In an appearance on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, former child actress Christy Carlson Romano opened up about her fraught relationship with her Even Stevens co-star Shia LaBeouf, when they worked on the Disney Channel show together.
On the podcast, which can be seen in full here, she admitted that their relationship was not good when they first started working together on the sitcom, which aired for three seasons from 2000 to 2003.
“It was oil and water,” she explained, noting that she was 14 when she filmed the pilot, while LaBeouf “must have been like 12.” As for why she believed they didn’t get along at first, she suggested that it might have been down to the differences in how they were raised.
“The upbringing that he was having was so bad… I was being raised and brought up to be this type A, I mean exactly like Ren Stevens. Like, you know your lines, you hit your marks, you don’t mess up,” she shared. “You’re a New York kid, like that comes with a certain echelon… I was trying to go to pre-college Juilliard… everything we were doing, my mom called it cross-training, came with a certain dollar amount of training.”
She also expanded on her relationship with LaBeouf in a post shared on Instagram, which was accompanied by a photo of the two co-stars and LaBeouf’s father.
“Me, Shia, and his dad,” she wrote. “Recently found this picture. Shia and I spent 3 years of our lives right next to each other in adjoining trailers, both of us enduring painful childhoods. If only we could have been there for each other, but we were each going through our own battles and could barely take care of ourselves. I’m finally sharing everything in my memoir. It might anger some people, but I don’t care anymore. If my story can help just one person, it will have been worth it.”
Romano is scheduled to release a new memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star, on Oct. 6.
