The singer steps behind the camera for a brutally candid new doc, enlisting former young Hollywood icons like Drew Barrymore, Christina Ricci, Raven-Symoné and JoJo Siwa to divulge the pleasures and perils of early fame.
In early April 2008, a few dozen people, including me, filed into a recording studio in midtown Manhattan to meet Disney’s “Next Big Thing.” That was how the company introduced a then-15-year-old Demi Lovato to the world, or to roughly 30 members of the media and advertising community.
The wide-eyed teen was in New York for the first time, and, upon taking her seat at a piano and belting out “This Is Me,” immediately established herself an exceptional talent. The power ballad was from Camp Rock, the first in a series of Disney projects that she’d lined up. Another movie (Princess Protection Program), a TV series (Sonny With a Chance), an album and tours with and without the Jonas Brothers would follow in stunningly quick succession. It was, at the time, all she’d ever wanted, putting Lovato on the same trajectory as Disney demigods like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez — and it came after years of being passed over for part after part.
“I was filled with gratitude, and there was this sense of wonder and excitement,” she recalls. “It was very much the honeymoon phase of my career, right before the train got moving in a way where I couldn’t pump the brakes.”
Now, 16 years later, Lovato is seated before me in the Los Angeles home she shares with her fiancé, singer-songwriter Jordan “Jutes” Lutes, trying to make sense of everything that came next. By anyone’s measure, Lovato’s life has swung wildly between professional highs, including eight studio albums, all of which debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, and personal lows, bottoming out in 2018 with a near fatal overdose, which was accompanied by three strokes, organ failure and a heart attack. Along the way, Lovato, who got her start on Barney & Friends at age 6, amassed a following of more than 266 million on social media, with whom she’s remained radically transparent about every step of her journey, which also includes a history with both sexual assault and an eating disorder. But before Lovato can move forward once and for all, she says, “I need to figure out why I entered this industry in the first place.”
So, as she closes in on 32, Lovato’s returning to the Walt Disney Co., making her directorial debut with Child Star, a bound-to-be-buzzy documentary set for a Sept. 17 release on Hulu. The project, which clocks in at close to 90 minutes, explores the deeply personal subject of early fame and the myriad challenges that come with trying to navigate it. In addition to her own story, which features prominently, she weaves in her intimate conversations with other former child stars, including Drew Barrymore, Christina Ricci, JoJo Siwa and Kenan Thompson. Though their talents and timelines vary considerably, taken together they provide a portrait of trauma and instability, with recurring tales of rejection, betrayal and unrelenting pressure.
What Lovato’s documentary does not do is cast blame on any one person or company, certainly not in the way that ID’s Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV did earlier this year with prolific producer Dan Schneider. Instead, the film is both a history lesson on child stardom — “From Shirley Temple to TikTok,” says producer Michael D. Ratner — and a macro look at what happens when you “give a really serious job to a really young kid and suddenly they’re making way more money than their parents,” adds veteran filmmaker Nicola Marsh, who serves as Lovato’s co-director. “The entire family ecosystem becomes dependent on that kid working that hard, and, I believe it’s Raven-Symoné who says it, they’ll milk the light out of you because there’s money to be made.”
Early on, releasing Child Star on a Disney-owned streaming service wasn’t in Lovato’s plans. In fact, the documentary initially was envisioned for YouTube Originals, the distributor of her 2021 doc, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, which chronicled her overdose in excruciating detail, including that the dealer who’d brought Lovato heroin that night also sexually assaulted her. Then YouTube Originals abruptly shuttered in early 2022, and Hulu swooped in. For Disney TV Group president Craig Erwich, “a very personal story around a very public story” was a winning formula for his platform.
The potential awkwardness of having a company that played a seismic role in the child stardom pipeline now airing a no-holds-barred doc on the subject was addressed in their very first meeting. “It would have been crazy to pursue it without talking about that,” says Ratner, who also produced as well as directed Dancing With the Devil. By all accounts, Hulu gave the team the freedom it needed to explore the subject honestly. “They were like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ Like, ‘Lean into it because if you try to avoid it, it looks worse,’ ” recalls Marsh. “And it’s not an exposé, but it is quite blunt, and it’s a credit to Hulu that they didn’t get cold feet — or maybe they did, but they certainly didn’t tell us.”
Lovato and her fellow producers got to work compiling a lengthy list of potential subjects — some Lovato knew, many she didn’t. She’d text, slide into DMs, go through reps, whatever it took. But unlike Lovato, who’s continually and unflinchingly shared her story, not everybody was ready or interested in revisiting their past. In fact, the frequency at which the team was told “no” shocked Lovato; Marsh insists she was more shocked when anybody said yes. She’s still marveling at the fact that Ricci wanted to talk about how her father had been a physically violent, failed cult leader, and sets became, as she describes it in the doc, “a refuge of emotional safety” — or that Thompson was willing to share how he went, as he says, “from rags to riches to rags,” when a man fronting as an accountant stole virtually all of his Nickelodeon earnings. “The honesty with which they came to the table was extraordinary,” says Marsh.
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