Cole Sprouse and brother Dylan Sprouse landed a lot of twin roles as kids, but not all of their auditions were winners.
Cole, 31, recalled one truly disastrous audition when he and Dylan tried out to play Thing One and Thing Two in 2003’s The Cat in the Hat when they were 7 years old. “We showed up to this dance studio, and our mom had put us in these stupid Thing One and Thing Two outfits to try and get the gig, and it was horrible,” Cole told Men’s Health in an interview published on Monday, February 19.
He remembered the casting directors telling the boys to “go wild,” noting that was their “only direction” for the siblings “because that’s what Thing One and Thing Two do — they just go apes–t.”
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Cole said he and Dylan proceeded to go “insane” as instructed and that’s when things got out of hand. “You tell two 7-year-olds to go wild, and they’ll go wild,” he explained. “We broke a mirror on one of the walls of the dance studio and then somehow ended up in a full-on fistfight, totally unprompted.”
The Riverdale alum called the experience “one of maybe the worst callback auditions we’ve ever done but one of the ones that stick out the most.” He joked, “Needless to say, we did not get the part.”
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Cole and Dylan broke into acting when they were babies, playing Patrick Kelly on Grace Under Fire from 1993 to 1998. The twosome’s big screen debut came the following year with Big Daddy. The brothers split the role of Julian in the 1999 comedy alongside Adam Sandler.
Cole’s first big solo gig was playing Ben Geller on Friends in 2000. He had a recurring role as Ross Geller’s (David Schwimmer) son until 2002.
Three years later, Cole and Dylan rocketed to superstardom after portraying twins Cody and Zack, respectively, on Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. They continued their roles on the subsequent spinoff, The Suite Life on Deck, which ran from 2008 to 2011.
Cole continued to find success on television playing Jughead Jones on Riverdale from 2017 to 2023. He jumped back into film after the show’s conclusion, starring in 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein.
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“I’m not a big believer in the 180 — when an actor goes from television to film and thinks, ‘I’m going to do something completely different,’” Cole told the outlet on Monday of his career trajectory. “I didn’t really want it to feel like that. I wanted it to be something that felt palatable, something that didn’t feel like a complete departure, but perhaps also something that felt just a little bit different.”
He continued: “But ultimately, at the end of the day, the way the audience perceives your career is out of your control. I just wanted to do something my kid self would love, and [Lisa Frankenstein] was it.”
