was a success – appearing in three Missy Elliott videos, and landing roles in Disney Channel shows and the Cheaper By the Dozen, Camp Rock and Step Up film franchises. But there were, inevitably, numerous disappointments – auditions that went nowhere, and pilots that weren't picked up. 'When you are the product, it's like, well, what's wrong with me? It had a deep impact on my self-esteem. The rejection hurt terribly, but then when I became chosen, my self-esteem was still tied up with that. Either way, you're not cultivating a core sense of worth. It's tied to so many things beyond your control. The unique aspect of [the entertainment industry] is that this is a daily experience that a child is going through, while disrupting every other area of their health and development along the way.'
For a while, when Stoner was 12, the prospect of their own show was dangled, until a similar teen sitcom was picked up, which would become the huge hit Hannah Montana and make a star of its lead, Miley Cyrus. Other peers, such as Demi Lovato, who had the lead role in Camp Rock, would also eclipse their career. 'My coping strategy was being a bit in denial that I was affected,' says Stoner. 'I think I was terrified of what I would have perceived to be negative emotions, whether that's self-doubt or envy, and doubled down on toxic positivity. The reality is, had I felt the hurt of not being chosen, I might have quit. I had to have some narrative that enabled me to persevere.' But these emotions, says Stoner, 'were festering, and they eventually took quite a toll on my health'.
Since the age of eight, says Stoner, they were in 'permanent performance mode' and they point out they didn't have any real sense of normality. Going through puberty is bad enough for any teen; to do it around adults, on camera, was excruciating. Stoner adds: 'For a young female body in particular, what I noticed was this sudden expectation that you will know how to sexualise your portrayals. That was just such a bizarre and horrific experience, to be in room after room with adult casting directors, knowing that I, at 13 or 14, am expected to seduce them.'
So many of Stoner's 'firsts' happened on camera or in rehearsals. Rehearsing a scene on the Disney show The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Stoner had to kiss both brothers of the title; in Cheaper By the Dozen 2, Stoner went on their first 'date'. They remember having to Google what feelings they should be portraying during all these experiences. 'I was on the outside peering in and going: 'OK, as the scientist here, what are the specimens doing? Oh, that's a schoolroom. Interesting. Textbooks, pencils? Fascinating.'' They laugh. 'There's some humour there, but also grief.'
By their mid-teens, Stoner was obsessively tracking the amount of punishing exercise they were doing, and their calorie intake. They followed diets so extreme that their menstrual cycle stopped. At 17, after a decade of being compliant, they finally asked for help.
They were advised not to go into rehab, aware of the rapidly approaching 'child star expiration date'. 'I knew I needed to hit certain milestones by 18 to be able to transition successfully into adulthood in entertainment, and I was creeping up on that date.' But they were also very unwell.
In treatment, Stoner experienced a consistent routine for the first time, 'and also adults who weren't on my payroll. I think treatment started pulling at threads.' After nearly three months of rehab, Stoner went back to Hollywood, although they had begun to look for a life beyond it. By their mid-20s, Stoner had a YouTube channel, had started studying mental health and was making music. They came out as queer in a piece for Teen Vogue in 2018 which, they say, caused them to lose the job on a children's show they were in.
Stoner would later start a podcast, Dear Hollywood, in which they explored the life of child stars. In one episode, they spoke powerfully about a rape they had experienced in their 20s. It wasn't that anything like that had happened during Stoner's years as a child actor, but they say that 'something felt indescribably familiar about it'. It made them reassess the situations they had been put in as a child, and the sense that their body was not their own, whether it was crew members reaching under their clothes to attach a microphone, or executives commenting on the way their adolescent body was developing. Stoner was already in therapy at the time, so they point out they had support after the sexual assault. 'I don't know if I had ever connected to that feeling [of what 'no' felt like] growing up, even though there were many cases where I could have and should have said no to what was happening.'
Stoner is also at a point where they think they may as well use their platform in a beneficial way, and especially, they say 'to speak up on behalf of other survivors. To also – what's the word? – I don't want to say objectify myself, but continue allowing this commodified version of myself to exist to hopefully accomplish social change. It's a strange position. Almost all the time, I crave anonymity.'
They work as a mental health coordinator on sets and have developed a toolkit for young performers. In the same way that intimacy coordinators have become industry standard for sex and nudity on set, Stoner would like to see the mental health of actors, and particularly child actors, given as much care. They hope that there will be change, 'not just for kids in Hollywood, but also kids online'. Stoner still works as an actor, including voice acting for the Disney show Phineas and Ferb. They did worry that their book, and being so critical of the industry, would affect their work. 'I've been testing out different scenarios, depending on how this unfolds, so that I can at least have my basic needs met, in case this disrupts contracts.'
Having been rich, and then not, how have they come to view society's idea – pushed by Hollywood itself – of success and the importance we place on fame and money? 'I got to see the folly of the illusion much sooner,' says Stoner. 'By the time I was 18 and others were just looking for their first jobs, I had already tasted the promised flavours of success and status, and I found them to be quite unsavoury.'
Having missed out on a normal childhood, Stoner has built a life. Therapy and finding a purpose, particularly in their mental health work, has helped them to work out who they are and what they want. Writing the book brought them closer to their father, and uncovered a different story from the one they had grown up with. They had been estranged for 15 years by that point, but in getting back in touch, they discovered their father had fought for years for custody and contact.
'I think those sections [of the book] feel the most emotionally potent and unresolved,' says Stoner. Their relationship with their mother is, says Stoner, 'a very delicate matter' they don't wish to go into. In writing, Stoner has been able to make more sense of their place beyond being the little girl in a Missy Elliott video, or a teen Disney star. 'It's brought a certain kind of freedom from my past.'
Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything: A Memoir by Alyson Stoner is published by Pan Macmillan (£22)