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Cole Sprouse is opening up about the reason he thinks his mother Melanie Wright pushed him and his twin brother Dylan into acting at an early age.
The Sprouse brothers were just 12 years old when their Disney show “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” premiered on the channel in 2005.
Cole, now 30, spoke about their childhood and how their mom got them into acting during a candid interview with Steven Bartlett’s “Diary Of A CEO” podcast.
He said, “My mother was, still is, the tortured artist type. She struggled with, in many different ways, her place in the world.
“I think she found a tremendous amount sense 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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He added: “It made a lot of financial sense for her to put us into acting. I think it satisfied some sort of narcissism she probably had in order to be recognized as this sort of artistic success,” the Daily Mail reported.
“She was a wonderful painter, so she always wanted some sort of artistic recognition and validation. But as time went on I think the entertainment industry just kind of broke her.”
Cole, now estranged from his mother after court officials previously granted their father Matthew sole custody of the boys, told the podcast, “This industry encourages the worst qualities of you as a person… selfishness, greed. A lot of these things that we have come to know as cardinal sins. It’s one of those things that encouraged a kind of selfishness that’s directly opposed to the fundamental idea of motherhood.”
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“And as I grew older, in my case the court had to step in and send my brother and I towards my father, who’s an incredible guy.
“But that selfishness is something the legal system also observed, and said that she was unfit, and I think as I have aged I’ve looked back on a lot of circumstances of that entire environment and I see a person that grapples with mental illness, drug abuse, but primarily narcissism.
“A wicked narcissism. The inability to perceive anything out of your own perspective, and that just doesn’t work with being a mother, with being a family in general.”
Cole’s latest interview comes after he opened up about fame, breakups and more in an interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. See more in the clip below.