Cole Sprouse Opens Up About Growing Up with 'Narcissistic' and 'Unfit' Mother
The 'Riverdale' actor spoke candidly about his childhood in a revealing new interview.
Cole Sprouse is ready to shed light on the struggles he faced while growing up as a child star and the issues he had while in the care of his mother, Melanie Wright.
"My mother was, still is, the kind of tortured artist type. She struggled with, in very many ways, her place in the world," he explained to The Diary Of A CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett.
Sprouse, now 30, continued, detailing how his mother put him and his twin brother, Dylan Sprouse, up for acting jobs at just eight months old. "I think she found a tremendous amount of self-identity through motherhood and tried to turn it into a profitable business at the same time, which for identical twin boys going into acting is [an] economic loophole — there are labor laws that can be incredibly profitable, so that’s what she did."
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Although the Riverdale actor noted, "It made a lot of financial sense for her to put us into acting," he went on to state that it also fed into his mother's negative traits, saying, "I think it satisfied some sort of narcissism she probably had in order to be recognized as this sort of artistic success."
"But as time went on, I think the entertainment industry just sort of broke her," said Sprouse.
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The actor's mother and father, Matthew Sprouse, divorced when he and his brother were very young, and the court initially granted his mother sole custody of the twins.
Sprouse and his brother did a lot of work as child actors, notably appearing in Friends, Big Daddy, and their own Disney Channel show, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
During the interview, Sprouse stated that the courts eventually granted their father sole custody, seeing his mother's "selfishness" and deeming her"unfit." Since then, he's been estranged from Wright.
Looking back on his childhood, Sprouse added that he sees his mother as "a person that grapples with mental illness, drug abuse, but primarily narcissism...and that just doesn’t work with being a mother, with being a family in general.”
But along with that, Sprouse credits the entertainment industry with fueling these negative qualities: "This industry in very many ways encourages the worst qualities of you as a person — narcissism, selfishness, greed, a lot of these things that we've come to know as practically cardinal sins. It's one of those things that encouraged a kind of selfishness that was directly opposed to the very fundamental idea of motherhood."
Sprouse didn't go into too much detail about why his mother was declared unfit to raise him and his twin, telling Bartlett, "I don't ever want to be perceived as a victim of it. I am not, and never will be, a victim of any circumstance that I am in...What happened in my youth happened and carved and forged me into the person I am today."
This isn't the first time the actor has opened up about his personal life to a podcaster; he previously dove into his history with relationships and other intimate topics in a now-viral episode of Call Her Daddy.
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