Miranda Cosgrove said that she felt “pressure” during her time starring in “iCarly” after her co-star, Jennette McCurdy, dropped her bombshell memoir detailing her own experience on the Nickelodeon show.
“For sure there was pressure,” 29-year-old Cosgrove said on Monday’s episode of the “Reign With Josh Smith” podcast. “Even when you’re not on TV or acting or anything, just growing up, there’s a lot of pressure to try to figure so many things out.”
Cosgrove, who starred on “iCarly” from 2007 to 2012, shared she would mainly focus on the negative criticism she received instead of any compliments her fans would share when she was a child star.
“When I was younger, I would go through and kind of ignore all the nice comments and look for the one mean one,” Cosgrove said, reflecting on how she would use social media back in the day. “I would be going through for awhile and be like, ‘Oh, found it!’”
But she shared that for her, the trolling didn’t hurt as much back then as it does today.
“I feel like when I was younger, I didn’t think about it as much as I do now,” she said. “Looking back, I think, ‘That seems like it would’ve been really hard.’ But when I was doing it, I wasn’t really thinking about it as much. I was more just kind of living my life.”
Cosgrove also shared that she didn’t have a normal teenage experience thanks to her acting career.
“When I was really young, I would go in to write songs and the different people I was co-writing with would be like, ‘What’s the craziest thing that happened with a guy you were dating recently?’” the “Kissin U” singer revealed. “And I’d be thinking, ‘I don’t know,’ I didn’t really have any crazy stories because I wasn’t really having a real high school or middle school experience.”
Fortunately, she found some normalcy when she attended college at the University of Southern California in 2012.
“My whole life changed, but it was awesome,” she said. “I made a lot of friends and I got to just take classes that I was interested in. I tried photography and I ended up majoring in psychology and it was just a really solid, good experience.”
Cosgroves dished on her growing up in the public eye after her “Sam & Cat” co-star McCurdy opened up about her bad experiences as a child actress and Nickelodeon’s toxic environment in her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.”
McCurdy opened up about the network offering her $300,000 in hush money to not publicly speak about her tenure on Nickelodeon. She also shared how she was told to drink alcohol as a child star. She also shared why she was “pissed” at her former co-star Ariana Grande.
McCurdy’s criticism of the network also seemed to inspire “Victorious” actress Daniella Monet to come forward about feeling “sexualized” as a child actress. And “Zoey 101” star Alexa Nikolas came forward about Nickelodeon’s “unsafe” and “traumatic” environement.