Keri Russell Says Girls on ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ Were Let Go Once They Looked ‘Sexually Active’
Keri Russell joked that The All New Mickey Mouse Club execs didn’t want “pregnant Mouseketeers” on their “roster,” so girls were cut when they started to develop.
“It was so bizarre that we were on that,” Russell, 48, told pal Jesse Tyler Ferguson during the Tuesday, July 9, episode of his “Dinner’s on Me” podcast.
The actress recalled joining the Disney Channel show in 1991 when she was 15 and leaving at the age of 17.
“Was there a cut-off age where, like, after you turned 17, you can no longer be on it?” Ferguson, 48, asked Russell, who starred alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Nikki DeLoach during her final season.
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Russell said there was an unofficial age limit, joking, “It’s usually girls who look like they were sexually active, which probably I was one of the first.” She teased: “They’re like, ‘She’s out. Oh, she is out. That one is gone.’”
Russell claimed that the rule wasn’t the same for her male costars, which included Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and JC Chasez for the 1993 cast.
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“Meanwhile, the boys stayed till they were, like, 19,” she said, revealing, “I was like, ‘By the way, I had sex with that person, so I know that they’ve had sex.’ For real.”
Russell didn’t divulge which of the Mouseketeers she slept with as a teenager, but she said it was clear Disney had a double standard for the girls.
“You know, girls and sexuality [is complicated],” she explained. “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.”
Russell found great success after being on the teen series — she starred on Felicity from 1998 to 2002 before playing Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans from 2013 to 2018 — but it isn’t lost on her that her story could’ve been much different.
The actress revealed that the only reason she and her Mickey Mouse Club costars got “out alive” after being child stars was because they were in it together.
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“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,” Russell said. “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 ran from 1989 to 1996. It was a reimagined version of the original Mickey Mouse Club, which aired from 1955 to 1958 and starred Annette Funicello, Jimmie Dodd and Sharon Baird, among others. Walt Disney also appeared on the original series, voicing Mickey Mouse.
Russell, meanwhile, has had a long career as a TV actress and film star, most recently appearing in 2023’s Cocaine Bear and playing Ambassador Kate Wyler on The Diplomat.
