Keri Russell: ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ Dropped Girls Who Seemed ‘Sexually Active’

Actress Keri Russell has recently shed light on the double standards within The All New Mickey Mouse Club, revealing that executives preferred not to have “pregnant Mouseketeers” on the show. As a result, girls were often cut if they appeared to be “sexually active.”

Russell, who is now 48, reflected on her time on the show during an appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast, Dinner’s on Me. She joined the cast in 1991 at the age of 15 and left when she was 17. On the podcast, Russell expressed her bewilderment at being on the show alongside future superstars such as Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling.

Ferguson, also 48, asked Russell if there was an age limit for the show’s participants. She responded, “It’s usually girls who look like they were sexually active, which probably I was one of the first. They’re like, ‘She’s out. Oh, she is out. That one is gone.’”

She pointed out that her male counterparts did not face the same scrutiny. “The boys stayed till they were, like, 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.”

Russell did not specify which of her co-stars she had been involved with. She added, “You know, girls and sexuality [is complicated]. 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.”

Reflecting on the darker aspects of child acting, Russell mentioned that she and her co-stars managed to “get out alive” because they significantly outnumbered the adults on set. “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 stated. “And for The Mickey Mouse Club, there were 19 of us. The adults were invisible to me, you know what I mean?”

The All New Mickey Mouse Club aired from 1989 to 1996 and was a reboot of the original Mickey Mouse Club, which was broadcast from 1955 to 1958 and featured Annette Funicello.

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Source: The Daily Beast