Demi Lovato's New Documentary "Child Star" Is Out Now — Here Are 13 Shocking And Heartbreaking Revelations From The Film
This post deals with topics like suicide ideation and eating disorders.
Demi Lovato's Child Star documentary debuted on Hulu this week. The film follows Demi as she examines the highs and lows of growing up in the spotlight.
Throughout the film, Demi also speaks with other former child stars like Drew Barrymore, Kenan Thompson, Raven-Symoné, and more as they reminisce about their experiences growing up in Hollywood, and the long-lasting effects.
Here are 13 things we learned from the doc:
1.Demi, who uses she/they pronouns, opened up about what it was like to balance her work life with her schooling. They became a victim of bullying and shared that they were given a "suicide petition" signed by their classmates.
“The popular girls would be writing in the bathroom stalls, ‘Demi’s a whore,’ all these nasty things. It got to the point where the end of the day on a Friday, I remember going to lunch and feeling like everyone was staring at me. They had signed a suicide petition saying I should kill myself," Demi said.
"It was passed around and people signed it. It was so extremely hurtful. And that was part of my motivation to follow my dreams, because I knew it would get me out of Texas. I imagined what it would be like being on Disney Channel. I was like, 'I’m going to become so famous they can’t escape my name,'" she added.
2.While growing up in the limelight became extremely difficult, Demi shared that at the beginning of her career it was still exciting. She had "so much fun filming Camp Rock." At the time, she and her costars weren't attending high school, but their set felt like high school in its own way.
"The whole thing was so exciting. We were all just kind of thrown into this Disney machine," they said. "We called it Disney High. We were dating each other and there was people who didn’t like each other and we were all the same age and none of us were in high school, so that was our experience of it."
3.Christina Ricci opened up about her father and called him "a failed cult leader." She added that there was "never" peace in her house, so she loved being on set so much because it felt more peaceful there.
"My father was a failed cult leader, and so he had all that really crazy narcissism that goes along with someone wanting to run a cult," she told Demi. "He was very physically violent. There was never any peace in my house."
4.During the filming of Camp Rock, Demi and Alyson Stoner were dealing with eating disorders separately. Alyson, who uses they/them pronouns, was actually the first person to confront Demi about their eating disorder.
"I remember one time you followed me into the bathroom in Camp Rock 1 and I had been purging. You picked up on it because your spidey senses were already in tune with those behaviors, and you followed me in and you talked to me," Demi said to Alyson. "I was really grateful that someone didn’t just shun me, in that moment, or shame me at all. I felt like you were very understanding, but that was definitely a moment I remember being — one, ‘Oh my god, somebody knows. Fuck.’ But two, I was really grateful that you were there for me."
Alyson said that they "felt that support mutually" and added, "We know what we were dealing with at the surface level was just one part of the story of what we’re going through each day.”
5.Raven-Symoné explained that her parents taught her at a very young age that acting was a job and she needed to be professional. "I knew it was work immediately. My parents made sure that I understood that this was a job. I get paid for it. You show up professionally," she said.
“I knew at 3 how much I was making and I understood it's a job. If you lose it, you don’t make that money," she continued. “We call it a family business. Everybody has a job within the family business, so nobody likes to say one person’s the breadwinner or not…read through those lines."
6.Raven added that she knew her job was "to entertain other people" and that had a lasting impact on her mental health growing up.
"From the age of 16 months, I knew that my job was to entertain other people. That’s a mind thing in itself," she said.
She also said, "Sometimes the parents’ dreams might bleed into the child’s, and you get so enmeshed. Parents forget that children, young kids, are performing for their parent. They're performing for their parents’ love and affection and their ‘good job.’ And yes, it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of money. And money does crazy shit.”
7.Kenan Thompson shared that he was scammed out of the money he made while working at Nickelodeon.
“My mom met this dude somewhere through the community — either, like, church or neighborhood shit, through a book club or something, who claimed to be a good kind of tax accountant, will get you out of your tax problems for the cheap. He was basically a con artist and, like, ran away with my entire, my biggest earnings up until that point," he said.
