Danica McKellar took a step back from Hollywood following her five-year run on The Wonder Years. Though it all worked out in hindsight, she admittedly had some fears about leaving the industry behind.
The 50-year-old actress scored her breakout role on the ABC series in 1988 when she was barely a teenager, and when the series finished after six seasons, she decided to go to UCLA “to get a degree in mathematics,” she told Closer Weekly.
“I stopped acting for four years. I just needed to find out who else I was,” McKellar said. “For me, the way I could find out was just to do something else and really exercise my brain.”
Related: Danica McKellar Says Her Wonder Years Castmates ‘Hadn’t Been Together’ in More Than 20 Years Until Fanboy Expo Reunion
She particularly wanted to “let go of all the glamour and superficiality of Hollywood,” she said, after spending her teen years enmeshed in that world.
Pursuing an education and taking that step back was “really empowering to me,” she said.
After earning her degree, though, she was “worried” about how she’d manage to get back into the industry.
“When I was done with my degree and I decided to go back into acting, I felt like I was trying to catch up,” she told the outlet. “I was doing all these independent films that weren’t very good.”
Things started to pick up, though, and she “started getting some traction,” particularly when she was cast in The West Wing in 2002.
Related: Danica McKellar Celebrates Her 50th Birthday with Wonder Years Costars, Family and More: Exclusive Party Photos
McKellar has spoken before about how the end of The Wonder Years and her pivot to school coincided with something of an identity crisis for her younger self.
“I had friends in the business whose parents were so overly impressed with everything that was going on with their kids that it puts too much pressure on the kid. It’s like, I dealt with enough of that when the show was over,” she said on Cheryl Burke’s podcast Sex, Lies and Spray Tans last year.
Astrida Valigorsky/Getty
Danica McKellar attends 90s Con on March 18, 2023
“When The Wonder Years was over, and I went to UCLA — it all happened around the same time — for me, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh. What would my value be if I didn’t have this show?’”
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The Wonder Years can be streamed in full on Hulu.
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