Things You Never Knew About 90210 Alum Brian Austin Green

From teen idol to failed rapper to working Hollywood actor this is Brian Austin Green. He has managed to stay busy in his post "Beverly Hills, 90210" career, and had a plethora of small-screen projects that include "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," "Anger Management," and "Desperate Housewives." Green also tried on his dancing shoes for Season 30 of "Dancing with the Stars" in 2021, where the actor was paired with professional dancer Sharna Burgess (and this is the real reason he joined). Green and Burgess finished in 13th place, but managed to have a strong connection off-screen. The couple got engaged in 2023. They have one son together, but what is the truth about Brian Austin Green and Sharna Burgess? We will get to that in a bit.

Most people know Green's impressive relationship history with celebrities like Megan Fox, with whom he was married for 10 years. However, there is a lot about the "Beverly Hills, 90210" alum that some people may not be aware of. He will forever be known as the lovable geeky David Silver for Generation X in the 1990s, but there is definitely a lot more to him than that.

Actors go by a different name than their birth name for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps it is difficult to pronounce, or they just want something with more flair. Brian Austin Green was born Brian Green — with no middle name. However, there was already an actor in the Screen Actors Guild with the name Brian Green, so the young actor had to get creative. In SAG (now known as SAG-AFTRA), there is a strict one member per name rule. This is more common in Hollywood than you might think, and everyone from actress Kat Dennings to Reese Witherspoon go by stage names different from their birth names.

During a 2016 interview on the podcast "Pod Meets World" [22:36], with hosts Rider Strong, Danielle Fishel, and Will Friedle, Green discussed how he came up with Austin. "Brian Green is not a very easy name to come up with a middle name for where the whole thing flows very well," Green said. "... So we went through a bunch of names, and we ended up going through the map and Austin fit," (via People).

Green was a teenager when he made the name switch. When he turned 22 and wanted to transition into a career in rap, he opted to go back to his birth name. "That's not my name and I'm tired of saying it is," revealed Green. "It's too long. It's a long drawn-out name. I couldn't handle it," per UPI.

Brian Austin Green has achieved an impressive career, remaining a working actor for over four decades in Hollywood. Before Green reached pop culture stardom for playing David Silver in "Beverly Hills, 90210," he had a role on the 1980s sitcom "My Two Dads." It would be the only acting gig Green was fired from.

During a 2026 interview with "Pod Meets World," Green explained, "I was really new to sitcoms, and I didn't completely understand the timing of it. I went to lunch and they were like, 'Yeah, we are going to have to recast.' But I was so young that I was like, 'Okay. I still get paid for this day, right?' That's all I really cared about at that point."

Green, who was around 14 years old, admitted to being, well, green. He said that the show's creator, Michael Jacobs, wanted what the young actor could not deliver at the time. "He kept giving me these line readings of exactly what he wanted, and I couldn't do it exactly that way, and that was it," Green added. It all worked out in the end. Green started performing on "Beverly Hills, 90210" in 1990, and that life-changing gig lasted for 10 years.

Today, the television landscape is littered with teen dramas like "Euphoria" and "Outer Banks." However, in 1990, the concept of an hour-long drama revolving around the lives of teenagers seemed silly. "A show like '90210' had never existed on T.V. before," Green told the Television Academy in 2025. "To all of a sudden read for a teen soap, I was like, 'No this is stupid. This will never work. My mom will never watch this.' It felt like there was no audience for it."

But "Beverly Hills, 90210" creator Darren Star disagreed. Star wrote his first pilot about what it would be like if a middle-class midwestern family moved to Beverly Hills. It was based on his own life. "I grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to school at UCLA, so in a sense I had that experience," he said during a 2016 interview with the Television Academy.

Thankfully, the creator had faith in the series, because Green, who would later be cast as the nerdy David Silver, did not. "It just seemed like a ridiculous idea," added Green. "Like, the kids are the star of the show?! And then we had Fox — which was this really weird, fledgling network, with a small roster of shows... So, after we finished the pilot, I was like, 'Okay, cool. Nice to meet you all. Bye!' I thought we'd just move on to the next pilot season."

