Soleil Moon Frye presents her child star doc on Jimmy Kimmel

Appearing on Tuesday Jimmy Kimmel Live, old and forever Punky Brewster Soleil Moon Frye has emerged as a fortunately normal, well-adjusted champ, still enthusiastic about her own personality and career. It may sound like a low bar to erase and write down, but the phrase “former child starToo rarely fails to be followed by grievous grief and sadness, so much the better for her. And why shouldn’t Frye be happy? The let’s just try it NBC’s offshoot of Peacock comes from giving the actress a ‘continuation’ decades later (in Frye’s words) of the life and courageous times of her iconic 1980s character in the new series. Punky brewster, with the now divorced (but still brave) mother of four, Punky, still with rebellious optimism and, well, courage. Plus, she’s releasing a new documentary that seeks to explore how she stepped straight into the cogs of the Hollywood child star machine without being damaged – too badly.

Child 90 (premiered on Hulu on March 12) saw Frye open the carefully sealed “Pandora’s Box” that contained the hundreds of VHS tapes and audio recordings she made as a young actress. As Kimmel confirmed, Frye was at the center of a truly diverse and impressive melee of some of the biggest young stars in TV and music of the day, including Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Brian Austin Green, Stephen Dorff. , Mark McGrath, Jenny Lewis, Perry Farrell, David Arquette, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio (who is the executive producer of the film). The documentary also includes footage of some of Frye’s friends who did not escape unharmed, such as the late Jonathan Brandis and Children stars Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce. Frye says of his eventual return to these recordings: “There was so much joy and happiness, and there was also a lot of pain. And I had lost people very close to me.

Describing her excavation of found images (which she says was inspired by a vision of Ross McElwee Sherman March, of all things) as an exercise in finding out “if my life had been the way I remembered it,” Frye told Kimmel that, ultimately, the sometimes painful experience was a liberating and enlightening experience. Noting the “pre-social media” freedom for his famous group of friends to be themselves with much more privacy than today’s young actors, Frye explained that while his punky-type enthusiasm in was often the object, it was only by seeing her. old tapes (and sharing them, sometimes emotionally, with her old friends in the movie) she saw this: “I didn’t know how much I was loved by these people.” For Frye, now 44 (seen in a candid vintage photo crushing both Mark Wahlberg and Will Smith), the long and disappointing road to childish stardom has, despite all its ups and downs, been in less turned out at least better. than most.