Grown Up '80s Child Stars Who Are Unrecognizable Now

There are plenty of tips and tricks that will help slow the aging process, but eventually, time comes for all of us. That's true for regular people as well as celebrities, and it's especially true for child stars who grow up in the glare of the spotlight ... with any luck, anyway. Many struggle, succumbing to the allure of fame and drugs as they try to find their way in the world. Others leave entertainment entirely, ditching Tinseltown for normal lives away from the prying eyes of the people who used to watch them on screen.

Thankfully, plenty of kids who got their start in entertainment at an early age grow up fine, but again, time comes for all of us. In other words, there are many reasons why you may not recognize a grown-up child star who first made their name in the 1980s. That was quite the decade for child stardom; it was the heyday of teen mags like Teen Beat, and Hollywood made heartthrobs out of everyone from commercial actors to sitcom stars and movie leads. Some former child stars have come out the other side of some pretty serious health issues and struggles with addiction; others have transformed their faces and bodies in an effort to shed their youthful images. Read on for a look at these grown-up child stars from the '80s who are unrecognizable now.

Back in the 1980s, Soleil Moon Frye played Punky Brewster on the show of the same name. Punky was a spunky kid, a precocious self-starter who didn't let the fact that her parents abandoned her get her down. The show had several iconic episodes that made it must-see television for kids, including one where a space-obsessed Punky grapples with the Challenger explosion that frightened so many schoolchildren. There was also an episode where Punky's friend Cherie (Cherie Johnson) gets stuck in a discarded refrigerator. "It traumatized so many. But it was so incredible," Frye later revealed to "Today." "Because so many people would come up to us afterwards that had actually used the CPR they had learned through Punky and through Cherie, and then actually really applied it in real life."

Frye had one of those iconic Hollywood wild-child childhoods, but she came out the other side. These days, you might not recognize Frye if you saw her on the street. Though she brought Punky back for a 2021 revival of the show on Peacock, she's primarily now a documentarian, no longer the spunky youngster she once was. She revisited her past in a documentary called "Kid 90," a film that made use of her extensive home movies to talk about the dangers of child stardom. It was a difficult process to sift through the wreckage of so many child star careers, she told Harper's Bazaar, but it was a healing one. "[I]n opening Pandora's box," she said, "[I] discovered true self-love."

The 1986 film "Stand by Me," a Stephen King adaptation about a group of kids who find a dead body in the woods, launched the careers of a number of child stars. River Phoenix was the film's lead, but he unfortunately passed away from a drug overdose in his 20s. The film also starred a young Jerry O'Connell, who played Vern; he was a chubby kid, sort of the bumbling, comic relief member of the friend group.

Though O'Connell switched up his image after the movie, shedding a lot of weight and morphing into a certified Hollywood hunk as he grew up, he doesn't mind discussing the film. "It's like a badge of honor, having been a part of 'Stand by Me,'" he reflected to "Entertainment Tonight." "For years, you know, if people would ever say, 'Hey, you were the fat kid in "Stand by Me,"' it used to make me angry. ... I'm more than that! I remember thinking, like, when are people gonna stop talking about 'Stand by Me' all the time?" Eventually, he realized that the movie's endurance was actually a good thing that he should be proud of.

In the years since, O'Connell has continued his acting career, and he's also known as a TV personality, having co-hosted "The Talk" and led his own talk show. He's also in a long-term relationship with Rebecca Romijn, and they have twins together. Not bad for someone who once wanted to escape his child-star past!

Corey Feldman was another "Stand by Me" star, though he was already quite famous by the time he acted in that film. After all, the previous year he'd been part of the cast of "The Goonies," and he would follow those iconic films up with roles in "The Lost Boys," "The 'Burbs," and plenty more. Alongside fellow child star Corey Haim, Feldman was known as one of "The Two Coreys," a pairing explored in a later reality show that dealt with how the actors had grown up in the spotlight. Haim was a child star who died tragically young, but Feldman's still around.

They both had a hard time. Feldman has opened up about what they went through as kids, including alleging that they were abused by a pedophile ring in Hollywood. Various police agencies have opened and closed investigations into what Feldman alleges happened back then, and the more people shut him out, the more Feldman tries to get people to listen. For example, in 2017, investigators uncovered an audiotape of Feldman making the allegations all the way back in 1993. "TIME 2 REOPEN THAT CASE @LAPD I DID REPORT IT WITHIN THE STATUTE, SO NOW IT SHOULD B ADMISSIBLE RIGHT?" he wrote on X.

