Cole Sprouse Details Trauma He & Former Disney Channel Stars Endured

Cole Sprouse is telling it like it is.

The child star turned accomplished actor is revealing his truth about growing up in the spotlight.

Cole and Dylan Sprouse got their big breaks at a very young age. They appeared on “Friends” and starred alongside Adam Sandlerin “Big Daddy.”

However, it was their Disney Channel show, “The Suite Life Of Zack & Cody,” that sent them into the stratosphere of fame.

In a new piece with the New York Times, Cole opens up about the trauma of fame at a young age, and what his female co-stars were subjected to.

“My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, ‘Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!’ No,” Cole explained. “When we talk about child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma.”

Cole and Dylan starred alongside Ashley Tisdale and Brenda Song on ‘Suite Life.’

“The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences, and every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience,” he admitted.

Cole continued, “So I’m violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I don’t feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover.”

The “Riverdale” actor also opened up about how “fame is a trauma” has followed him into his adult career.

“And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, I’ve noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child,” he revealed.

He also said that “people have an easier time hiding it when they’re older.”

Speaking of “hiding it,” in another recent interview, Cole was not hiding his feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Lili Reinhart.

Last month, while speaking to GQ, one-half of the couple formerly known as “Sprousehart,” explained that their relationship and romance was the real deal.

When speaking about his relationship with Lili, he explained that it was a very public one with “all this public currency.”

He didn’t dive deeper into what he meant by “public currency,” but I can assume it meant that them as a couple made people money.

And that anything they wanted to keep private was hard to do given their level of fame.

He did clarify that their relationship was “as real as it gets.”

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Another potential reason for their split could be due to the CW leaning into their relationship as a promotion opportunity for “Riverdale.”

This is something Cole detested doing in public.

With that relationship in the rearview, Cole is focused on his current relationship with Ari Fournier and moving forward with her and their new dog, Bear.

Unfortunately, information about their relationship has had to be kept private due to online trolls who don’t support Cole and Ari’s relationship.

He told the outlet that even if he wanted to share pictures of Ari and him on Instagram, “followers report everything about Ari and me as bullying, and it gets taken down pretty immediately. Even on my other friends' accounts, it gets taken down.”