Soleil Moon Frye takes an eye-opening stroll down memory lane in “kid 90,” an upcoming Hulu documentary that sees the former child actor rediscovering hundreds of hours of footage she filmed as a teenager in the ’90s. “I carried a camera with me everywhere I went,” she says in a new trailer for the project. “We weren’t concerned about the Internet. We did the things that teenagers did — we just happened to be in Hollywood.”
Cast as the lead of “Punky Brewster” when she was just seven years old, Frye grew up in front of the camera, and alongside other child actors. The tight-knit community experienced the highs and lows of adolescence — and living in the public eye — together.
“I remember ‘Saved By the Bell’ directors saying, ‘The minute you walk onto the stage you’re no longer a child anymore. You’re an adult,'” recalls Mark-Paul Harry Gosselaar, who played Zack on “Saved by the Bell.”
In addition to facing adult work responsibilities, Frye also found herself being sexualized when she started going through puberty. “Men treated me more like a woman and not like a 13-year-old,” the actor and director explains.
“Now that I’ve opened Pandora’s Box I can’t put any of this back,” Frye observes. “The big question is, what happens once I unlock the vault?”
Frye is reprising her role as Punky Brewster on Peacock’s revival of the sitcom, which premieres tomorrow, February 25. The “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” alumna’s directing credits include 1998’s “Wild Horses,” a pic about a group of teachers who are under the mistaken impression that they have 24 hours to live, and 2004’s “Sonny Boy,” a doc about her relationship with her father.
Described as a “deeply personal coming-of-age story that explores how ‘sometimes we need to look back to find our way forward,'” “kid 90” hits Hulu March 12.
