Not all child stars want to keep up with their acting crafts. Morgan York, who is best known for her role as Sarah on the popular Disney Channel series Hannah Montana, resurfaced online recently when discussing her decision to leave acting for good after some success as a child star.
The 28-year-old writer now works for a publishing house, but says she is regularly asked why she gave up acting as a teenager.
“I started acting when I was nine and from the beginning my mom told me, ‘The second this becomes not fun or you want to stop, you can stop,'” she shared on TikTok. “I never expected it to be a lifetime thing. I even remember as a kid trying to imagine myself as an adult actor and just not seeing it.”
York, whose last role was in 2010, said she always planned to stop acting when she went to college.
“I think I also wildly underestimated how much of an uproar would be made over it. I thought I could just leave and nobody would ask me for the next 11 years of my life, ‘Why did you quit acting?'” she said. “But yeah, it wasn’t fun anymore. My passion for acting did not outweigh all the costs, like all the time you have to spend away from loved ones on sets and the constant scrutiny from people watching you.”
She added that her passion for writing fiction was “much stronger.”
In a second TikTok video, she was asked if she still keeps in touch with any of the stars from Hannah Montana, which starred Miley Cyrus in the lead role.
“I haven’t spoken to any of the Hannah Montana cast since 2010,” she admitted, noting she follows the whole cast on social media, but doesn’t think they follow her back.
“I have never thought of myself as famous. I wasn’t in that much, relatively speaking. I can go about my life and people don’t know my name if you just said it,” she explained. “Whereas if you said Miley Cyrus’ name, most people know who that is.”
