Actors Who Only Made It To Hollywood Because Of Their Parents' Sacrifices

When one thinks about the parents of young actors, it's unfortunately easy to assume the worst. We've heard story after story from actors who had parents that pushed them a little too hard into the business and treated them more like their cash machines than their children. Some had such a rough go of their budding acting careers and the way their parents were involved in — or interfered with — those efforts that they eventually swore off the industry entirely. And that doesn't include the ones who wanted to stay in the business but found that Hollywood wanted nothing to do with them. 

That being said, not every child actor was dragged to Hollywood against their will and/or exploited by their parents once they got there. Nor has every child actor had parents that kept them at arm's length once they got bit with the acting bug. There are a number of actors who had much more positive experiences in their journeys to acting, due in no small part to their parents not only supporting their children's movie star dreams, but going above and beyond to help ensure that their kids got every opportunity they could to get their first big break. 

Though she'd been kicking around on television for a few years prior, the world was first properly introduced to Millie Bobby Brown on "Stranger Things." Playing the mysterious superpowered young girl known only as Eleven, Brown helped lead the Netflix sci-fi/horror show from word-of-mouth cult hit to topping all streaming shows in 2022. 

At 20 years old, Brown already had most of "Stranger Things" under her belt while also starring in and co-producing two "Enola Holmes" movies for Netflix. It's as strong a start to an acting career as any young performer could possibly hope for, and Brown credits her parents with helping her get her foot in the door. Born in Spain and spending part of her childhood in England, Brown's family had already relocated to Florida when the future star was eight. Brown began to do some local acting in Orlando and was quickly discovered by an agent, who said Brown needed to be in Hollywood. 

So off the family went, selling almost everything they had to be able to afford the move. Things initially went slow for Brown's career, and the family's money eventually ran out, forcing them to return to England. Even then, and despite going nearly bankrupt in the process, Brown's parents never lost faith in her talents or her dream, right up until she auditioned for "Stranger Things."

Even though "The Next Karate Kid" failed to become a star vehicle for her, Hilary Swank wouldn't have to wait very long for her breakout role on the big screen. That came five years later with "Boys Don't Cry," which would earn the actor her first Oscar at only 25 years old. Swank has stayed a fixture in both film and television ever since, including eventually adding a second Oscar to her mantel for "Million Dollar Baby." 

Swank had grown up in Washington, far from the bright lights of Hollywood. After her parents got divorced when Swank was 15, her mother took that as the perfect chance to start over — and she and Swank got in a car and drove to Los Angeles to support her daughter's acting dreams. But they were quite literally starting over, so much so that they had to spend some time living out of that same car while Swank auditioned and her mom worked as a secretary. They eventually had enough to rent a bedroom from a single mother, which at least got them off the streets. 

While giving her acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for "Boys Don't Cry," Swank acknowledged her mother's huge sacrifice for her acting career, telling her mom (who was in the audience), "It looks like living out of our car was worth it." 

Zac Efron seemed to navigate the transition from teen to adult actor better than most, going from "High School Musical" heartthrob to extremely mature roles like the Ted Bundy biopic "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" — which took a toll on the actor — with only a few years spent in rom-com purgatory in the interim. Considering all his parents did to encourage him and his career in the early years, it's no wonder that Efron seems intent to not waste the chance he's been given at Hollywood stardom.

When Efron received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 2023, he made sure to thank the two people who put him on the path to that honor. He spoke to People that day of his parents' support and sacrifice when he was just getting started, explaining, "It must've been difficult to drive me back and forth to auditions when I was 15, three hours from the Arroyo Grande out here, just to have such a small shot." And that apparently didn't end as soon as Efron started booking roles, either, as he went on to discuss how his parents "sacrificed a lot to support me throughout the years."

A lot of people know that Mila Kunis was born in Ukraine, but fewer are familiar with how exactly she ended up in Hollywood. Mila's parents, Mark and Elvira Kunis, wanted Mila and her brother to have the best opportunities possible. So, as Mila explained to the Los Angeles Times, "...my parents wanted my brother and me to have a future, and so they just dropped everything. They came with $250." Mila was seven years old at the time. 