Feldman looks quite different these days; after all, he's had a hard life. He likes to dye his hair blond, for example, but sometimes it's also long and stringy, as when he performed on the "Today" show in 2016. Either way, we wish him well.

Corey Feldman wasn't the only star of "The Goonies" who looks quite different these days. There's also Ke Huy Quan, who played Data in the film. The year before, he'd starred as Short Round in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," the plucky sidekick to Harrison Ford's swashbuckling adventurer. Filming that movie was scary for the young actor, but he later told Entertainment Weekly that Ford comforted him on set. "He said, and I'll never forget this, 'Ke, I want you to remember, I will never hurt you.' When he said that, oh my gosh, it just made me love him so much more," Quan recalled. "Here is Indiana Jones telling me that he's gonna take care of me."

After his child stardom, Quan left the spotlight for quite a while. He worked behind the scenes as a fight choreographer, letting others do the acting. Because we didn't actually watch him grow up, you may not realize that the Oscar-winning star of "Everything Everywhere All at Once" is the same kid who was famous in the 1980s. He returned to Hollywood in the 2022 smash hit, winning moviegoers' hearts as a man who would've been happy just doing laundry and taxes. "My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp, and somehow I ended up here, on Hollywood's biggest stage," he said while accepting his Academy Award. "They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it's happening to me. This is the American Dream."

Wil Wheaton was another child star who emerged from "Stand by Me." He played Gordie, a kid who gets swept up in an adventure in part because he's miserable at home. It turns out that's what Wheaton himself was going through, as he explained to Yahoo! Entertainment. "Important context, I think, is that I didn't want to be an actor when I was a kid. My parents forced me to do it," he said. "[T]hrough a combination of incredible emotional abuse from my father and a lot of manipulation, using me, from my mother, like, really put me in that place." He reflected that this helped his characterization of Gordie, noting, "[W]hen I watch 'Stand by Me' now, I cannot ignore the unbelievable sadness in my eyes and I cannot ignore the reality that it was that sadness, that isolation that I think gave me what Gordie needed to come to life."

Wheaton went on to play Wesley, an intelligent youngster, on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Thankfully, in his adulthood — as a bespectacled, bearded man who looks nothing like the watery-eyed kid from "Stand by Me" — Wheaton has been able to pivot. He's carved out quite a career for himself as a nerd-culture celebrity, trading on his "Star Trek" cred for a lifetime of commentating, web series, convention appearances, and more. He even played himself on "The Big Bang Theory," giving fans a glimpse at what Wesley looked like all grown up.

For most of the 1980s and into the '90s, Danny Pintauro played the adorable Jonathan on "Who's the Boss?" Pintauro was the youngest child of the show's main sitcom family, but as he grew up on camera, he found that his storylines were getting minimized for reasons he didn't quite understand. Pintauro, after all, was gay, and though he wasn't out at the time, he later said that the showrunners were uneasy about giving him the kind of romantic storylines most teenagers got. "They didn't feel like my character dating a girl was believable," he told People. "I didn't understand why. ... They don't want me to be here," he thought.

Pintauro struggled in the wake of the show. "I just wanted to be a normal guy," he recalled. "I didn't have friends." He was outed by The National Enquirer, struggled with addiction, and was diagnosed with HIV. Pintauro stepped away from the spotlight and worked for a while as a vet tech, eventually finding love and settling down.

In recent years, even though he no longer looks like he did on the '80s sitcom, Pintauro has stepped back into acting. He appeared in the Lifetime Christmas movie "A Country Christmas Harmony," and he's cultivated a fan base on TikTok, too. In May 2025, Pintauro lip-synched to a rendition of Doechii's "Anxiety," rattling off things that were making him anxious. "No live today friends," he wrote in the caption. "Just need a mental health nap."

"E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" gave us Drew Barrymore, but she wasn't the only child star who became a familiar face in the '80s thanks to the Steven Spielberg movie. The lovable alien's best friend was Elliott, played by Henry Thomas. The talented youngster's stunning audition tape for the film regularly goes viral online. In the audition tape, Thomas shocked filmmakers by bursting into tears on cue in a way that just made you want to give him a hug. You might assume Thomas was the most confident child in the business, but he later told HeyUGuys that that wasn't the case. "When I see that, I just remember being so scared that I wouldn't get the part, and so sure that I had failed." He was hired on the spot, leading Thomas to realize that he actually might have something there. 

