While she is perhaps best known for her performances in shows like The Last of Us and The Killing, as well as movies such as The Help nowadays, 42-year-old Ashley Johnson was just 7 years old when she got her big break in the TV sitcom Growing Pains.
Ashley played Chrissy Seaver on the series between 1990 and 1992, starring opposite a young Leonardo DiCaprio, who also got his big break on the show.
And now, the star has shared a horrifying insight into the dangers that came with being a child star during that era, revealing that a fan almost managed to abduct her from set ahead of a live taping of the show.
Speaking on her Weird Kids podcast, Ashley recalled: “It was in the first year I was on, and we had only done a couple of film nights. So, I hadn’t done that many yet, and at that time, all of the cast sort of had trailers, and they were like old camper trailers. They’re not like the fancy trailers that they are now. They were great. We would exit our trailers before the shoot, and the audience that would be walking in, you would walk by the audience before you would walk into the studio.”
“Somebody had written in and said: ‘I am coming to set and I am going to bring a gun and I am going to murder some of the cast,’” she went on. “So, I’m walking with my mom, and then I just remember some guy hops out of the line and he grabs me and starts booking it... There was security that somehow got on him after some time.”
Ashley explained that the studio audience would only be “within five feet” of the stars when they were entering the set, and that security measures — like metal detectors — that are now typical across Hollywood were nonexistent at this time.
As security struggled to get Ashley free from the man, she remembers “flying around in the air,” noting that the attempted kidnapper had a gun on him. She shared: “I was clueless as to what was happening, but I was very upset, and they were talking to me about it after. And they were like: ‘Are you OK?’ And I just said: ‘I just think I’m gonna be in trouble.’”
“I think I was such a polite kid at the time, I think he was running with me and running away. I was like: ‘Who are you, sir? What is your name? I was very pleased to meet you.’ But he was packing. They got him,” Ashley said. “This was the thing. He was high on something. It wasn’t meth, but it was something — like, he was so strong.”
Unfortunately, Ashley isn’t the only ‘90s child star to have horror stories from this time, with Boy Meets World actor Danielle Fishel sharing her own troubling experience back in 2022.
For reference, Danielle was just 12 years old when she was cast as Topanga in the sitcom, which aired between 1993 and 2000. On her podcast, Pod Meets World, Danielle revealed that when she was still a preteen, an adult man wrote to her pretending to be a young female fan.
Once he established regular correspondence with Danielle, he started to show up at her school and tell people that he was there to pick her up. Danielle did not go into detail about how the situation — which was branded her “first stalker experience” — was resolved.
Спутники
РН
SpaceX
Роскосмос
NASA