These former child actors choose to leave the entertainment industry, however other performers who start their careers early go on to stay in Hollywood for the rest of their lives.
While some haven’t achieved much success (running a podcast or practicing entertainment law, for instance), others have neglected their time in front of the camera in favor of other interests.
Charlie Buckett, in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was Peter Ostrum’s only acting credit.
Ostrum became a veterinarian after having always loved animals; according to Veterinary Practice News, he earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Cornell University.
According to the website, he spent 37 years working at Countryside Veterinary Clinic in Lowville, New York, before retiring in December 2022.
When Jennifer Stone was cast as Selena Gomez’s on-screen best friend Harper Finkle on Wizards of Waverly Place in 2007,
it was her first major role. Stone kept up her acting after the show ended in 2012, but she eventually made the decision to enroll in nursing school.
As stated in her Instagram bio, Stone co-hosts the Wizards of Waverly Pod with David DeLuise, her former costar, in addition to her job as an ER nurse.
Following her career as a child actor, when she appeared in episodes of Phil of the Future, Summerland,
and later No Ordinary Family, Kay Panabaker has stepped away from the spotlight to focus on animals.
Panabaker stated that it has been seven years since she started working as a zookeeper at Walt Disney World in an Instagram post from May 2022.
Panabaker discussed her job at the Disney park in an interview with Naperville Magazine in 2016. She said that she works with a variety of creatures,
such as goats, sheep, elephants, porcupines, skunks, donkeys, cows, parrots, birds of prey, and opossums.
Speaking about the reasons for her decision to exit the entertainment industry, Panabaker stated that she had become disenchanted with her work,
particularly following an encounter on set where a producer had asked her to drop weight. Even though she went on to audition in L.A. for a long after that, she claimed that ‘the passion wasn’t there.’
After securing child roles in Warren Beatty movies such as What About Bob?, Hook, and Dick Tracy, Charlie Korsmo made the decision to stay away from performing during his high school years.
‘We really had a sort of choice to make after Hook, that was my last movie as a kid,’ he said to PEOPLE.
But it had been a few years since I had attended school. I discovered all of a sudden that I had few people my own age anymore.
He had the desire to resume acting while attending M.I.T. to study physics, and he got in touch with his former agent again, who helped him land a part in the 1998 film Can’t Hardly Wait.
Despite his return to the industry, Korsmo would eventually earn his degree from M.I.T. before enrolling in Yale Law School and going on to become a Cleveland law professor at Case Western Reserve University.
The former child star has scored two roles in recent years, according to IMDb: A Different Man in 2024 and Chained for Life in 2018.
Working on Chained for Life with an old director buddy, Korsmo told PEOPLE, ‘I wasn’t out there looking for parts, but he said there was a part in there for me,
so I said, ‘We can do it in a very short shoot because I’ve got a job and I’ve got little kids.’ ‘Yet the timing seemed appropriate, and I really liked the script.’
Although Bridgit Mendler’s first acting credit came from a 2006 episode of General Hospital, she rose to fame in 2010 as a teenager on the Disney Channel with the show Good Luck Charlie.
After Good Luck Charlie concluded in 2014, Mendler had an appearance in Lemonade Mouth (2011) and contributed multiple songs to the soundtrack.
The celebrity released ‘Ready or Not’ as her first song in 2012, ahead of her debut album Hello My Name Is.
Before pausing her musical career, she released her most recent EP and went on tour with Nemesis in 2016.
Mendler attended the University of Southern California for a few years before being named a 2017 Director’s Fellow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. She said that she had enrolled in a PhD program at MIT the following year.
She is pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy, or PhD, from MIT after completing her master’s degree from the esteemed university;
however, she stated in a post on X that this pursuit has been placed on hold. She stated that she was two months away from finishing her Doctor of Laws, or JD, in the same March 2024 post.
The former Disney actress made two more significant announcements in February. The first was that she was appointed CEO of Northwood Space,
a firm whose goal is to build a ‘data highway between earth and space.’ She also mentioned that she became a mother by first adopting and then fostering a 4-year-old kid.
On the Disney Channel series with Hilary Duff, Clayton Snyder won his first part in 2001 as Lizzie McGuire’s crush, Ethan Craft.
Although there was a little pause on his IMDb page, Snyder continued to act into the 2010s, with
his most recent appearance being a 2021 TV movie called The Maltese Holiday. He played the character in both seasons of the show as well as the 2003 film.
Ethan’s role was rumored to be appearing in Lizzie McGuire before the much awaited relaunch was finally axed.According to his Instagram, Snyder is currently a real estate agent in California.
Andrea Barber believed her acting career was over until returning to the role of Kimmy Gibbler in the Full House spinoff, Fuller House.
For me, it was a rather smooth move. I was prepared, too,’ she said to PEOPLE. ‘I had a lot of success as a child actor,
and it really doesn’t get better than Full House for me, so I never looked back—I know that sounds crazy.’
Following his tenure as the show’s star from 1987 to 1995, Barber completed his studies at Whittier College, worked as an intern at the UN in Geneva,
Switzerland, and obtained a master’s degree in the United Kingdom. After that, she decided to pursue a career in teaching.
Not only has Barber returned to the world of Full House, but she also made an appearance on That Girl Lay Lay on Nickelodeon recently.
In 1985, Jeff Cohen made his screen debut as Chunk in The Goonies, costarring with Ke Huy Quan as Data.
After Cohen left the public eye and returned to work as an entertainment lawyer in 1991, Quan and Cohen collaborated once more,
this time around for Quan’s contract negotiations for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which took place over 40 years later.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Quan joked about the unusual reunion, saying, ‘When the producer of our movie was trying to make my deal, he said he never imagined that he’d have to talk to Chunk and Data for his movie.’