Keri Russell Claims Girls Were Dropped From Mickey Mouse Club Over Appearance

Keri Russell was a cast member of the Disney Channel’s ’90s revival of The Mickey Mouse Club.

But she had to leave the show at age 17 for a controversial reason, she told Jesse Tyler Ferguson in an interview for his podcast, Dinner’s on Me.

“Yeah, it’s usually, like, girls who looked like they were sexually active” had to leave, she joked. “Which, probably, I was one of the first. They were like, ‘She is out!’ ”

“Meanwhile, the boys stayed till they were like 19,” Russell added. “I was like, ‘By the way, I had sex with that person, so I know that they’ve had sex.’ For real.”

Russell was part of the show’s cast that included Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. “I say this completely truthfully: I was literally the least talented one there,” she told W Magazine last year.

She joined the cast when she was 15.

“I was living in Colorado at the time,” Russell said. “And some of my friends were going to a giant casting call for Disney at the downtown Denver Convention Center. And I went, I stood in line, and did my little nerdy, you know, dance. And they had me read a little skit, like, about a mermaid brushing her teeth, or something, with chocolate, or something stupid like that. And then I just happened to get it.”

“I think, back then, Disney was looking for kids that were kind of, like, normal,” she said.

Russell managed to avoid the depredations faced by some child stars.

“I think what’s really the creepiest part of kid acting is usually it’s one or two kids with all adults,” she said. “So, that really accelerates the adultification of everything. And for The Mickey Mouse Club, there were 19 of us. The adults were invisible to me.”

“So, I wasn’t completely alone with all the adults,” she added. “And I think that was helpful.”