By JACK SMART
‘I have a clear mission: Try to have as much fun as possible’
Few actors might jump at the chance to play a character that has almost no lines and requires hours of heavy makeup application. But Cole Sprouse, who stars in the new film Lisa Frankenstein as a reanimated corpse known as “the Creature,” wasn’t just up for the task, he reveled in it. “I’m a big geek for practical effects,” the 31-year-old says with a grin. Even when talking about the “tomblike experience” of getting a prosthetic cast of his face, he can’t contain his enthusiasm. “They cover your head in silicone except for one nostril to allow you to breathe out of,” he explains. “Full sensory deprivation. You do your Zen work and try as best you can to not have a panic attack.”
For Sprouse, playing a mute monster who rises from the dead is the latest adventure in a career that kicked off when he was 6 months old (first in a commercial and then as the baby son of Brett Butler’s character on the TV series Grace Under Fire). Since then, he has been climbing Hollywood’s ladder—alternating early roles with his twin brother and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody costar, Dylan though he took a break from acting to study archaeology and photography at New York University. “I do have a clear mission: Try to have as much fun as possible,” says Sprouse, whose post-uni return to acting has included leading romantic roles in 2019’s Five Feet Apart and 2022’s Moonshot. Seven seasons as Jughead Jones on the CW hit Riverdale, he adds, has given him the financial stability to ask, “What’s the kind of work I want to do?”
For starters Lisa Frankenstein, the first film directed by his friend Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late Robin Williams. “I always wanted to play a monster,” he says of his role in the movie, which was written by Juno’s Oscar-winning scribe Diablo Cody. “It felt like one of those opportunities that I would be able to high-five my 10-year-old self about.”
If Sprouse ever needs to revisit his childhood, it’s well-preserved via numerous films and TV projects, including Friends (he played Ross’s son Ben) and Big Daddy, the 1999 comedy starring Adam Sandler, whom Sprouse cites as “the only person that I have pretty consistent communication with from that period”—with the exception of his Suite Life family. “We never anticipated that it would’ve been such an important part of so many people’s childhoods,” he says of the Disney sitcom that ran from 2005 to 2008 and still regularly gets name checked by die-hard fans on social media. “It’s beautiful to see.”
Sprouse, who has been dating model Ari Fournier since January 2021, also counts the Riverdale cast in his inner circle. He proudly shouts out Charles Melton’s recent award-winning turn in May December and the career success of Camila Mendes, KJ Apa, Madelaine Petsch and Lili Reinhart (whom Sprouse dated for much of the show’s 2017-23 run). Like their characters on the high school drama, “everyone,” he quips, “seems to have graduated.”
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