A former member of the All-New Mickey Mouse Club told Newsweek that the TV show was "Juilliard on steroids for kids," comparing the program to the prestigious performing arts school in New York City.
Nikki DeLoach, 44, is a mother-of-two and an actor known for her roles in the TV series Awkward, North Shore and Days of Our Lives as well as multiple Hallmark movies. But she got her start on the All-New Mickey Mouse Club in 1993 when she was 12 years old.
The young cast members—otherwise known as Mouseketeers—performed in a variety of musical and dance numbers, with the show particularly known for its sketch comedy.
It was a springboard for the stars to go on to become successful in the entertainment industry, and DeLoach's cast mates included future actors Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell, plus budding pop stars Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez from NSYNC.
During a conversation with Newsweek, DeLoach spoke fondly of her time on the show and while she said it never felt like work, she detailed an intense work schedule and told how it felt to see her co-stars become megastars, while she wasn't so lucky.
"[It was] one of the best experiences of my life. I hear these horror stories of kids in the entertainment business and, listen, I did go through a lot later in my life of the dark side of the entertainment business for sure. But on that show specifically, they did a lot of things right, a lot of things," she said.
Before going on to talk about those dark times, when her music career was severely damaged by a deeply corrupt manager who was eventually jailed, DeLoach prefers to focus on the early days of her life in entertainment.
"These were the days when Disney had moved the show to Orlando to kind of get around those child protection laws from California," she continued.
"And we worked, I mean, in that last year of the show, we worked six-day weeks, which obviously would never be allowed in California. And we worked from morning to night. I mean, we would start at 9 o'clock in the morning and we will end at 6:30 at night. Or we would come in a little later.
"If we were shooting a music video late into the night, we would come in later and we would shoot until like 2 a.m. … We did three live shows a week. Now to give you perspective, SNL [Saturday Night Live] does one."
At the time of publication, Newsweek had not heard from Disney after emailing spokespeople for comment on June 27 and July 4.
While the All-New Mickey Mouse Club helped instill a strong work ethic, DeLoach said working on the show was still enjoyable.
"We got to be kids and it was so much fun and so it never felt like work for me. I can only speak for me, of course. I just always felt like, you know, we were getting to do what we loved to do in a very safe environment and with trusted adults who took really good care of us," the actor said.
"And I'm so grateful because it really and truly, you know, not only was it kind of like a Juilliard on steroids for kids, you got to do anything and everything you possibly wanted to do."
While on the show the children covered almost every aspect of the entertainment industry. They were doing live performances, which required choreography, and they learned how to record music in a booth for the videos they would shoot.
The cast got to put on comedy sketches and DeLoach was one of the lucky cast members chosen to be in the children's soap opera Disney created called Emerald Cove. Airing from 1993 to 1995, the show was a dramedy series on the Disney Channel and a serial from the fifth, sixth and seventh seasons of the All-New Mickey Mouse Club.
"They picked like seven of us from the whole cast of 20 to go and do that show … We went down to Florida either three months earlier or stayed later from the actual show to film Emerald Cove," she explained.
"So by the time we got to do Emerald Cove, I was pretty much down there all year long filming and it was heaven, it was heaven."
Before making it onto the All-New Mickey Mouse Club, auditioning children had to attend a casting camp, where Timberlake was the first friend that DeLoach made. The pair are still friends to this day, with the actor telling Newsweek they are "like brother and sister."
She continued: "There was not a kid that was at that camp that was not full of talent, you know, every single one of them, they were all so gifted. And so the fact that I ended up getting on the show again to this day is a miracle.
"There is nothing particularly special about me, I would say, as opposed to anyone else because everybody was so talented. I just remember hearing Christina Aguilera for the first time and thinking there has to be some kind of, like, boom box or voice box that she's hiding or concealing inside her clothes because I could not believe a voice like that came out of, at the time, a 12-year-old's mouth. It was so clear how gifted she was. I've never heard a child sing that way."
When it came to casting, DeLoach thinks there were "obvious choices" but believes that the casting directors wanted to find kids who also connected while at the camp.
The Awkward actor said she, Timberlake, Spears, Gosling and T.J. Fantini "immediately bonded," and she clearly remembers the day she and Aguilera became friends.
"There was one day very early on in the camp where Christina was eating by herself at a table and I don't like anybody to be by themselves," DeLoach said.
"And so I went over to her and I asked if she wanted to join us and eat with us every day. And so she picked up her tray and then she came over and she sat with us and I was told later that it was that act of inviting her over, to make sure that she wasn't by herself and that we all got to be together, that was the deciding factor for me to be on the show.
"We kind of found each other and I think that was a big part of the decision. 'These kids, yes, they all had talent but they all bonded and we could see that they all got along really well,'" she said, assuming what was going through the casting directors' minds at the time.
The actor added: "They were also watching the parents … All of our parents got along really well. And so I think all of those factors went into making the decision of the seven kids that ended up on the show."
As these were the days without social media—and many of the kids didn't have mobile phones—DeLoach said she and her cast mates were able to exist in their own little world.
"Oh, we were in a bubble. I mean, truly, we were in a little bubble. We had no idea how big the show was truly worldwide," she said. "I get to meet people these days from Colombia and from Europe, and from all over, who grew up watching the Mickey Mouse Club...
