To this day, former child actress Danica McKellar is best known for her role on the ABC coming-of-age series The Wonder Years, in which she played love interest to Fred Savage‘s Kevin Arnold. But when you’re that age, fame can be a blessing and a curse, as the 50-year-old recently revealed.
McKellar made an appearance on the September 23 episode of the “Hey Dude… The 90s Called!” podcast hosted by Christine Taylor and David Lascher, who both starred on the Nickelodeon live action comedy of the same name. When asked about her career pivot, McKellar later earned a mathematics degree from UCLA and has written several math books geared towards middle-school and high-school girls, she had a refreshing take on her TV fame.
“For me, I needed to figure out who else I was besides Winnie Cooper,” she said, adding that “every day, all day long,” people were asking her about the character.
“But it was very limiting as a teenager, when you’re 18, the show ended when I was 18, and you’re like, OK, so now I’m going to figure out like, time for the next phase of my life,” she continued. “And everywhere I went it was like, ‘Hey aren’t you that girl who played Winnie? Aren’t you that girl from TV? It’s like, constantly, you’re trying to figure out who you are as a teenager and everyone else is telling you who you are, and it’s like a thing that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You guys are aware there’s all the insecurity that comes from having a lot of success early on, and then you don’t have that thing anymore,” she continued, addressing Taylor and Lascher. “And you’re like, ‘Who am I now? Where do I get my validation?’”
McKellar compared her situation to a friend in high school who had long, “gorgeous” natural red hair. She said that the friend received compliments about her hair literally every single day. So finally, she cut it off and dyed it back, because she needed to figure out who she was apart from her hair.
“So I had to figure out who I was, and I went to UCLA,” she continued. “And I’ve always loved a good challenge, so I decided to take a calculus class. And I had taken calculus in high school, and I had done well in it, but I didn’t think of myself as somebody who would do well at college math.”
McKellar said that when she took her first midterm, she was dismayed to learn that her score was a disappointing 22 out of 40. However, she said it was a test to weed out from among the 163 students in the class who were actually good at math.
“I know this because the professor graphed the scores, not with names,” she noted. “There was one 22, there were two 15, and the rest was nine and below. I will never forget this … all these people in the class, you’re like, [having] imposter syndrome, ‘I don’t belong here, all these other people are probably really smart.'”
“And the next day, I kid you not, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and says, ‘Excuse me, are you that girl? Aren’t you that girl who got the 22?'” McKellar recalled. “It was the greatest feeling, it was me chopping off my hair, getting it dyed black, and somebody saying, ‘You’re amazing.'”
“It was just me. It had nothing to do with the superficiality of Hollywood or all the great writers and the sound design … and all the things they did to make Winnie Cooper [into] Winnie Cooper. It was just like, this is just me and my brain who did this.”
McKellar said that she had been planning to major in film, but decided instead to pursue math. Eventually, she did turn back to acting, and in recent years has been a staple on the Hallmark Channel and the Great American Family channel.
