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This Is Why You Don’t Hear About Dylan Sprouse Anymore

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Somewhere between a comic shop counter and a Brooklyn meadery, Dylan Sprouse quietly rewired his entire career.

The kid who played Adam Sandler’s son in Big Daddy and then spent the better part of a decade as one half of Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody didn’t fade out of Hollywood by accident. While his identical twin, Cole Sprouse, became a fixture on The CW’s Riverdale starting in 2017, Dylan deliberately stepped off the same track years earlier, trading soundstages for a college classroom, a comic shop register, and eventually a fermentation tank. By late 2018, that path had led somewhere nobody would have guessed back in the Tipton Hotel days.

• In 2011, Dylan left full-time acting to enroll at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he studied video game design and development, graduating alongside Cole in May 2015.
• He worked low-profile jobs during and after college, including clerking at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles and hosting at an East Village restaurant in New York City just to get out of the house and socialize.
• In mid-2018 he opened All-Wise Meadery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, serving as founder and master mazer crafting fermented honey wine, while dating Victoria’s Secret model Barbara Palvin.

The NYU Detour

Dylan didn’t leave acting because the offers dried up. He left because he wanted a different education than the one Hollywood was giving him. Enrolling at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2011, he built a course of study around video game design and development, a field about as far from Disney Channel soundstages as a former child star can get. He graduated in May 2015, walking with Cole, who was finishing his own degree in archaeology and theater.

College years weren’t spent chasing pilot season either. Dylan took a job clerking at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles and later hosted tables at an East Village restaurant in New York, work he’s said openly was less about the paycheck and more about staying social and normal while everyone around him assumed he’d vanished.

Choosing Indie Over Blockbuster

When Dylan did return to a set, he wasn’t angling for a franchise. In 2017 he starred in the indie thriller Dismissed and the short film Carte Blanche, then shot the comedy Banana Split. It’s a résumé built on small, selective projects rather than studio tentpoles, the opposite approach from a brother who was racking up Teen Choice Awards on network television during the same stretch.

That selectivity extended to music. In 2018 Dylan appeared in Camila Cabello’s video for “Consequences,” giving fans a brief, glossy reminder that he could still show up on camera when the project actually interested him, rather than because it kept his name in circulation.

Comic shop clerk, NYU grad student, meadery founder — Dylan Sprouse spent nearly a decade building a résumé that has almost nothing to do with acting.

Building All-Wise Meadery

The clearest sign of where Dylan’s actual ambitions landed came in mid-2018, when he officially opened All-Wise Meadery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’s the founder and master mazer, meaning he’s the one overseeing the fermentation of honey into mead rather than just lending his name to someone else’s brand. It’s a hands-on business built from the ground up, a long way from a Disney Channel dressing room.

His personal life picked up its own headlines around the same time, thanks to his relationship with Victoria’s Secret model Barbara Palvin. Between the meadery, the indie film credits, and a high-profile romance, Dylan spent 2018 looking less like a former Disney star hiding from the spotlight and more like someone who simply built a different one on his own terms — a path not unlike other public figures whose personal lives have drawn as much attention as their careers, as seen in Megan Fox’s relationship history.

Twins on Different Tracks

The contrast with Cole is the whole story here. Cole took the Jughead Jones role on Riverdale in 2017 and rode it to six Teen Choice Awards and a Saturn Award nomination across 2017 and 2018, the kind of mainstream visibility that keeps a former child star’s name in constant rotation. Dylan had the same starting point — the same show, the same fame, even the same face — and chose to route around all of it. NYU classmates who later crossed paths with famous faces from unexpected places, the sort of trivia covered in celebrities who knew each other in college, aren’t far off from how Dylan spent his own campus years: unnoticed, on purpose.

Dylan Sprouse isn’t disappearing. He’s running a working meadery in Williamsburg, he’s got indie film credits piling up quietly, and he’s dating one of the world’s most recognizable models — he just stopped needing a Disney Channel credit to prove any of it mattered.