Keri Russell: Girls were shut out of ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ once they looked ‘sexually active’
The Mouse House had strict rules.
Keri Russell, 48, who was in “The Mickey Mouse Club” as a teenager, revealed on Tuesday’s episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson‘s “Dinner’s on Me” podcast that the club had a cut-off.
“Was there a cut-off age where like, after you turned 17, you can no longer be on it?” Ferguson asked Russell, who joined the show when she was 15 in 1991 and left when she was 17.
“Yeah, it’s usually girls who look like they were sexually active, which probably I was one of the first,” Russell said. “They’re like, ‘She’s out. Oh, she is out.'”
Meanwhile, “The boys stayed till they were 19,” she said.
Russell added, “I was like, ‘By the way, I had sex with that person, so I know that they’ve had sex.’ For real.”
She didn’t reveal who her early tryst was with, but Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, JC Chasez, Britney Spears, Dale Godboldo, Josh Ackerman, and Nikki Deloach are all fellow Mousketeers.
“You know, girls and sexuality,” Russell said. “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. Pregnant Mouseketeers aren’t on the roster.”
Russell said she believed that she was able to get “out alive” from being a child star, because she was mostly surrounded by peers her age.
“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 said. “And for the Mickey Mouse Club, there were 19 of us. The adults were invisible to me, you know what I mean?”
On the same podcast episode, Russell, who was most recently in the Netflix hit “The Diplomat,” also reflected on her relationship with her “The Americans” co-star Matthew Rhys, 49.
The duo have been romantically linked since late 2013, and they share a 7-year-old son, Sam.
“I’m really able to enjoy it, you know? And it was such a lark that we got to do that together in that kind of… at that prime of our lives. And, you know, had we met when we were 20, we wouldn’t be together,” she said.
“We were just in the right moment. It was so kind of sexy and spy,” she said about meeting him on the critically acclaimed spy drama, which ran from 2013-2018 and featured Russell and Rhys playing KGB spies pretending to be an American couple.
“And that world was just so languid,” she said.
“And it’s obviously fun, as you know, to be a part of something that’s such a success and so beloved.”