In the 1990s, "Beverly Hills, 90210" was not just a hit television show; it was a cultural phenomenon. The coming-of-age high school drama defied Gen-X grunge era style and permeated all things '90s pop culture, from fashion to sideburns. It also helped define the teen soap T.V. era to usher in shows like "Dawson's Creek" and "The O.C."

But it did not start out that way when it first hit the air in the fall of 1990. Initially, "Beverly Hills, 90210" was a flop on a station that most people had never heard of called Fox. The series did not gain momentum until Season 2, when it was released during the summer. "The first 13 episodes, nobody watched... and then all of a sudden, the summer episodes, they started," Green revealed on the "Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum podcast." "They came up with this brilliant idea of doing these summer episodes. So when all the other shows went into reruns, we had new original shows. So when kids were out of school, they had something to watch that was brand new."

In the 1990s, having new shows run over the summer was an anomaly and a genius idea that turned Green and his co-stars into teen idols practically overnight. "Everything changed within like a week and a half, two weeks," Green added.

In the mid-1990s, Brian Austin Green dropped his middle name and pursued a career in rap. In a meta-twist, his "90210" character David Silver was also pursuing hip-hop. Green grew up surrounded by music. "I went to junior high for music, because my father is a drummer and I grew up playing," he told UPI. The star was at the height of his fame when he released his debut solo album, "One Stop Carnival," in 1996. Unfortunately, the album was not received well, critically or commercially.

Perhaps fans were expecting something more David Silver-like? "It wasn't an album that fit with the demographic of '90210,'" said Green, (via Yahoo). "The audience and the label were expecting more of a pop album, and I grew up listening to hip-hop... That was all I listened to and danced to and was a fan of at that point, so it wasn't a stretch for me necessarily, but it was absolutely a stretch for our audience."

There was also the inevitable "Vanilla Ice" comparison and the stigma that comes with it. However, prior to the album's release, Green thought that his music would resonate. "His biggest problem was the fact that he wasn't real with what he was doing, and that's why people stopped listening to his stuff," said Green of Vanilla Ice. "I'm not pretending to be anything else. I'm not doing gangsta videos and that whole thing."

Can the nerdy guy get the popular, pretty girl? It is a classic trope that played out in both real-life and on the small screen. Brian Austin Green's David Silver somehow manages to start dating Tori Spelling's Donna Martin on "Beverly Hills, 90210." Then, Green and Spelling took their T.V. romance into the real world. "Because, like, whatever Brian and I were and are and like, we have a soul connection. Like, Donna and David, Brian and Tori, we do love each other," Spelling said on a 2015 episode of her "90210" podcast with Jennie Garth called "90210MG" [43:00 mark].

However, unlike their small-screen characters Donna and David, who married on the show's 2000 finale, Spelling and Green were not meant to last forever. After "90210" wrapped, Green said that he wanted to remain friends with Spelling, but she felt that she had to move on.

Today, they are friends; however, the pair went nearly two decades without speaking. For a look inside Tori Spelling's complicated relationship with former co-star Brian Austin Green, Spelling dished on a 2024 episode of Green's podcast "Oldish." "I remember our last conversation and the last thing we said to each other before those 18 years. I was crying," Spelling admitted. "I remember crying that we were going to lose touch because we were so close. It was almost like going through a divorce or something."

Brian Austin Green first met Megan Fox while filming an episode of the sitcom "Hope & Faith." While on Deon Cole's podcast "Funny Knowing You", Green said it was Fox who pursued him. "Megan was 17 at the time and I was like, 'Nope, not a chance.' And she just f*cking relentlessly pursued me," Green said.

