Appears on Tuesday Jimmy Kimmel Live, ancient and forever Punky Brewster Soleil Moon Frye emerged as a blessedly normal champion, well-adjusted and still excited about herself and her career. This may seem like a low bar to clean and write down, but the phrase “ex-child star”Very rarely does she stop being followed by a broken heart and sadness, so good for her. And why shouldn’t Frye be happy? THE let’s just try The NBC branch that is Peacock has just delivered the actress a “sequel” (in Frye’s words) decades after the life and courageous times of her iconic 1980s character in the new series Punky Brewster, with the now divorced (but always brave) mother of four, Punky, still swaying with uncompromising optimism and, well, courage. In addition, she has a new documentary being released that seeks to explore how she plunged right into the gears of the Hollywood children’s star machine without getting damaged – very badly.
Kid 90 (debuted on Hulu on March 12) saw Frye opening the carefully sealed “Pandora’s box” that contained the hundreds of VHS tapes and audio recordings she made when she was a young actress. As Kimmel confirmed, Frye was right in the middle of a truly varied and impressive mess of some of the biggest TV and music stars of the time, including Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Brian Austin Green, Stephen Dorff, Mark McGrath, Jenny Lewis, Perry Farrell , David Arquette, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio (who serves as executive producer on the film). The documentary also includes images of some of Frye’s friends who did not escape unscathed, such as the late Jonathan Brandis and Kids stars Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce. Frye said of his eventual return to these recordings: “There was a lot of joy and happiness and also a lot of pain. And I had lost some people who were very close to me. “
Describing her excavation of found footage (which, she claims, was inspired by Ross McElwee’s exhibition Sherman’s March, of all things) as an exercise to find out “if my life had gone the way I remembered,” Frye told Kimmel that, in the final analysis, the sometimes painful experience was liberating and enlightening. Observing the freedom of “pre-social media” for her group of famous friends to be themselves with much more privacy than today’s young actors, Frye explained that, although her punky enthusiasm often made her the focus, it was only in seeing her old tapes (and sharing them, sometimes emotionally, with her old friends in the film) she saw that, “I didn’t realize how much I was loved by those people” For Frye, now 44 (seen in a photo of sincere period crushing both Mark Wahlberg and Will Smith), the long and disillusioned path of child stardom, despite all its ups and downs, ended up being at least better than most.