Christy Carlson Romano offered an unfiltered look into how she would use drugs and go out to clubs in an attempt to get attention after her child star days.
“I was a binge drinking, solve your problems by partying and going out and having fun [kind of person],” Carlson Romano, 42, recalled in Us‘ exclusive clip from the Tuesday, September 29, episode of the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast.
Host Amanda Hirsch asked about Carlson Romano’s first time trying cocaine at a star-studded party, to which the actress replied, “I was old to start to try cocaine. I was, like, 23.”
Despite mentioning the incident in her upcoming memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Rise and Fall of a Child Star, Carlson Romano recalled not being a fan of cocaine.
“I think what I liked was the attention I got for doing it in front of people. You feel cool doing it in the moment, in the room with people,” she continued. “Everybody is like, ‘I got the Disney girl to do cocaine for the first time.'”
Carlson Romano is best known for her roles from the early 2000s, which include Even Stevens, Kim Possible and Cadet Kelly.
“I didn’t care [if people found out]. First of all, I had been clubbing for a while just trying to get noticed and it never happened,” she recalled. “Before Instagram, you really didn’t have control over your image.”
Carlson Romano was determined to shape the public’s opinion of her, sharing, “At that time, I had been clubbing since I was 16. But I’ve been really aggressively clubbing to try to get noticed since I was 21.”
She continued, “[It was] so that I could be seen with the right people or going to the right places … But the irony is that I didn’t have a publicist or a stylist or anybody really guiding me. I don’t know why that thought never occurred to me to team up with people.”
Elsewhere in the sneak peek, Carlson Romano recalled an embarrassing moment when she approached Lindsay Lohan hoping to bond with the actress amid her feud with Hilary Duff.
The interaction didn’t result in the friendship Carlson Romano was hoping for — but it taught her an important lesson.
“I’ll kick myself because it’s an embarrassing story but we all have things,” she noted. “And that’s what I hope makes the book relatable, where it’s, ‘Foot in mouth. You were dumb and now you’ve learned from that.'”