While Barrymore would have the classic troubled Hollywood childhood that almost made her into a cautionary tale, it also cemented her place in pop culture as she grew up before our eyes. Thomas, on the other hand, faded from view for a while. He still acts regularly now as an adult, but you'd be forgiven for not realizing that the stern but loving father from Netflix's "The Haunting of Hill House" was the same kid who once offered his Reese's Pieces to an alien. "[That child] is still very much here," Thomas told HeyUGuys. "He's still very much afraid but, you know, keeping it in check."

Jerry O'Connell talks regularly about still being recognized as "the fat kid from 'Stand by Me.'" Sometimes, though, people mix him up with another '80s child star, and he has to correct the record, as he did on X in 2022. "I wasn't in Goonies," O'Connell wrote. "I was in Stand By Me." Fans are likely confusing him with Jeff Cohen, the actor who played Chunk in the classic adventure film. Like O'Connell's "Stand by Me" character, Chunk was a certain kind of classic archetype, a kid who could offer some comic relief because he was a bit heftier than his castmates.

Like O'Connell, Cohen later slimmed down, to the point that you likely wouldn't recognize him today without context. After all, he doesn't act anymore, one of many once-popular child stars who completely vanished. Still, that doesn't mean Cohen isn't still involved in moviemaking. His former "Goonies" co-stars Ke Huy Quan and Sean Astin reunited for the 2025 action-comedy "Love Hurts," and Cohen showed up on set to support his old castmates. In a behind-the-scenes video for Universal Pictures, Quan revealed, "Jeff Cohen is my entertainment attorney ... It was just so cool to have three Goonies on the set. That was a very special day."

Family sitcoms were all the rage in the 1980s, and they were the perfect place for young actors to launch their careers. One of the biggest shows of the decade was "The Wonder Years," a show about those awkward childhood times when we're trying to come into our own and figure out who we are. Danica McKellar starred on that show as the lovable Winnie Cooper, the longtime crush of Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage). It was a classic will-they, won't-they, made all the more poignant by the show's occasional focus on Winnie as a girl dealing with the death of her older brother in the Vietnam War.

After the show ended in the early '90s, McKellar took time away from Hollywood to study mathematics. That also involved shedding the image she'd built for herself on TV. "I didn't wear any makeup, I always put my hair up in a ponytail, T-shirt, and jeans. A lot of my professors at UCLA had never even owned a television," she told E! News. "I got a chance to redefine myself."

She's back to being glamorous ... or at least, she's as glamorous as made-for-television holiday movie stardom allows. McKellar was a Hallmark star who left for Great American Family, putting her crush-worthy sitcom past on the back burner so that she could make movies with a greater emphasis on religion.

Justine Bateman wasn't the only member of her family to find fame in the '80s as a child star. She's the sister of Jason Bateman, the "Teen Wolf Too" star who would go on to reach leading-man status on shows like "Arrested Development" and "Ozark." For her part, Justine starred on shows like "Family Ties," playing little sister Mallory who grows up to be quite smart in her own right.

These days, Justine no longer acts; instead, she's a director, helming films like "Violet," "Look," and "Feel." Still, even though she doesn't spend her time in front of the camera anymore, she makes headlines when she steps out in public because people just can't believe that a Hollywood star would choose to forego plastic surgery. She's an advocate for "aging naturally," as she explained to the Los Angeles Times, not worrying about what people think about the fact that she looks visibly older than she did decades ago on television. "I think I look rad. I think my face represents who I am," she said. "I like it, and so that's basically the end of the road."

If you were a kid in the 1980s — or if you were a kid in the 1990s with access to Blockbuster, or if you were a kid in the 2000s who had parents who were kids in those earlier decades — then chances are, you may have seen "Troop Beverly Hills." The classic comedy stars Shelley Long as a hapless Wilderness Girls troop leader desperately trying to control her tiny charges as she goes through a divorce. The girls are colorful characters, including one played by the stunning "Spy Kids" star Carla Gugino, but one of the most memorable was Hannah, a young redhead played by Jenny Lewis. Lewis had a thriving career in the '80s, putting in appearances on everything from "Baywatch" to "Growing Pains" to "Golden Girls" and more.

If you only knew her as the adorable girl in the Jell-O commercials, however, you may not realize that "Troop Beverly Hills" Jenny Lewis is the same Jenny Lewis who electrified the indie rock scene of the early aughts as one of the founding members of Rilo Kiley. Her entertainment career has had a whole second act as a beloved musician, and she tours as a solo artist now in addition to reuniting with her band in 2025. Reflecting on getting the band back together, Lewis told The New York Times, "It's a tender and scary and magical thing. But who wouldn't want to go back to being in their mid-20s again?" You'll notice that she's not eager to return to those Jell-O days.