6 Things We Learned From Demi Lovato’s New Documentary ‘Child Star’
A generation of kids (myself included) grew up with Demi Lovato on their TVs. They watched as an eight-year-old Lovato painted shapes and counted kittens in her first acting gig, on the PBS series Barney & Friends. A few years later, they belted the lyrics to “This is Me” during Disney’s Camp Rock sing-along specials and belly laughed to the “So Random” comedy skits on Sonny With a Chance. For Lovato, growing up in the public eye was all she knew. At age 16, she paused filming to tour her albums Don’t Forget and Here We Go Again before launching into another Disney project. Lovato seemed to be living every teenage girl’s fantasy, yet she was crumbling under the pressures of rapid success.
Sixteen years later, Lovato charts that exponential rise to stardom — and its downsides — in Child Star, a documentary now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. In the 90-minute film, which marks Lovato’s directorial debut, she talks with fellow former child stars including Drew Barrymore, Christina Ricci, Raven-Symoné, Kenan Thompson, Jojo Siwa, and Alyson Stoner about the disorienting effects of finding fame at a young age, and how it led them to psychological and emotional distress, alcohol and drug abuse, and instability.
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As Lovato recounts in the film, “Why am I living my dream, and doing what I love and have these opportunities in front of me but I am so fucking unhappy?”
Child Star follows Investigation Discovery’s blockbuster five-part series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, released in March, which exposed sexual misconduct, gender discrimination, and public humiliation behind the scenes at Nickelodeon. Lovato’s film, co-directed by Nicola Marsh, paints with a broader brush, focusing on young actors’ experiences across cable networks and film, and ultimately strikes a more hopeful chord, laying out how the former child stars were able to survive the rejection, betrayal, and alienation they experienced in their youth to find stability and security. For Lovato, it seems, the film offers a potent reminder that, “You’ll be OK, kid,” as her latest single of the same name proclaims.
Here are six takeaways from Child Star.
Lovato was viciously bullied in school
As Lovato auditioned for post-Barney & Friends gigs in the early 2000s, she says she was tormented by other kids at school. In the film, Lovato says someone scribbled “Demi’s a whore” on the bathroom stalls and recalls walking to lunch and feeling the whole school staring her down. “They had signed a suicide petition saying that I should kill myself and it was passed around and people signed it,” Lovato says. “It was so extremely hurtful. And that was a part of my motivation to follow my dreams.”
Lovato’s co-stars feared her explosive temper
Lovato says she has only fleeting memories of filming Sonny With a Chance and Camp Rock 2, which she attributes to “part of my dissociation” from the projects. But she does confirm the long-whispered rumors that she was difficult to work with. Raven-Symoné, who guest starred on the second season of Sonny With a Chance, raises her voice to a high-pitched squeal as she tells Lovato in the film, “You weren’t the nicest person! You weren’t like ‘Welcome!’”
“I’ve been in the industry for as long as you and I understand the glaze over the eyes,” Raven-Symoné says. “I didn’t hold it against you, I was like, ‘Something’s going on there.’”
Stoner, who starred as Lovato’s confidante in 2008’s Camp Rock and the 2010 sequel, echoes that sentiment. The only Camp Rock co-star to participate in the doc, Stoner is frank about how Lovato’s erratic behavior made Stoner lose a “thread of trust” and “closeness” with her.
“The last few years of working together felt really challenging,” Stoner says in the film. “The treatment did feel drastically different. I do remember a sense of walking on eggshells. So, there was definitely a lot of fear of a blowup.”’
One of Lovato’s infamous outbursts occurred in 2010, when the 18-year-old punched one of her backup dancers during the Colombia leg of the Camp Rock 2 tour. In Lovato’s 2017 documentary Simply Complicated, Lovato said a backup dancer told Kevin Jonas, father of the Jonas brothers, that Lovato was abusing Adderall, prompting Lovato to lash out. Lovato addresses the altercation in the documentary, and apologizes to Stoner for the harm she caused.
Stoner and Lovato struggled with mental health and eating disorders
Both Stoner and Lovato struggled with their body image. Whenever Stoner (who uses they/them pronouns) saw their airbrushed image in a teen magazine, they say it exacerbated issues around their self-worth. Before and during the Camp Rock press tour in Europe, Stoner recalls feeling terrified about their appearance and developing “obsessive” behaviors. The pressure to reach perfection led Stoner to eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, exercise bulimia, and binge-eating disorder. Lovato, meanwhile, would purge her food in the bathrooms of the Camp Rock set, she says in the doc.
Lovato also says that she dealt with depression, had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and binge drank on the weekends. During one of her tours she played 70 shows in 90 days, she says, and didn’t understand that she could take time off. “I get a lot of anxiety when I think of how close I came to not being here at all,” she says.
Lovato, Ricci, and Barrymore experimented with booze and drugs as children
Ricci, who at age 10 starred in The Addams Family, Barrymore, who starred in her first ad at 11 months and became world-famous at 9 in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Lovato talk about the instability of their childhoods and premature experiences with drugs and alcohol.
For Ricci, whose father was a failed cult leader with a violent temper, time spent on a Hollywood set represented a “refuge for emotional safety,” she says in the doc. Ricci later tells Lovato that she turned to drugs and alcohol in her teens because “I don’t remember feeling like there was any other way to be happy.”
Barrymore called Steven Spielberg a “father” while filming E.T. and was sent to a mental health institution by her mother as a teenager. (Barrymore was emancipated from her parents at age 14.) A family friend would give her weed at age 10, she says in the film.
Ricci and Lovato learned to conceal their use of illicit substances. Lovato hid her booze in a coffee cup, since Solo cups were banned on set, she says, whereas Ricci would request a “warming Diet Coke,” or a Diet Coke spiked with alcohol, from her assistant.
Siwa says she was blacklisted by Nickelodeon
Siwa, known for her larger-than-life bows and bedazzled attire, signed a brand deal with Nickelodeon at age 13. Siwa also starred in self-titled Nickelodeon projects like Jojo Siwa: My World (2017), Jojo’s Follow Your D.R.E.A.M (2019), and Jojo’s Dream Birthday (2019). When Siwa posted a coming-out video to Instagram in 2021, she claims in Child Star, Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins called her and mandated she call every retailer and “tell them you’re not going crazy.” So, Siwa proceeded to call Target, Walmart, JCPenney, Toys “R” Us, Claire’s and other retailers, she says in the doc. Following her coming-out video, Siwa says that she was also not invited to Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards, adding she was “blackballed from the company.” (A source close to the Kids Choice Awards reportedly claimed it was an “honest mistake,” according to Variety.)
Lovato wouldn’t change anything about her career
Before the documentary comes to a close, Lovato sits down with a group of young fans to field questions about child stardom. When one kid asks whether Lovato would change anything about her career, Lovato says that she prefers to live with no regrets: “I’ve made some really questionable choices in my life, but I wouldn’t end up where I am in this moment right now, today, had I not made all the choices that I made in my life leading up to this point.”
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