Mayim Bialik is opening up on her come-up in Hollywood as a young child performer and revealed that she felt “different” from others growing up.
“I don’t know if I felt normal growing up,” the “Big Bang Theory” alum, 45, told Yahoo! Entertainment. “But I don’t think that had to do with the fact that I was a child actor — I think that I came from a really unusual family. So nothing felt normal for me. I always felt different.”
The “Jeopardy!” guest host pressed that she felt like an outsider growing up in the public eye as a young actress.
“Being on television definitely … made me feel like more of an outsider,” she explained. “Being in the public eye is definitely abnormal. But there was a lot about my life that was still normal: I was still treated like a normal kid who had to go to school, and do my chores and be picked on by my brother.”
‘BIG BANG THEORY’ ALUM MAYIM BIALIK REVEALS ‘THE GREATEST JOB I’VE EVER HAD’
During a virtual panel for FOX’s Winter Press Tour in December, Bialik told reporters that seven years after breaking out as an actress in the 1988 musical drama “Beaches” at the age of 12, she removed herself from the Hollywood eye simply because she wanted to have “an experience of being appreciated for what was inside and not just sort of what I could offer people.”
“I was 19 when I left the industry and I was away for 12 years,” the 45-year-old actress said at the time. “I got my degree and I had my two sons and I taught neuroscience for about five years after getting my degree. And the God’s honest truth is I was running out of health insurance and I went back to acting so that I could literally just get enough insurance to cover my toddler and my infant. And I had never seen the ‘Big Bang Theory.'”
Mayim Bialik. (Photo by: Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
The “Call Me Kat” star and executive producer, who also held down guest spots on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” as a child star, said she credits the film “Blossom” for opening her mind to the fact that she didn’t feel normal because her life wasn’t a normal experience, instead she lives one that people rarely have the opportunity to have even in their adult lives.
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“We filmed ‘Blossom’ in Paris, and that’s a place I never would’ve gotten to go to [except] for work,” she relayed to Yahoo! Entertainment. “It really broadened my concept of the world.”