As a teen, Soleil Moon Frye's breast reduction made magazine covers. It taught the former 'Punky Brewster' star that 'people want you to stay little forever.'

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Soleil Moon Frye has been in the public eye since she was a mismatched-shoed little girl on TV's Punky Brewster in the '80s. At 48, she feels like she's finally coming into her own.
'When we're really young, we have so much of that spark of who we want to be, of what we want to do and then, as life transpires, oftentimes we go on these different roads,' Frye tells Yahoo Life for our Unapologetically series. 'I personally feel like so much of the journey in my life — and this moment — has been guiding me back to who I really am and who I always was. Yet it took the path less traveled to get there.'
Frye's path as of late has led her to documentary filmmaking. She helmed Paramount+'s two-part docuseries The Carters: Hurts to Love You, an exploration of how fame, mental illness and addiction led to singer Aaron Carter's death in 2022, told from the perspective of his twin sister, Angel Carter Conrad. Before that, Frye exposed her own experience growing up in Hollywood and losing friends to addiction and suicide in Kid 90, which was released by Hulu in 2021. She's currently completing a documentary about singer Shifty Shellshock, a childhood friend and ex-boyfriend who died from an accidental drug overdose in 2024.
The projects come amid a larger period of self-discovery for Frye. She and her husband of more than 20 years, Jason Goldberg, who share four children, divorced in 2022. After their split, Frye reconnected with Crazy Town frontman Shellshock (real name: Seth Binzer), whom she had known as a teen. They went on to date, but ended their relationship prior to his death.
'It's been such a journey getting to this moment in time, and there's been so much love, faith, pain, grief,' she says. 'So many experiences of peeling back the onion.'
Frye tells me about some of those layers — from growing up in a world that felt way too comfortable having discussions about her teenage body, to coming into her own as a filmmaker.
I'm so thankful to be doing what I love each and every day. It makes me emotional because I love, love, love sharing stories … and to share stories that help create meaningful conversations is truly a dream. [Plus, there's been my own] self-discovery — through Kid 90 and [my old] diaries and what that brought up for me, the documentary [Werewolf and the Waves] I'm working on about [Shellshock] and The Carters, [which] led me into deeper empathy and compassion around looking at addiction as a disease. Every step has led me to right here, right now and I'm really thankful for it. It's been a beautiful, heart-wrenching journey to get here.
In my 20s and 30s, there was a lot of wanting to make other people proud. … I cared what other people thought. … [My 40s have] been that process of unlearning and going: I have to do this because I love it and it feeds my soul. For a long time, I cared about what other people thought.
I was really fortunate to have an incredible foundation at home and amazing family and friends and I look at our journey of growing up and growing up in the business [as] so colorful. There was so much fun and joy within our friendships. Some of my friends have gone on to have these incredible families and really healthy, exquisite lives and some of my friends didn't make it out. Some had struggles with their families and some had absolutely beautiful, stable families. … When you take mental illness and addiction and you combine that with money and fame and all of these other elements, then that can really implode.
So many young people globally are struggling in front of their screens, while somebody else is liking, disliking or calling them out. This is a global crisis. I think about what a sensitive, loving, beautiful heart this young man had — and what becomes that breaking point? That certainly made me look at my own life. I remember wanting to please people and that doesn't even have to be something that your parents or the industry puts on you. It's something that you may put on yourself. But when you layer that, it can become explosive.
Right? I had gone through this rapid development so early on as a teenager and feeling that objectification, all those layers. I can't even imagine doing it under the microscope of social media. That's what young people are going through — and I don't think we've begun to scratch the surface on what that looks like and what that means.
I know. It's wild because I had [a breast] reduction and so much of that was health reasons — my back, all these different things — and then I remember it made it look like I had [other work done]. People were like, 'Oh, you did this and this and this.' No! What?! But I think we've lived so often in this sensationalist society where we love to build people up, and then we love to break them down.
It was so surreal, and so crazy. I think so often when you grow up — and this is something that I related to with Aaron — is that when you play a character [like Punky], people want you to stay little forever. It's like they want to remember you as that little girl or boy. Then we grow up. I know for me, I went through such an awkward stage while trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, in such formative years. So, as we were speaking earlier about coming back into myself, it's been such an incredible journey.
One of the most incredible things has been that they're like, 'Oh, mom's been on this ride too.' I think that as much as we communicate and share stories about the awkward stages and our bodies, I think so much of it is inside. It's so internal. So you can make changes to your body, but so much of the work is the internal part of it. Something that is most important to me is us having conversations and not brushing things under the rug and looking within to get to the root of our experiences.
I live in the bath a lot of the time — and I walk a lot. The last few docs were so intense and I remember there were days when I'd be on Zoom and I'd be like: 'Excuse me' and I'd have to [step away] because of the things that I was seeing or hearing. It was just so emotional. So meditation, walking, those are the things that I that I most lean into — and then my kids' arms.
I feel like I'm graduating from my teens to my 20s. I'm entering my 20s. … I am still such a kid in so many ways. I have this joy for life and discovery and adventure and excitement that feels incredibly youthful — and at the same time, this incredible gratitude and appreciation for the experience. Sometimes I'll look at pictures of when I was in my teens and 20s, and I'm like, Look at that young woman and how beautiful and full of life she is. I really didn't see it at the time. I had so many insecurities. … I cared about what the world thought. I didn't have that level of self-love, so I wasn't really able to appreciate the beauty of what was. So I've really made it a point for myself, in this moment, that I really want to appreciate all the different versions of myself, so that when I'm 80, 90 or 100 years old, looking back, I can be like, Wow, you really were able to feel that moment and appreciate [it]. That's something that I work on on a regular basis.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.