“Wonder Year” star Danica McKeller revealed that after the show ended in 1993 she swapped for an obscure life as “American lover” because she felt “very limited.”
“I had to understand who I was other than Winnie Cooper,” she said on Tuesday’s episode of “Hay Dude… Call of the 90s” podcast. “It was a blessing to be part of a popular show, but I was extremely restricted as a teenager at the age of 18.”
“Where I go, you know that girl played Winnie? You’re not a TV girl?”
She continued. “It’s like constant, you’re trying to figure out who you are as a teenager.
McKeller, 50, also admitted a feeling of “anxiety” after the time ended in the ABC series.
“You’ve had a lot of success early on, and you don’t have it anymore. You said, who am I now? She reflected. “I had to run away from it and find out who I was.”
This idea led her to enroll in UCLA classes.
“I took off all my makeup, put on my backpack and t-shirt and threw my hair into my ponytail,” she shared.
McKeller explained how she fell in love with her higher education experience after earning a good score on one of her calculus tests.
“It was the best feeling…it was me,” she explained. “It had nothing to do with the superficiality of Hollywood and all the great writers and sound design, or anything they did to make Winnie Cooper (Into) Winnie Cooper. It was me and my brain that did this.”
After graduating from UCLA with honor, she worked as a mathematician and started her own website, which gave students mathematics advice.
McKeller later decided to return to acting, having missed out on “connecting with people,” and starred in many lifetimes and distinctive films. She also appeared on the show “The West Wing.”
She tied the knot with composer Mike Verta in 2009, and together they called her son in 2010, but stopped it two years later.
She married Los Angeles lawyer Scott Svesloski in 2014.
