Dylan Sprouse made a startling claim by referring to himself and twin brother Cole Sprouse as “children of incest.”
During the Tuesday, October 20, episode of the “Wildmen” podcast, Dylan, 34, recalled using genealogy program Ancestry to map out his and Cole’s family tree, saying, “When I first took it, my actual breakdown of history was very different than it is now.”
Dylan learned a lot about his relatives through the program.
“I’ve found a lot of family members, weirdly, who I never met, because my dad’s side of the family is pretty fractured,” he noted. “I started to talk to them, compare and contrast.”
After diving into his background, Dylan “found out something weird” when it came to both sides of the family heading to California during the Gold Rush. Dylan said that one set of relatives discovered gold in the process and moved the rest of the family from North Carolina to California.
Both sides of Dylan and Cole’s family were subsequently joined by marriage in the late 1800s.
“And then, they diverged, and then they married again [through] my mom and my dad, like, last generation,” he explained. “I called Cole, I showed him a picture, I was like, ‘Dude, I just found out some f**king crazy s***.’ … The only reason I started to get suspicious is because when I started talking to my dad’s side of the family, I found out that his uncles were identical twins.”
He continued: “I’d only ever thought that identical twins or twins in general came from my mom’s side of the family. We had seven sets of twins in four generations. … Because it’s the same family!”
Dylan shared his theory that his genes crossed in the past.
“It’s my dad and my mom. They had no idea. So, then I’m looking at this, and I go, ‘What the hell?’” he concluded. “A lot of stuff started to make sense, because one of my aunts was a twin, but she was one of the twins who ate her twin in the womb, and when they cut open a cyst in her shoulder, it had teeth and hair. Long story short, Cole and I are children of incest.”
Cole and Dylan rose to fame as child stars in projects such as Big Daddy, Friends, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, The Suite Life on Deck and more. The Riverdale star later recalled how his and Dylan’s upbringing was affected by their mom’s issues.
“My mother was — still is — the tortured artist type. She struggled with, in many different ways, her place in the world,” he explained on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast in March 2023. “I think she found a tremendous amount of self-identity through motherhood and tried to turn it into a profitable business at the same time, which, for identical twin boys, going into acting is [an] economic loophole — there are labor laws that can be incredibly profitable, so that’s what she did.”
At the time, Cole revealed that their estranged mother “lost” all of the money they had earned by the time they were 10.
“[My father, Matthew Sprouse] desperately wanted us to be normal kids, and my mother wanted us to be a bit more of a caricature of two normal kids,” he said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast that same month, noting that his dad received sole custody at the time. “When my father was given forced custody, we had pretty much lost everything from the youngest parts of our career. That would be Friends and Big Daddy. My mother was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman, but she was financially the most irresponsible person ever.”
Cole confirmed that he had no relationship with his mother since he became an adult.
“In truth, she lost her mind,” he added. “I think it was the consequence of some weird alchemy of addiction and mental instability, and it’s probably the greatest wound in my life and also the greatest driving force for my continuing in this industry. I miss her a lot. She was an incredibly beautiful and artistic woman.”
