Keri Russell Reflects on the Creepy Sexism of 'Mickey Mouse Club'

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | July 12, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | July 12, 2024 |

Keri Russell looked back on her time on The All New Mickey Mouse Club in a recent episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast. When the host asked her if there was a cutoff age for the child stars to appear on the show, she said, “It’s usually like girls who look like they were sexually active, which, probably, I was one of the first. They’re like, ‘She’s out! She is out! That one is gone.’” I mean, yeah. That, unfortunately, tracks.

Not that she wasn’t sexually active; it just wasn’t any of their business. Furthermore, she says she was sexually active with one of the male Mousketeers, but he didn’t get fired. Which, yeah. Makes sense.

“The boys stayed ‘til they were, like, 19,” she explained. While she didn’t name the boy she was involved with, she was at the time romantically linked to co-star Tony Lucca, who was 19 when he left the show in 1995. “I was like, ‘By the way, I’ve had sex with that person so I know that they’ve had sex.’”

This is all especially stupid because Russell was 15 years old when she started on the show in 1991, and the teenage years are, famously, when teenagers become sexually active.

“You know, girls and sexuality,” she joked. Tale as old as time, indeed. She added, “It is weird that I was on that. I think what’s really 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.” But MMC, she explained, was different, because the kids outnumbered the adults: “For The Mickey Mouse Club, there were 19 of us. The adults were invisible to me…I wasn’t completely alone with all the adults and I think that was helpful.”

With the child stardom reckoning going on in entertainment right now, I think she should count her lucky stars.