“Little Rascals” alum Blake Collins had a normal job during his teenage years despite starring in dozens of commercials and a hit Hollywood movie as a kid.
Collins, 41, who played Woim in the 1994 film, worked at McDonald’s, where he says he was constantly recognized.
“It was in a Walmart,” Collins told People in a recent interview. “All my friends worked there in high school.”
“It was fun, but it’s very awkward to be working a cash register at McDonald’s; you’re 15 years old, someone going like, ‘Can I get a number one, please? Wait, I know you from somewhere. Were you in ‘The Little Rascals?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes.’ And they’re like, ‘Now you work at McDonald’s?’ I’m like, ‘Yes.’”
Warkol, 39, who played Froggy in the kids’ flick and now works in business development, teamed up with Collins for a podcast called “The Not So Little Rascals.”
In one episode, they interviewed other former child actors about finances and got wildly “mixed” responses.
“[We hear], ‘My parents handled it very bad, or stole it, just straight up stole it,’ in some cases,” Collins shared. “And then there’s the great stories where like, ‘Oh yeah, I got every dime. And my parents were so proud when they got to give me access to my bank account.’”
He noted that him working a regular job as a teenager is a prime example that child actors “don’t make as much money as most people would’ve thought.”
Collins, who now works behind the scenes in Hollywood doing camerawork, says he made the decision to quit showbiz because he wanted to reset his relationship with his mother, who had been acting as his manager.
“It was a manager/employee relationship to some degree,” he explained. “She was a wonderful mother, but I just kind of wanted even more normalcy going to high school. I wanted to play sports. I wanted to hang out with my friends.”
He added that working as a child actor can be a “grind.”
“You get picked up from school early every day and you get taken to Santa Monica, to Hollywood, back to Santa Monica, and you’re home at nine o’clock every night,” he divulged. “It’s a grind, especially if you’re a working child actor like Jordan and I were. I mean, we have five to seven or sometimes more auditions a week, and we spend most of our week in the back of our parents’ car just waiting to get home.”
While Collins and Warkol are using their child-star past to launch a podcast, their “Little Rascals” co-star Bug Hall has chosen an unusual post-Hollywood life: living off the grid with his family in Arkansas.
Hall, who does not own a computer or television and played Alfalfa in the family comedy film, lives with his wife and five children in a camper van after taking a “vow of poverty.”
Read the full article here
