“Mickey Mouse Club” cut off girls who looked “sexually active”

Actress Keri Russell spoke openly about the double standards in The brand new Mickey Mouse Cluband said executives didn’t want “pregnant Mouseketeers” on the show, so girls were cut if they looked “like they were sexually active.”

Russell, 48, who first appeared on the show in 1991 at age 15 and left at 17, told Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his podcast Dinner’s on Me that she found it “bizarre” that she appeared on the show alongside the likes of Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling.

“Was there an age limit after your 17th birthday that you couldn’t take it anymore?” asked 48-year-old Ferguson Russell.

“It’s usually girls who look like they’re sexually active, and I was probably one of the first,” she said. “They say, ‘She’s out. Oh, she’s out. That one’s gone.'”

The Cocaine Bear The star said this was not the case with her male co-stars.

“The guys stayed until they were about 19,” she said. “I was like, ‘By the way, I had sex with that person, so I know they had sex.’ Seriously.”

Russell did not reveal which of her co-stars she slept with.

“You know, girls and sexuality (are complicated),” she said. “And by the way, I had, like, the body of a 12-year-old boy. There’s nothing really sexy about me, but I think that’s what made (Disney) nervous.”

Referring to recent stories of child actors being abused by executives, Russell said she and her co-stars managed to “get out alive” because they outnumbered adults on set.

“I think the scariest thing about child acting is that it’s usually one or two kids with all the adults, and that really accelerates the adultness of it all,” she said. “And for The Mickey Mouse Club, “We were 19 people. The adults were invisible to me, you know what I mean?”

THe Brand new Mickey Mouse Club ran from 1989 to 1996 and was a remake of the original Mickey Mouse Clubwhich was broadcast from 1955 to 1958 and in which Annette Funicello played the leading role.