Stoner was a small child when they began acting professionally – and their experience included extreme pressure, dangerous diets, rehab, dashed hopes and self-doubt. Now, with a new memoir, they consider how they escaped ‘the toddler to train-wreck pipeline’
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hen Alyson Stoner was nine, a wardrobe assistant on the set of a TV show noticed the child actor’s dark leg-hair and told Stoner it was “dirty and unladylike”, and that they couldn’t wear shorts in the show until it was removed. “I started to view my body in a detached way where it was just something to control, to fix, to manipulate for whatever standard was presented to me,” says Stoner. “In this case, the extreme beauty standards of the industry.”
It was a lot for a nine-year-old to take on, but by then Stoner had been working for several years – they were a Disney regular, and appeared in films such as Cheaper By the Dozen – and were used to doing whatever adults asked. As a teenager, this would lead to an excessive exercise regime and an eating disorder requiring inpatient treatment.
Later, Stoner, who uses they/them pronouns, would embrace evangelical Christianity as a way of making sense of their life, undergoing conversion practices to, in the words of a church friend, exorcise “the demon of homosexuality”. Eventually, Stoner, who is 32, would embrace themselves, come out as queer and become a mental-health practitioner and advocate. Their experiences as a child star meant, they say when we speak over Zoom, “I didn’t have a chance to establish any kind of trustworthy connection with my own mind and body.”