Mark and Elvira discovered that the university degrees they'd earned in Ukraine didn't mean much in the States, so they had to start from the beginning at low-paying entry level jobs to get the family back on their feet. Recognizing that young Mila had a knack for performing, her parents once saved up to pay for $890 acting classes for her — even though they only had $900 in the bank at the time. But the risky investment paid off, as it would only take a few years before Mila started landing small gigs in movies and on television. 

Mila eventually got her big break when she was cast as Jackie on "That '70s Show" in 1998, and she's stayed busy every since. But despite all her parents did — and all the money they paid — to get her acting career going, Mila says they've never let her give them money or even pay for dinners at restaurants. 

The journey that the Phoenix children — including actors River, Joaquin, Rain, Summer, and Liberty Phoenix — took to get to Hollywood was far more treacherous than most. In fact, it involved literally having to escape from a dangerous cult. Their parents, Arlyn Phoenix and John Lee Bottom, realized that Venezuela-based religious group The Children of God was no longer the right place for them and their children, and they fled the group's compound in 1977. The family had to ride a freight ship as stowaways in order to get from Venezuela to the U.S., and it was during that trip that Joaquin celebrated his third birthday.

Even though they were already struggling in their new life in Florida, Arlyn and John Lee could tell that their children — particularly River and Rain — were natural-born performers. So they scraped together every dime they could to relocate the family to Los Angeles and give the kids their best shot at stardom. River, Rain, and Joaquin would busk on the streets to help support the family, and River and Joaquin soon both began to book acting gigs. 

In just a few short years, River was one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood, although his life would be tragically cut short. As for Joaquin, he went on to become one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation with four Oscar nominations and counting, including his 2020 win for "Joker." 

Another performer whose time on the Disney Channel wasn't the peak of her career is Zendaya Coleman, best known as simply Zendaya. At this point, the fact that she starred in "Shake It Up" and "K.C. Undercover" — two of the best Disney Channel shows of all time — feels like a mere footnote in a career that has long since eclipsed those humble beginnings. It's currently a toss-up whether Michelle "MJ" Jones-Watson in the current run of "Spider-Man" films or Rue Bennett on the HBO series "Euphoria" is the role for which she's most famous — and those are on top of starring in the two most recent "Dune" films as well as various other high-profile projects.

As Zendaya explained to Glamour in 2017, none of what she's accomplished as an actor would have been possible without the unwavering support and tremendous sacrifice of her parents. "Luckily I had parents who were like, 'You know what? We believe in you,'" she told the publication. When she was only in middle school, her dad quit his job so that he and Zendaya could move from Oakland to Los Angeles for auditions. 

Meanwhile, her mom not only stayed behind, but worked two jobs to both help support Zendaya and also pay for all the car trips the family had to take back and forth between the two cities to still spend as much time together as possible. 

Jenna Ortega got her first screen credits at only 10 years old, playing small parts on the TV shows "Rob" and "CSI: NY." Her first film credit was no less than a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing the vice president's daughter in "Iron Man 3." It wouldn't be long before her roles got much bigger, from being a series regular in Netflix's "Richie Rich" and having a recurring role on "Jane the Virgin" to eventually becoming a certified scream queen with parts in the "Scream" and "X" horror movie franchises. Of course, there's also her being the latest actor to play a live-action Wednesday Addams on the Netflix show "Wednesday" and joining the cast of the long-awaited "Beetlejuice" sequel.

Ortega has already played more zeitgeist-capturing characters before she was old enough to drink than many actors do over their entire careers. What's even more remarkable about her rise to fame from a young age is that she laid that foundation without even actually living in Los Angeles. Ortega told Jimmy Kimmel that even though her mother was a full-time ER nurse, she'd still drive the nearly seven-hour round trip journey four or five times each week for Ortega's auditions. What little bit of time Ortega's mom had to rest, between long shifts of one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs there is, she spent large chunks of in the car so that Ortega could get her big break. 

