“Wonder Years” star Danica McKellar revealed she traded being “America’s Sweetheart” for a life of obscurity due to feeling “very limited” after the show ended in 1993.
“I needed to figure out who else I was besides Winnie Cooper,” she said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Hey Dude.. The ’90s Called” podcast. “It was a blessing to be on a show that’s that popular but it was very limiting as a teenager when you’re 18.”
“Everywhere I went it was, ‘Hey aren’t you that girl you know that played Winnie? Aren’t you that girl from TV?’”
She continued, “It’s like constant, you’re trying to figure out who you are as a teenager and everyone else is telling you who you are.”
McKellar, 50, also admitted feeling “insecure” after her time on the ABC series ended.
“You have a lot of success early on, and then you don’t have that anymore, and you’re like, who who am I now? Where do I get my validation?” she reflected. “I had to get away from it and find out who else I was.”
The thought led her to enroll in classes at UCLA.
“I took all my makeup off and I would wear a backpack and a T-shirt and throw my hair in a ponytail,” she shared.
McKellar went on to explain how she fell in love with her higher education experience after she got a good score on one of her calculus tests, which pushed her into a different spotlight as her fellow classmates recognized her intellectual skills instead of her acting credits.
“It was the greatest feeling… It was just me,” she explained. “It had nothing to do with the superficiality of Hollywood or all the great writers or the sound design and all the things they did to make Winnie Cooper [into] Winnie Cooper. It was just me and my brain who did this.”
After she graduated from UCLA with honors, she worked as a mathematician and started her own website where she would give math advice to students.
McKellar later decided to return to acting because she missed having a “connection with people,” and went on to star in a number of Lifetime and Hallmark films. She also starred on the show “West Wing.”
She tied the knot with composer Mike Verta in 2009 and together, they welcomed a son in 2010, Though, they called it quits two years later.
She went on to wed Los Angeles attorney Scott Sveslosky in 2014.