COLE SPROUSE

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When Riverdale, Greg Berlanti’s dark, contemporary take on the Archie comics, premiered on the CW last week, it marked the return of the actor Cole Sprouse to television in a project worlds away from the one that first brought him to prominence as a teenager. Sprouse and his twin brother Dylan are still best known for playing the titular brothers on Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and its follow-up The Suite Life on Deck, which took place, respectively, in a hotel and on a cruise ship and made the Sprouses the most famous television twins since Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Broadly humorous, loudly acted, and, as Sprouse politely puts it, “boisterous,” the shows fit neatly in the Disney stable alongside Hannah Montana, which starred a young Miley Cyrus, and Wizards of Waverly Place, which introduced Selena Gomez to the world. And just as Cyrus and Gomez have successfully managed to move beyond their child-actor days and reinvent themselves in recent years as international pop stars, Sprouse sees Riverdale as a chance to prove that his Disney phase is behind him. “I think while it’s easy to group us all into a similar category, all of our paths have remained unique,” he explains. “We end up having to show the same maturation, just in different ways. We’re consistently trying to prove our humanity to a group of people that has a really hard time believing it.”

Born in Italy, the Sprouse twins began acting as babies to help their mother pay the bills. They appeared in films like Big Daddy with Adam Sandler and as Ross’s son on Friends, and were tapped by Disney in 2005 to headline The Suite Life, which would go on to run for four years before spinning off as The Suite Life on Deck. “The show gave me a profound work ethic,” Sprouse says. “I never missed a day of work in the eight years I was there, and it really taught me to push myself and drive myself. But the danger of being on a show like that for eight years is that you lose purpose. Continuing the show is oftentimes the most dangerous thing to do as an actor because purpose is the currency for quality work as an actor.”

Besides the increasing monotony of playing Cody, Sprouse now says that he is still trying to sort out what being so closely linked to a fictional persona throughout his teenage years has meant for his personal development. “When you’re a child and you’re growing up and you’re mimicking a certain character or you’re trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you’re playing into your real life and kind of become that thing,” he explains. “You end up having to figure out where you separate from the thing you’ve played for eight years when you leave it.”

Sprouse, now twenty-four, says that the unique strictures and tone of the Disney studio also may have served to sharpen some of the developmental struggles its actors had to endure, due to the contrast between the roles they were playing onscreen and the people they were still in the process of become themselves. “Disney acting as a style is very large. It’s designed to capture the attention of children, so it often comes off as immature and youthful,” he says. “That gets complicated when you’re starting to develop personally and sexually through puberty and you’re starting to have these opposing ideas of yourself as a young person. Oftentimes that leads to some form of cognitive dissonance where you are being sold as something you truly don’t identify with and you have this rebellion that takes place.”

Having successfully made the transition from child star to grown-up actor without scandal, Sprouse is nonetheless quick to come to the defense of his peers who have had rockier paths, heightened by the intense scrutiny of the public eye. “It’s one of those things that gets written off as humorous when you watch a child entertainer try to redefine themselves, but it can be an intense identity crisis,” he says. “I think in our modern society we have a much greater understanding of the importance of personal identity and how we see ourselves and I’m hoping that over time people latch onto the fact that this hurts people and they have a little more respect for something like that.”

In lieu of “We Can’t Stop” or Spring Breakers, Sprouse turned to school. After taking a year off after The Suite Life, he enrolled at NYU at nineteen and eventually decided to major in archeology. Fascinated by the earth sciences since childhood thanks to a geologist grandfather, Sprouse jokes that he wanted to live out “tales of adventure,” which he was able to do after he was accepted into an exclusive program to work on an excavation site in France. He moved decisively away from acting during his four years as an undergraduate, and admits that he very seriously considered the possibility of never coming back. “When we were younger, it was a business choice for us and I realized that I couldn’t live like that anymore and there was no fulfillment in that sort of acting,” he explains. “I needed to take a break and reassess, and I did. My brother and I had sort of reached a plateau and there was nothing we could really do there so we chose to go into education and embrace an interdisciplinary world of knowledge.”

