Cole Sprouse and brother Dylan Sprouse was given many double roles as children, but not all of their auditions were winners.
Cole, 31, recalled a truly disastrous audition when he and Dylan tried to play Thing One and Thing Two in 2003. The cat in the hat when they were 7 years old. “We came to this dance studio and our mom had put us in these stupid Thing One and Thing Two outfits to try to get the gig, and it was horrible,” Cole said. Men’s health in an interview published on Monday, February 19.
He recalled that the casting directors told the boys to “go crazy” and noted that this was their “only direction” for the siblings, “because that’s what Thing One and Thing Two do: they just go apes.’
Cole said he and Dylan went “insane” as instructed, and that’s when things spiraled out of control. “You tell two seven-year-olds to go wild, and they will go wild,” he explained. “We broke a mirror on one of the walls of the dance studio and somehow ended up in a full-blown fistfight, completely unprompted.”
The Riverdale alum called the experience “one of perhaps the worst callback auditions we’ve ever done, but one of the most notable.” He joked: “Needless to say, we didn’t get the part.”
Cole and Dylan started acting when they were babies, playing Patrick Kelly Grace under fire from 1993 to 1998. The following year the duo made their debut on the silver screen Big daddy. The brothers co-starred the role of Julian in the 1999 comedy Adam Sandler.
Cole’s first major solo performance was playing Ben Geller Friends in 2000. He had a recurring role as Ross Geller’s (David Schwimmer) son until 2002.
Three years later, Cole and Dylan became superstars after playing twins Cody and Zack, respectively, on Disney Channel’s Zack & Cody’s suite life. They continued their roles in the subsequent spin-off, Suite life on deckwhich ran from 2008 to 2011.
Cole continued to find success on television playing Jughead Jones Riverdale from 2017 to 2023. He jumped back into film after the show ended, starring in 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein.
“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 about his career trajectory. “I didn’t really want it to feel like that. I wanted it to be something that felt digestible, something that didn’t feel like a complete departure, but maybe also something that felt a little bit different.”
He continued: “But at the end of the day, you have no control over the way the public perceives your career. I just wanted to do something that my child would enjoy, and… [Lisa Frankenstein] was it.”