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10 Disney Channel Stars Before And After

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Ten Disney Channel kids grew up on camera, and the split screens tell very different stories.

Before Snapchat and TikTok, an entire generation clocked their afternoons around Disney Channel premieres, and the network turned a handful of teenagers into the biggest young stars on the planet. 10 Disney Channel Stars Before And After, published by TheThings Celebrity in September 2016, lines up the network’s biggest names next to where they landed once the Mouse House credits stopped rolling. The gap between the two photos, in some cases, is the whole story.

• Miley Cyrus went from Hannah Montana’s dual-identity sitcom to the full-blown pop reinvention of her Bangerz era.
• Raven-Symoné moved from headlining That’s So Raven to a permanent seat behind the desk on ABC’s The View.
• Zendaya’s run on Shake It Up led directly to her early-2016 casting in Spider-Man: Homecoming, while Dylan and Cole Sprouse stepped away from acting entirely to finish degrees at NYU.

The Original Disney Roster

The video’s before-and-after format leans on the network’s biggest sitcom exports of the 2000s and early 2010s. Miley Cyrus and Jason Earles anchored Hannah Montana as Miley Stewart and her older brother Jackson. Selena Gomez carried Wizards of Waverly Place as Alex Russo, while Hilary Duff and Jake Thomas played siblings Lizzie and Matt on Lizzie McGuire a few years earlier. Dylan Sprouse, Cole Sprouse, and Brenda Song rounded out The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, and Bella Thorne and Zendaya were the breakout duo of Shake It Up.

Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers get grouped together through Camp Rock, the 2008 Disney Channel Original Movie that turned both acts into recording artists almost overnight. That movie-to-music pipeline became one of the network’s most reliable star-making tools, and it’s a big part of why this particular roster shows up in so many “then and now” retrospectives.

Pop Reinventions

No transformation in the video is starker than Miley Cyrus’s. The girl who sang “Best of Both Worlds” as Hannah Montana spent the years after the show ended rebuilding her image around the 2013 album Bangerz, trading the Disney wig for a persona built on shock value and headline-grabbing performances. Demi Lovato followed a parallel, if less abrasive, path — the Camp Rock star built a solo pop career that culminated in 2015’s Confident, all while becoming one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken advocates for mental health treatment.

The same girl who once sang “Best of Both Worlds” on a Disney Channel soundstage spent the Bangerz era rebuilding her entire image from scratch.

Musical reinvention wasn’t limited to solo acts, either. The Jonas Brothers turned their Camp Rock exposure into arena tours and their own MTV run before eventually going their separate ways, a trajectory that fits the same pattern covered in pieces like The Biggest Boy Band Beefs Ever, where teen fame and adult career splits tend to collide.

Beyond the Disney Lot

Not every star chased music or bigger acting roles. Raven-Symoné, who spent six seasons as the psychic teenager on That’s So Raven, transitioned into daytime television as a co-host on ABC’s The View — a chair that, as detailed in Why The Republican Co-Host Seat On The View Is Cursed, has proven to be one of the more turbulent seats in daytime TV. Dylan and Cole Sprouse took an even more drastic detour, stepping out of Hollywood entirely to earn degrees at NYU before circling back toward acting and, separately, opening a bar together in Brooklyn.

Bella Thorne, meanwhile, pushed further into music, modeling, and indie film and television work after Shake It Up ended, building a public profile that leaned heavily on her social media presence. Her former co-star Zendaya took the opposite route into the mainstream: she landed the role of MJ in Spider-Man: Homecoming in early 2016, a casting that instantly repositioned her as a bankable name in major studio franchises rather than just a Disney Channel alum.

Diverging Career Paths

The through-line across all ten before-and-afters is timing. Stars like Selena Gomez and Hilary Duff leaned on their Disney-built fanbases to move into producing and acting projects aimed at older audiences, while others, like the Sprouse twins, deliberately stepped off the treadmill to reset before coming back on their own terms. Both routes show up in the video’s split-screen format, and both were still playing out in real time as of September 2016.

Zendaya’s Spider-Man: Homecoming casting sits at the center of that shift — a Disney Channel dancer from Shake It Up now attached to one of Sony and Marvel’s biggest franchise reboots, with the film gearing up for its wide release the following summer.