He added, "By the time that was discovered, that was toward the end of that Nickelodeon tenure and the end of the job-to-job existence I had up until that point, and it was devastating because I discovered it in front of others. I went to go buy a house in Atlanta, like my first home kind of shit, and he didn’t show up with the fucking check. I’m with the real estate people at the office waiting to sign this paperwork, and he doesn’t bring the check... It’s crazy going from rags to riches and back to rags. It’s a motherfucker.”
8.Alyson also shared that working with Demi on Camp Rock 2 became difficult. Alyson said they felt like they had to "walk on eggshells" around Demi.
"It felt so hard to access you in that way. We lost that thread of trust, closeness and it didn’t seem like you wanted to be reached either at that point," Alyson said. "The last few years of working together felt really challenging. The treatment did feel drastically different. I do remember a sense of walking on eggshells and so there was definitely a lot of fear of a blowup."
Demi then apologized to Alyson.
9.Raven also shared that Demi wasn't "the nicest person in the world" to work with.
"You weren’t the nicest person in the world. But being the person I am, being in the industry as long as you have, and knowing the look, I didn’t turn on you. I was like, 'Something’s wrong there,'" Raven said.
10.As Demi grew up, she was always grateful for her success but began to loathe the spotlight. They said they felt "gross" for being so unhappy.
“There was one time where I was on my tour bus and I looked out the window, there were fans chasing my tour bus, and they were screaming and they were so excited my bus was showing up to the venue. I was just crying, could not stop crying," they said.
"Why am I living my dream and doing what I love and have these opportunities in front of me, but I’m so fucking unhappy? I would always feel so gross about myself. I knew that being on Disney Channel, I was in a coveted position that millions of people would trade me in a heartbeat and I felt like I was taking it for granted. But really, I was just a teenager that was struggling," they added.
11.Demi, Alyson, and Raven all spoke about "disassociation" from their work.
Alyson said, "I think I was kind of disassociated throughout the whole journey. On the outside, you look like everything's okay, and years later, you can’t remember a thing."
While Raven said she "disappeared every day" while working on The Cosby Show. She added, "If you would have asked me that when I was 13, I would have said I remember what the floor looked like and I remember the smells, but even that would be recall from a recall. Nothing is a pure memory right now."
Demi shared that she was so out of it that she didn't even remember Raven guest-starred on her Disney Channel series Sonny with a Chance. "When we first got on the phone to talk about this project, I said, ‘I watched you on That’s So Raven, you’re such an inspiration.’ And you were like, ‘Bitch I was on your show,’" they said. "And I was like, ‘Oh my God, she was.’ But it was part of my disassociation that I don’t even remember so much of my show that I was on, but I do remember how difficult I was to work with because I was in so much pain and I was hurting."
12.JoJo Siwa spoke about how she felt her relationship with Nickelodeon changed after she came out as queer. Shortly after coming out, JoJo said she was told that she needed to call retailers who sold her merch to "tell them [she's] not going crazy."
"When I was 17, it just became something that I didn’t want to be a part of at all anymore. I would do anything to break away or get out of it. People would always ask me, ‘Are you gay?’ and I would be like, ‘I don’t think I’m anything,'" she said. “I was on FaceTime with my girlfriend, and I did a video singing ‘Born This Way,’ and was like, 'I think I want to put this on my Reels Story,' because it was just my close friends."
She continued, “I didn’t realize that no child star as still a child star had ever come out before. The president of the network called me and was like, ‘What are we gonna tell the kids?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’" JoJo said that the exec told her to call "every retailer" to "tell them you're not going crazy."
“Everything after I came out changed," she claimed. "The way they communicated with me changed. The way they worked with me changed. The way they developed my work changed. Everything changed."
When this story was first reported, a Nickelodeon spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter, "We are unaware of the incident JoJo is referencing, and she was certainly not blackballed by Nickelodeon. We have valued and supported JoJo throughout our incredibly successful partnership, which included a JoJo-themed Pride collection at a major national retailer, among our many collaborations together. We continue to cheer her on and wish her nothing but the best."
13.Finally, JoJo also shared that according to her contract with Nickelodeon, "they owned all [her] rights to everything, except social media." Because of this, JoJo would post 250–300 times a day.
"There’s nothing left for me at the end of the day," she said.
Child Star is now streaming on Hulu.
