‘Mom encouraged me to get breast implants’: Disney child star Christy Carlson Romano on fame, family and freedom

The Guardian · Emine Saner · 2026-11-06 10:00 UTC

She started acting at six and by 16 was starring in Even Stevens with Shia LaBeouf. Then her career fell apart. Here, she explains how she survived growing up in the spotlight

In a class at college, Christy Carlson Romano was encouraged to think about her “community”. Who were their people, the tutor asked the class, and where did they belong? The answer that popped into Carlson Romano’s head was child actors, but not the ones that went on to have successful grown-up careers. “The ones who were once the shining stars,” she writes in her memoir, “and who are now just trying to find out their places in the world.” Carlson Romano had returned to college after initially dropping out. She had survived sexual assault and toxic relationships, was broke and drinking too much. But before all that, she had been a teenage Disney star. She had made it.

The title of her memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck, gives you a flavour of where Carlson Romano, 42, is coming from, but what’s most striking isn’t that she goes off the rails (she doesn’t, hugely, compared to other former child stars), but how sensible and mature she is as a child. It’s alarming. When fans recognise her now – she was in the popular Disney series Even Stevens which started in 2000 – they tell her she was a huge part of their childhoods. She had been acting the part of a normal suburban girl, the perfectionist Ren Stevens, while having no idea what that was like. She was already a mini adult.

Now Carlson Romano has a social media career, which has given her a detachment from the entertainment industry. “I’m outspoken at this point, but for a lot of people they can’t do that,” she says. “What hurts is when I see other child actors suffering, because I know that means they haven’t found their way through the pain.” We speak, over Zoom, not long after Hayden Panettiere, the “Nashville” actor and singer who had started as a child and had talked about her experience of early fame, addiction and mental illness, had been found dead.

Read the full story at The Guardian · All coverage of this story