![]() ![]() “By the time I was seven, I viewed media through a technical lens of character development, direction and production, so the enchantment of other worlds and investment into other characters isn’t an experience I have,” she says. Where Martin voluntarily stepped away from that world early on, Stoner says she coped with the “chaos” of the industry she was working in by not watching films past the age of six. In 2019, she made her stage debut in the capital in The Actor’s Nightmare by Tony Award-winning playwright Christopher Durang, receiving rave reviews from The Guardian and The Stage. “I wanted to do Shakespeare and classical texts.” London’s world of theatre was a million miles away from what she was used to. “ to London was this reinvention, a reminder of who I was and what I wanted, what creatively fulfilled me,” Martin says. She studied drama at the prestigious acting school Lamda and now works predominantly in theatre, her first love. It was panned by critics but she had a “genuinely amazing time” filming it and has since relocated to east London, where she lives with her husband, British actor Oli Higginson. Martin declined to join them, choosing instead to go against type and star as the sweet but naive lead Jo Mitchell, in the 2011 direct-to-video movie, Mean Girls 2. Meaghan Martin was invited on the Camp Rock tour led by The Jonas Brothers in 2010 – the same tour Lovato eventually dropped out of to enter treatment for “emotional and physical issues” after punching a backup dancer. “I think I’d learnt by 15 that rejection was inevitable,” she adds. “You hope but try not to let yourself get too excited.” Martin, who was born in Las Vegas, landed adverts for Barbie and Cabbage Patch Kids as a child and had already appeared in TV programmes including Just Jordan and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. “ High School Musical had just come out so we had an idea that this could be big,” 29-year-old Martin tells The Independent. The audition, where she met Stone and Lovato for the first time, took eight hours later Martin messaged Lovato on MySpace to ask if they’d got the part. ![]() When the film came out, she was bombarded with offers to play different degrees of the same bitchy blonde teen. Stoner’s Camp Rock co-star, Meaghan Martin, faced a similar issue when she was cast as queen bee Tess Tyler opposite Lovato and The Jonas Brothers in 2008. “Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of performers deciding whether to lean into a stereotype they’re given or strive for who they feel they are authentically,” continues Stoner, “and rarely do those feel like exactly the same things.” An actor’s placement in this hierarchy can affect anything and everything from career trajectory to the way they are perceived by the public. “Beyond the psychological implications and commodifying your body – as a minor, remember – the industry also has a hierarchy of desirable and profitable qualities,” she explains. With so many celebrities now speaking out over past trauma, the Disney Channel and the culture around it are beginning to be seen in a very different light. While they have all gone on to forge wildly varying careers – an Oscar-nominated actor, a Grammy-winning pop star – what links many of them, particularly the women, is how a childhood spent in the spotlight paved the way for issues such as substance abuse, addiction, mental health struggles and exploitation. It was the starting point for not just Spears and Lovato but also Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Vanessa Hudgens, Ryan Gosling, Selena Gomez, Zac Efron, The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. ![]() And many of these people, whose lives have unfolded under the glare of the media and the scrutiny of the public, are bound together by one unique origin story: they got their big break on the Disney Channel. Many are reclaiming their narratives, and reflecting on being hounded, bullied and attacked by the very people who helped make them famous in the first place. ![]() Over the past year, a reckoning has been taking place as the lives of these celebrities – from Britney Spears to Demi Lovato – have been re-examined. But for many former child stars, it’s not so far from the truth. There’s something eerie about Peter Pan, a boy frozen forever in childhood. ![]()
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