Miranda Cosgrove said she felt “pressured” during her time on “iCarly” after her co-star, Jennette McCurdy, dropped her amazing memoir detailing her own experience on the Nickelodeon show.
“There was definitely pressure,” said 29-year-old Cosgrove on Monday’s episode of the podcast “Reign With Josh Smith.” “Even if you’re not on TV or acting or anything, but just growing up, there’s a lot of pressure to try and figure out so many things.”
Cosgrove, who starred in “iCarly” from 2007 to 2012, said she would focus on the negative criticism she received rather than the compliments her fans would share when she was a child star.
“When I was younger, I ignored all the nice comments and went looking for the one mean thing,” Cosgrove said, thinking about how she would use social media back in the day. “I would go on for a while and say, ‘Oh, I found it!'”
But she shared for her that the trolling didn’t hurt as much then as it does now.
“I feel like I didn’t think about it as much when I was younger than I do now,” she said. “Looking back, I think, ‘That seems to have been very difficult.’ But when I did it, I didn’t think much about it, I just lived my life.”
Cosgrove also shared that she did not have a normal teenage experience due to her acting career.
“When I was really young, I started writing songs and the different people I co-wrote with said, ‘What’s the craziest thing that happened to a guy you were recently dating?'” the “Kissin U singer revealed. “And I’d be like, ‘I don’t know,’ I didn’t really have crazy stories because I didn’t really have a real high school or high school experience.”
Fortunately, she found some normalcy when she attended the University of Southern California in 2012.
“My whole life has changed, but it was amazing,” she said. “I made a lot of friends and I could just take classes that I was interested in. I tried photography and eventually I studied psychology and it was just a really solid, good experience.”
Cosgroves dished up her growing up in the public eye after her “Sam & Cat” co-star McCurdy opened up about her bad experiences as a child actress and Nickelodeon’s toxic environment in her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.”
McCurdy opened up about the network offering her $300,000 in hush money for not speaking publicly about her tenure on Nickelodeon. She also shared how she was told to drink alcohol as a child star. She also shared why she was “pissed” at her former co-star Ariana Grande.
McCurdy’s criticism of the network also seemed to inspire victorious actress Daniella Monet to come forward about feeling “sexualized” as a child actress. And “Zoey 101” star Alexa Nikolas came out about Nickelodeon’s “unsafe” and “traumatic” environment.