McCurdy is a child star who left her career in her early 20s, something she was only able to do because of her mother’s death. Since McCurdy was six years old, Debra had molded and controlled her, turning McCurdy into a successful actor. she was on the hit show iCarly, on the US children’s channel Nickelodeon, and the spin-off Sam & Cat. Every aspect of McCurdy’s life was micromanaged, from who she was allowed to see to what she ate. the restricted diet led to eating disorders. Debra even bathed McCurdy in the shower until she was 16 and touched her vagina and breasts (Debra was diagnosed with breast cancer when McCurdy was two and said she was checking for lumps) and shaved her legs. Becoming a famous actor was Debra’s dream, not McCurdy’s. When McCurdy, as a child sitting in the back of the car after a bad audition, tells her mother she doesn’t want to do it anymore, Debra is furious. “He was driving, so it was, on my part, bad timing,” he recalls with a laugh. “She started screaming, tears streaming down her face. He immediately went into hysteria, and so was often met with resistance. And I felt then: “It’s not okay to mention this.” Jennette McCurdy with her iCarly co-star Miranda Cosgrove in 2007. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy If her mother’s behavior is considered abhorrent, then the world of children’s television isn’t much better, with child stars having to deal with manic shows and grueling auditions. There is a general feeling that it is not a healthy place for young people to learn who they are. Last month, Alexa Nikolas, another former child actor, took part in a protest outside Nickelodeon’s studios in California, claiming that child performers were “not safe” on the channel’s shows. “I try to talk about everything from a personal point of view [rather than] something more systemic,” says McCurdy. “I definitely think there are a lot of harsh realities for children and teenagers.” McCurdy grew up in Garden Grove, a small town in California, with her parents, grandparents, and three older siblings in a Mormon family. They didn’t have much money: her father worked for a kitchen design firm, and her mother sometimes worked shifts at Target, though her main job, McCurdy writes, was “making sure I made it in Hollywood.” Debra’s moods and behavior were erratic and everyone was afraid to upset her. In addition, the possibility of the cancer returning hung over the family. McCurdy was homeschooled and had no friends, which meant she didn’t realize until later how dysfunctional her home life was. “I felt like an outsider, there was layer upon layer of shelter,” she says — I was homeschooled, Mormon, a child actor, and working in a grown-up world. “I considered myself a second-rate Mormon, I wasn’t as good at being a Mormon as the others. I didn’t have girlfriends in school and then in acting, a lot of mums can be competitive so they don’t necessarily want daughters to talk to each other.’ When Debra signed McCurdy up for dance lessons (14 a week to improve her chances), she made a friend and got a chance to see another type of home life. “It was one of my first memories of registering what I couldn’t recognize at the time as dysfunction, of ‘my family runs on a different frequency.’ What about the other adults around her – her grandparents, her father, the people at church? Couldn’t they see how harmful Debre was? “My mom seemed to keep up appearances. She did a really good job of portraying that she and I were best friends and that we were inseparable.” At home, she says, her grandparents and father begged her to get help. He would throw McCurdy’s father out and make him sleep in the car, scream at them or throw something. “The louder it would sound when it broke, the more likely it was to throw that object.” He gives a small laugh. “She never asked for help, never worked on any of her stuff. I fully sympathize with mental illness, but the fact that he didn’t try to change it is a more complicated feeling for me.” I got the thing my mom wanted for me, and she looked not only unhappy, but suddenly jealous Throughout McCurdy’s childhood, Debra did her best to make McCurdy a star. She whitened her teeth and dyed her eyelashes, she was looking for agents and managers. Worst of all, when McCurdy showed signs of puberty, Debra taught her to restrict calories and manage her diet “to keep me babyish.” She panicked at the thought of her daughter growing up, but there was also a professional motive. If McCurdy could act at a younger age, she would get more roles “because you can work longer hours on set and you can get directed better.” Instead of feeling trapped and manipulated, the diet felt, to McCurdy, like bonding. Like: “This is great. Mom and I help each other with our meal plans.’ I didn’t realize the reality.” Landing roles in commercials and television series, McCurdy was not only on her way to fulfilling her mother’s dream, but also supporting the family financially. iCarly (2007-2012) became a huge hit and her role as the main star’s tomboy sidekick made McCurdy famous. It was, he says, terrifying. “I was such an overprotected, sheltered kid, with quite a bit of social anxiety, and then to be recognized every time I walked out the door was overwhelming. I grew to resent fame. It was my mom’s wish for me, it was never what I had set my sights on.” She also realized that she hadn’t made her mother happy, which was all she ever wanted. “I thought that would solve everything. Then I got to the thing she wanted for me, and she seemed not only unhappy, but suddenly jealous of me for having it. I think fame was the first thing that really got my mom across that she and I were separate people. We were so confused and I think she really saw her identity in me.” First Ladies… McCurdy meets Michelle Obama in 2012. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Nickelodeon Working on the show was not, for McCurdy, a happy experience. He writes about the man he calls The Creator (taken as showrunner Dan Snyder) and the terrifying atmosphere he says he created on set: overly complimentary one moment, verbally aggressive the next (he writes that he shot a six-year-old “on place to mess up a few lines in a day’s rehearsal”). At one point, when McCurdy was 18 and the prospect of her own spin-off show stuck, she writes that The Creator took her out to dinner where he encouraged her to try alcohol for the first time and massaged her shoulders. She wanted to stop, she writes, but was “so afraid of offending him.” There were parallels between him and her mother. Here was another grown man who had to tiptoe around to please her. “Absolutely,” he agrees. “Another thing about being a kid in this world is that there are a lot of really dominant figures.” (When she left Nickelodeon, she was offered a $300,000 “severance” on the condition that she not talk about her experiences there, which she refused; Schneider left the channel in 2018 after an internal investigation found she had been verbally abused. ) The experience of performing as a child, seen through McCurdy’s eyes, is mostly detrimental, especially when it comes to auditions. “I wasn’t psychologically developed enough to understand that rejection doesn’t mean you’re not worthy, it just means you don’t fit the role,” she says. “I couldn’t separate those two things.” Once he succeeded, there were other pressures. “It led me to have complex feelings about any child acting experience.” He thinks it would help just to have “someone on the kid’s team. There are agents and managers, network executives and sometimes [recording] Labels if the kid also makes music – all those people who, even if they have the best intentions, at the end of the day are making money off of that kid. If there was someone who was there strictly for the welfare of that child, it would make a difference.” Even if you handle it very carefully, inevitably being a child star is not a “normal” adolescence. When McCurdy got her first period, she was working and the news got out to the cast and crew. she had her first kiss on set, in front of a camera crew, while they shouted instructions at her. All these firsts happen in an unreal environment. “At this point the question arises: what is reality?” she says. “The worlds are bleeding into each other and it takes a lot of unpacking after the fact to figure out what the hell happened.” Sign up for Within Saturday The only way to get a behind-the-scenes look at our brand new magazine, Saturday. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers, plus all the must-read articles and columns delivered to your inbox every weekend. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our site and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I really felt like I had no identity without my mom. I didn’t know who I was. I felt terrified, powerless and incompetent For McCurdy, the next few years would be…
