For a while there, two identical blond boys were on every television in America. They were Zack and Cody Martin, the twins running wild through a Boston hotel on “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.” Dylan and Cole Sprouse had their faces on lunchboxes, on magazine covers, on the bedroom walls of a whole generation of kids. And then, right when they could have cashed in the biggest paychecks of their lives, they did something almost nobody in Hollywood does. They stopped.
In 2010 the brothers were accepted to New York University. They pushed the start date back a year, and from 2011 to 2015 they went to class like anyone else. Cole studied archaeology. Dylan studied video game design. They walked New York sidewalks with backpacks while the world kept expecting them to sign the next Disney deal. Instead they were writing papers and pulling all-nighters, two former child stars quietly trying to figure out who they were when the cameras finally turned off.
Cole later described the choice as a way to breathe. Fame that arrives before you’re old enough to drive has a strange weight to it, and both brothers wanted a few years where nobody was watching. So they took them. They finished their degrees. They graduated in 2015, the same year most of their old fans were graduating high school and wondering, half-seriously, whatever happened to those two.
What happened was that they grew up in opposite directions.
Dylan had been brewing since he was sixteen. In college he kept it up, tinkering with mead — honey wine, one of the oldest drinks on earth — inside his NYU dorm room closet, ordering raw honey from a Finger Lakes apiary. Most people would have called that a phase. Dylan called it a plan. After graduation he teamed up with two partners, Doug Brochu and Matt Kwan, and in Brooklyn they opened All-Wise Meadery, a bar and micro-meadery with floor-to-ceiling glass and tanks holding thousands of gallons of mead, everything sourced from New York. The same honey supplier he’d used in his dorm closet was now filling steel tanks in Williamsburg.
He was upfront that this wasn’t him quitting acting for good. “It was just a decision for me to take a break,” he told W Magazine. “It was just time.” And, he added, “it was never a decision for me to never return to acting.” He was right — he’d go on to film again — but for a stretch there, the boy from the Disney Channel was pouring flights of honey wine and explaining fermentation to strangers who slowly realized who was behind the bar.
Cole went the other way. He walked back onto a set and picked up a role that buried Cody Martin for a new audience entirely: brooding, black-hoodie Jughead Jones on “Riverdale,” a part he played across seven seasons. The kid who once did pratfalls in a hotel lobby was now the moody narrator of a teen noir. On the side he built a genuine second career as a photographer, shooting real fashion spreads for the likes of Vogue — good enough that people in that world take him seriously as a photographer, not as a former Disney kid holding a camera.
Two brothers, one face, one childhood, the exact same fork in the road — and they took different branches on purpose. One poured honey wine in Brooklyn. One went back to the soundstage and the camera. Neither of them chased the easy path of milking Zack and Cody for another decade. They both walked away first, sat in a classroom, and only then decided, separately, what came next. That might be the most grown-up thing either of them ever did.