"And so it's really nice to hear those stories from people and how much the Mickey Mouse Club impacted them. We didn't know because we were living in this little bubble in Orlando. And obviously, you know, there was no social media or cellphones or anything like that, and what a gift.
"A lot of us were from very small towns—Britney, from Kentwood [Louisiana], and Justin from Millington [Tennessee]—coming to basically find a group of people who were just like us. I was like, 'Oh my goodness, you want to do the same thing I want to do.' We were all theater kids essentially."
While DeLoach has a lot of love and respect for the industry, that doesn't mean it's always been easy. Working on the All-New Mickey Mouse Club meant that she learned a lot about what it meant to work in the entertainment business at a young age.
"It is such an unfair industry and it makes no sense and it is harsh and it is mean. And sometimes, yeah, you could be the most talented person in the room and not get the job," she said.
"It's not like normal industries where, you know, you work so many years and you just keep climbing that ladder. Your resume could be the longest resume of all of these things that you've done and nobody cares, you know, and that's true for today. And so it was a really good lesson for me to learn not to be a victim in this industry."
DeLoach told Newsweek that when the show ended, she couldn't help but compare her career to that of Spears, Aguilera, Timberlake and Gosling. While they had come up together in the industry, she found herself on a different path to her cast mates.
In 1998 DeLoach took a break from acting when she became a member of the girl group Innosense. While the group was an opening act for both NSYNC and Spears, due to a variety of issues that were outside of DeLoach's control, the group never took off and eventually disbanded.
The band's manager at the time was Lou Pearlman, the talent manager behind the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. By the time Innosense were on their way up with an album about to be released, Pearlman was arrested.
"We were just on that precipice of breaking out and breaking through and there was so much hard work that had gone into all of it but the Feds closed in, [Pearlman] got arrested and it was found out all the corrupt activity that he was involved in," DeLoach said. "RCA Records...dropped all acts that were connected to Lou and we were one of those acts."
In 2006, Pearlman was accused of running one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in U.S. history after scamming various people, including the musical acts he was involved with. He entered a guilty plea to charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and making false statements during bankruptcy proceedings. He was found guilty in 2008 and given a 25-year prison term. He died in federal custody in 2016.
DeLoach described leaving the music industry as a "creative wound."
While Spears, Timberlake and Aguilera were becoming international pop stars and Gosling was being cast in studio films, DeLoach's music career had fizzled out and she was in community college.
"You can take a pile of poop that is given to you and you can kind of spin anything into gold if you have enough determination. I have taken away a lot of life experiences for sure, a lot of lessons that were learned in the process of the music business. One of them is being very careful of who you trust," DeLoach shared.
"My husband is my entertainment lawyer for a reason and I have a PR team with Melanie and Jessica, who I trust completely. When you find those people, you hold on to them for the rest of your life."
She continued: "I look back and I think about a lot of the hard—because I haven't had the career that Justin has or Christina has or Britney has had or Ryan has had. And that has been a struggle when their careers were blowing up and I was in community college unable to buy strawberries.
"You know what I mean? Like, I literally could not buy fruit. I was so poor and wondering, like, why was I left out? I worked just as hard as everybody else. And I also had talent. So, like, why did I get left behind?"
While a younger DeLoach may have struggled and couldn't help but compare herself, she is now proud of the work that she has done. Not only is she acting and writing, but she has also helped a variety of causes that are close to her heart. This was spurred on by the fact that her second child was born with life-threatening congenital heart defects (CHDs) in 2017 and her father battled Pick's disease, a rare form of dementia.
"I look back at that now and I realize that I would not be the person that I am today had I not gone through what I did. I certainly wouldn't be the president of the Foundation Board of Trustees for the Children's Hospital, Los Angeles. I certainly wouldn't be a spokesperson for the Alzheimer's Association and on the board for Mind What Matters where we give care grants to people who take care of their loved ones with Alzheimer's and dementia," she said.
"I don't know that I would have such a heart for giving back and that would be such a big part of my life had everything gone right in my career. There's so much of my life now and who I am now, that I don't know if that would be true, had I had that golden yellow brick road paved for me the entire way.
"I look back and while I wish I didn't have to go through the stuff that I went through in the music business, again, the universe sometimes gives you a pile of poop and you've got to make it matter and you've got to make it mean something."
To date, DeLoach has starred in more than 18 films across Hallmark's various channels and has signed a multi-picture overall deal with the network. She recently reprised her role as Goldy Berry in the fourth installment of the popular Curious Caterer Mystery series, Curious Caterer: Foiled Plans. It is available now on Hallmark Mystery.
She has also collaborated with her writing partner, Megan McNulty, on several projects for Hallmark, including most recently True Justice: Family Ties, which she also appeared in alongside Katherine McNamara, as well as Christmas for Keeps, which aired on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.
DeLoach added: "Do I have the career that I dreamt of when I was 15 years old? No, I wanted to be Sandra Bullock. I am not Sandra Bullock, clearly. But you know, I am paying my bills doing what I love to do and I haven't had to take on a second job and I haven't had to worry about that and truthfully, the fact that this is my life, it's a miracle. I'm so, so, so blessed."
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