Faced with the choice between (expensive) graduate school and (relatively lucrative) television work, Sprouse says he decided last year to take a shot at pilot week, the annual busy period when studios and networks cast many of the new television shows they want to try out. “I was planning on continuing with archaeology, but when I auditioned and I got the part and we did that pilot, I had a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I didn’t really think of it, but it felt fulfilling again, which is really the only thing you should honestly pursue in art. And as long as it feels fulfilling, I’ll continue.”

Having just come off a Twilight Zone binge, Sprouse says he was immediately attracted to the role of Jughead, Archie’s best friend who also takes on a voiceover role in Riverdale that is reminiscent of Rod Serling’s narration for his influential television series. Full of sex, scandal, and the sort of heightened drama common to most shows about teenagers, Riverdale will come as a surprise to most people who know Archie only as a cheerful, lighthearted slice of midcentury small-town American life. The series opens with a death, Archie sleeps with his music teacher, and Veronica comes to town disgraced after her family loses all its wealth when her father is jailed for financial misdeeds. There are notes of Twin Peaks—although Sprouse is loathe to compare anything to David Lynch—and Brick, the 2006 Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie which took a film noir sensibility to high school life.

Sprouse himself admits to having been put off by the initial descriptions of the show, but says that further reading helped him understand that Riverdale fits easily into the world of Archie, as the new leadership at Archie Comics has pushed in new and surprising directions to make the brand relevant again today. “When I first heard the abstract, it kind of put a sour taste in my mouth,” he says. “I come from a comic background—I worked at a comic shop—and when you hear about a dark and gritty take on an otherwise beloved franchise, that’s all the wrong buzzwords for the right project. Nothing really dubious happens in the original Archie Digests, but as I started to do more research, I realized the universe of Archie is really wide open. The Punisher comes to Archie, Archie dies when he gets shot trying to protect his friend, and in the new comics, zombies come to Archie. So it seemed like the road had been paved for a while for something like this. My knowledge now is that the Archie universe is wide enough for something like this to take place.”

In refashioning an idyllic American icon for a confusing and complicated new world, Riverdale is also, Sprouse contends, a tacit reflection of today’s political climate. “We live in a society right now that’s obsessed with this golden-age America mentality,” he explains. “Trump’s whole campaign was built around ‘Make America Great Again,’ which essentially is a play towards the same era that Archie arose out of that is this golden, perfect world. I don’t mind how we may be tampering with this idea of a golden age because of my personal political stance. I don’t think that ‘everything is perfect and jolly’ is a perspective that makes any sense. Our society is either primed perfectly for a more contemporary view of this classic American property or they’re going to rebel against it. It’s the same political division within our society right now.”

Currently based in Vancouver shooting Riverdale, Sprouse is also continuing to pursue a photography career on the side. He’s been commissioned by Condé Nast Traveler and shot a story for Teen Vogue earlier this month, and says that what began as a hobby has quickly turned into a passionate vocation. He finds that the travel photography, especially, has been helpful in shaping his perspective. “Travel photography is difficult in that you’re very reliant upon the place you’re going to be a sort of beautiful that can sell,” he explains. “You end up having to be really critical and quite aware at all points of your environment. It’s a very different way of looking at the world, but you end up internalizing a lot of that way of seeing. Most of us were quite nomadic through human history, and I think that part of us still very much exists in a yearning for adventure and worldliness. What travel photography is aiming to do is to inspire a love of something different than yourself.”

And though they require work on different sides of the camera, what connects Sprouse’s acting and his photography is that he plans to continue both as long as they remain “fulfilling.” With over two decades of experience under his belt, he knows what he wants and he knows when it’s time to move on. “Riverdale is a much more human project than the last one and I realize now that though I’ve had enough time to step away and to take a breather, my main challenge if I’m going to continue acting is to discern the things that were valuable about my childhood and the skills I acquired as a child and the things to keep and the things to let go,” he says. “It’s more real, and I don’t think just because it’s on the forefront of pop culture that it should be treated any less than something very ‘noble.’ I’m going to try and do that and see how it ends up.”

Riverdale airs on Thursdays on The CW.