Green's relationship with Vanessa Marcil had ended, and he said that the now-18-year-old Fox served as a "breath of fresh air." "She was like fun and laughing all the time and easygoing. And I was like, 'Man, this is exactly what I need at this point in my life,'" added Green.

The truth about Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green's relationship is that they married in 2010 and went on to have three sons together. They separated in 2015 when Fox filed for divorce. Perhaps it was because Megan Fox was not entirely faithful during her marriage with 90210s Brian Austin Green? The pair briefly got back together; however, their divorce became final in 2022. Because of the couple's age difference, Green has had to fight off rumors that the actor groomed Fox. "I really logically understood that if I defend myself this one time, it's never gonna stop," Green said on a 2025 episode of the podcast "Oldish." "I'm gonna have to defend myself for who knows how long because people are gonna believe what they want to believe."

It was March 2020, and the entire world had shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Producers at the hit reality show "The Masked Singer" contacted Brian Austin Green to see if he wanted to be one of their masked singers. "Every industry was shut down," Green told Entertainment Weekly. "So just looking at the way this show works and knowing that it's not a competition show, it's really a chance for families to sit in front of the T.V. and just have fun..."

Green picked the giraffe costume and went to work trying to hide his identity from the audience and the judges. The issue for Green was that one of the judges at the time was Robin Thicke. "For three years, we were best friends... we were at each other's house every day," said Green.

However, even with their history, the "Blurred Lines" singer was unable to guess that Green was the guy in the giraffe costume. "And no disrespect to him, because he's a super-nice guy, but he sucks at this," added Green. "He's terrible. I told the producers early on, if there's anybody on this panel that's going to guess me, it's him because we know each other so well. He knows the way that I speak, and the timbre of my voice." Once Thicke saw Green underneath the giraffe mask, he was in shock, proclaiming, "We were best friends as teenagers," (via Gold Derby).

For the millions of people who have a chronic, debilitating illness that doctors cannot figure out, perhaps Brian Austin Green's medical journey will offer some light. The "Anger Management" actor talked about his health struggles during a 2023 episode of "Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies and Spray Tans" [21:06] podcast. "I'd spent four and a half years recovering from stroke-like symptoms without ever having had a stroke but I couldn't speak," said Green.

The father of five was eventually diagnosed with vertigo and ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis is, according to the Cleveland Clinic, "a chronic condition that happens when you have inflammation in your colon." While it manifests differently in each person who has it, signs and symptoms of ulcerative colitis include diarrhea, bloody stools, and abdominal cramping.

Green also experienced intense brain fog. The illness was so debilitating that the "Desperate Housewives" actor admitted that he was bedridden for several months. "I couldn't speak. I couldn't read. I couldn't write," added Green. In the end, it all came down to the actor's diet and stress. "It's really just dietary," he said during an interview with "Good Morning America." "As long as I can keep things within my system that my body doesn't think I'm poisoning it with, then it doesn't fight back," per Self.

Brian Austin Green is the dad of five boys. He has an adult son named Kassius Lijah with former "Beverly Hills, 90210" co-star Vanessa Marcil. The actor also has three sons, Noah Shannon, Bodhi Ransom, and Journey River, with "Transformers" actor Megan Fox. Finally, he has a son named Zane Walker with Australian dancer Sharna Burgess, who also served as Green's dance partner on "Dancing with the Stars." What we know about Megan Fox's three kids with Brian Austin Green is limited because Fox wishes for her kids' private lives to stay private.

Managing five kids with three different women is probably not easy. Why co-parenting with Vanessa Marcil was a struggle for Brian Austin Green has a lot to do with the two not seeing eye to eye. Green told Us Weekly in 2023, "There's a part of me that wishes I could go back and fix things, of course, but then there's also a part of me that knows that if I hadn't experienced exactly what I experienced in parenting, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Green explained during an interview with E! News that, "The number one is always make sure that everything is centered around the experience of the kids." He added, "People make a mistake of thinking that they're gonna do things so the separation doesn't affect the kids and that's — of course it's gonna affect the kids."