Christy Carlson Romano, ever the multi-tasker, is getting her hair done when she answers my phone call. “Austin Life magazine is asking me to be on their cover for the holidays, so I’m very excited,” she says. What’s landed Romano on the cover of a magazine has little to do with any of the iconic characters she brought to life as a Disney Channel star in the early aughts—like Ren Stevens, Shia Labeouf’s overachieving older sister on the series Even Stevens, or Cadet Captain Jennifer Stone in the Disney Channel original movie Cadet Kelly opposite Hilary Duff, or voicing the titular character on the animated series Kim Possible. No, what’s brought Romano back into the public eye after years out of the spotlight has been her YouTube channel.
Now, instead of singing about going to the moon in 1969 or saving the world with a naked mole rat named Rufus, Romano walks at a brisk pace through the woods of Texas, talking about the past. Maybe you’ve seen her videos, like “How I Lost Princess Diaries To Anne Hathaway,” or “Why I Don’t Talk To Shia LaBeouf,” or “My 9/11 Story” which rake in hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of views. Romano is often wearing an athleisure outfit and talking directly to the camera about how she lost all her money or why she ran away from Hollywood. The videos are always just a few seconds longer than ten minutes—the minimum length of time a YouTube video must be in order to enable mid-roll ad breaks and, thus, be monetized.
While in the salon, Romano briefly considers divulging the secret of who has the somewhat unenviable task of filming her, effectively jogging backwards through the winding trail to capture the magic. “Vanity Fair wants to know if I can tell them about our cameraman,” she whispers to her husband, who’s with her. I hear a laugh, and then Romano comes back to the phone with the verdict. “He says nobody gets to know, and he says sorry,”—though she also drops a breadcrumb that the answer is “not that complicated.”
In any case, the videos aren’t about figuring out the identity of the cameraman. They’re about getting reacquainted with Christy Carlson Romano. Watching them feels both incredibly random and intimately familiar—like an estranged friend from the distant past has knocked on your door, let themselves into your house, and started talking, unprompted, about everything that’s happened since the last time you saw each other. The clips have taken hold of a specific corner of the internet, where memequeens have photoshopped their own titles onto Romano’s videos—like “How I Thought Of The Idea For Making Dune” or “So, So Many Of You Are Gay. Why?” Sometimes, it’s hard to tell which titles are real and which ones are fake.
The enterprise started out more traditionally, as a YouTube cooking show in which Romano invited other former Disney pals (Kim Possible’s Will Freidle,That’s So Raven’s Annaliese Van der Pol) to make salads or nachos with her. “We dumped money into budgets. We dumped money into guest fees and day rates. It was like a real production,” Romano says.
But then the pandemic hit. Romano moved to Austin with her husband and producing partner Brendan Rooney and their two small children. They had to completely reconceive the show. And while the new format feels like top-of-mind musings about her life in the limelight, it’s actually quite a scientific endeavor.
“We dive into analytics very much so,” Romano says. “In order to get the best knowledge base for how my channel’s improving, [Brendan’s] working every single day, tracking how popular something is and why. He’s like, pre-inputting SEO titles.” The research led to the more casual walkabouts that have landed with older millennials. “Usually with YouTube content creators, it starts grassroots and then it becomes something more produced,” Romano says. “In my situation, it was the opposite. And that’s kind of unique.”
Romano maintains that despite all the research, the videos are still fairly off-the-cuff, and the editing is light—just to remove some stammering and the occasional “umm” in post. She appreciates the control she has over the final product and her own life, something that’s a far cry from her Disney days. “We had morality clauses” back then, she says, which she believes were put in place to help kids who were “having trouble assimilating into the professional responsibilities.”
But despite posting videos with titles like “Why Child Fame Is So Dangerous,” Romano has only positive things to say about her Disney experience, and has even offered to mentor the new generation of Disney stars. “Any time I meet young talent that’s going through this experience, I'm always offering my services in genuine hopes that they feel like they can call me,” she says. “If a Disney star called me and said ‘I just messed up. What do I do?’ and it’s like two in the morning, I would literally get in my car and I would go and get them.”
Romano, who started working professionally at the age of six, knows firsthand how difficult a life in the spotlight can be at a young age. And while she’s at peace with the trajectory of her own career, there are a few moments that still stick in her craw. “For the longest time, I was always trying to get in different magazines,” she says—before recalling getting left off Vanity Fair’s now iconic 2003 “It’s Raining Teens” cover, featuring “It” girls like Lindsay Lohan, Raven-Symoné, Amanda Bynes, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and her Cadet Kelly co-star Hilary Duff.
“I’m not salty with Vanity Fair. I’m salty with whoever was pushing whoever to book,” Romano says. “It was hard for me to break through to that level. When I’m looking back on it, I’m like ‘Oh, I’m still salty,” but, of course, I’m not. Everybody can look at that Vanity Fair and say, ‘These girls all were pretty much set up from this article to go forward to have the empires of their choosing.”
Instead of getting an empire, Romano got her education—leaving Hollywood and the public eye to go to Barnard, where she met her husband. Given the public struggles that some of those cover stars and her Disney channel brethren have faced, Romano realizes that perhaps it was best that she didn’t land VF. When I ask if she’s happy with the road she’s taken, she responds with a hearty “hell yeah.”
“I would never second-guess the path that I have taken,” she explains, “because sometimes I’ll look at some of my co-stars' struggles and I’ll say, ‘that’s really hard.’ I would never trade my life for that extreme amount of fame for that long.”
Even though she “rejected” fame, as she puts it, Romano has popped up again from time to time on stage and screen, most notably starring as Belle in the 2004 Broadway production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at the age of nineteen. But even that production was fraught for the actress. Carrying the show was taxing on her voice, which was already in delicate condition after she had to have surgery to remove vocal nodules right before her audition. Romano admits that she probably pushed her voice past its limit to get through that experience and make her Disney family proud. “They were at 30% seat capacity when I came in,” Romano recalls. “They were invested in me doing a good job.” Despite her best efforts, the New York theater scene was also cruel to her. “I read the comments on the old forums on Broadway World, and they were so mean and so, like, theater queen, bitchy.” Starring in the Broadway production of Avenue Q as Kate Monster in 2008, in her words, “saved my appreciation and deep, deep love of the theater.”
Still, Romano seems to have nothing but love for Disney and the industry she called home throughout her childhood. When I ask if she’d encourage her own children to join the industry, Romano says that she’d rather put them “through the Disney machine than the Nickelodeon machine.”
“I believe Disney treats its kids fairly,” she says—before clarifying that she isn’t eager to get them into show business in the first place. That being said, Romano is more than happy to revisit and update some of her own beloved Disney channel characters, and even floated the idea of a Cadet Kelly reboot with a queer Captain Stone. “I have tried to pitch the idea around a couple different reboots, but it’s not in my hands and I wouldn’t want to force something if it didn’t have absolute support,” she says.
As for why she doesn’t speak to some of her more famous co-stars, like LaBeouf and Duff, Romano thinks a lot of her co-stars haven’t reckoned with their pasts yet. “I honestly think we’re a little scared of each other,” she says. “Some people that I really wanted to be on the [cooking] show said no because they didn’t even want to lean into their past. They’re scared to. They’re afraid of their past. And I think that speaks to unresolved issues with their past. It must, right?”
Romano, though, is not afraid of her past, and plans to embrace it well into her future—even if she doesn’t know exactly where the wooded road will take her. “I’m more than my past,” she says. “I was set on this path. It just took this many years to get here.”
— Cover Story: Regina King Is in Her Element
— Even on Film, Dear Evan Hansen Can’t Fix the Musical’s Main Problem
— Linda Tripp’s Daughter Wishes Her Mom Was Around to See Impeachment: American Crime Story
— Unlucky Star: The Brief, Bombastic Life of Rudolph Valentino
— Emmys 2021 Winners: See the Full List Here
— LuLaRich’s Derryl on Taking Down LuLaRoe and Boycotting Kelly Clarkson
— What Michaela Coel Did With I May Destroy You Is Bigger Than the Emmys
— Love Is a Crime: Inside One of Hollywood’s Wildest Scandals
— Dune Gets Lost in Space
— From the Archive: The Making of Ghostbusters
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”