Though U.S. audiences didn't first take notice of her until 2015, when she was one of the leads of the ABC series "Quantico," Priyanka Chopra already had over a decade of movie stardom under her belt in her native India. The mid-2000s saw her start to shift her focus towards Hollywood, with roles in movies like "Baywatch," "We Can Be Heroes," and "The Matrix Resurrections." When she's not acting, Chopra is also a musician, writer, producer, and philanthropist — not to mention the wife of Nick Jonas, which made her that much more of a media fixture in this part of the world. 

So how does someone get the kind of foundation one needs to build such an impressive multi-hyphenate career? In Chopra's case, it was her parents. "They stood by me and supported me over their own dreams and ambitions. They sacrificed their lives so that I could have mine," she told The Indian Express in 2019. She added that her mom remains her best friend and her "best person." At the time of that interview, Chopra expressed a desire to become a mother herself — a dream she fulfilled three years later when she and Nick Jonas welcomed their daughter in January 2022. 

Owing in part to his eternally childlike face, it's tough to even pinpoint the moment when Elijah Wood went from child star to adult actor. It also helps that he worked so much and so consistently all throughout his life that he rolled from one phase of his career to the next without giving anyone a chance to notice the change. But it's hard to deny that the role that catapulted him to international fame was Frodo Baggins in the live-action "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in the early 2000s. Not bad for a kid from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Wood's parents were running a sandwich shop and catering business called Alfalfa's Deli out of a Cedar Rapids mall that was well known to the locals during the 1980s. But when Wood expressed an interest in acting, his parents were willing to sell Alfalfa's in order to fund the move to Hollywood — although his parents divorced around that time, so only Wood and his mom made the move. It is said that 60% of restaurants don't last a single year, and even among those that do, 80% are closed within five. So for Wood's parents to beat the odds and have a successful restaurant that outlasted both of those milestones — only to sell it for their son's silver screen dreams — is not an insignificant sacrifice to have made. 

Another "Euphoria" star who has also dabbled in the Spider-Man cinematic universe is Sydney Sweeney — though "Madame Web" likely wouldn't even make a top 10 list of projects the actor is known for. Such a list would more likely include titles like "The White Lotus," "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Sharp Objects," and her highly acclaimed performance as the titular intelligence leaker in "Reality." 

Sweeney has described the financial situation of her childhood as tight, yet not on the level of significant struggle. But that changed when she turned 13 and her family made the move from Spokane, Washington to Los Angeles so Sweeney could pursue a career in acting. They went from living in a house to a single-bed motel room that needed to be shared by Sweeney, her parents, and her brother. The situation put a serious strain on her parents' marriage, and they eventually ended up divorcing as well as filing for bankruptcy. As she told Variety, "My parents sacrificed so much to support my dream, and they lost so much during it." 

For what it's worth, Sweeney has at least been able to pay some of that sacrifice back. She revealed in March 2024 that she paid off the mortgage on her mother's house, fulfilling one of her childhood dreams of eventually being to take care of her parents.

While most people point to "Wizards of Waverly Place" as being the starting point for Selena Gomez's career, she had previously spent two years on the hugely popular PBS series "Barney and Friends." Either way, it didn't take long before Gomez was a full-blown movie star, thanks to roles in movies like "Ramona and Beezus," "Spring Breakers," and the "Hotel Transylvania" series. Most recently she's earned raves as one of the three leads of "Only Murders in the Building," capably holding her own next to seasoned vets Steve Martin and Martin Short. And all along the way, Gomez has also maintained a successful music career that has spawned multiple albums and headlining concert tours. 

Her success is all the more impressive when you consider that she was the daughter of a teenaged mother who was a single mom by the time she was 21. Gomez said during an E! Entertainment special (via Huffington Post), "Having me at 16 had to have been a big responsibility. My mom gave up everything for me and had, like, three jobs. She supported me, sacrificed her life for me." She admits to being angry with her mom after her parents got divorced when Gomez was five, something she said she regrets. But her mom, Mandy Teefey, never took it personally. "[Selena] would vent and yell at me and all I could do is just say, 'I'm sorry — but you'll understand someday,'" Teefey said. 

Ke Huy Quan's best supporting actor Oscar win for "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is one of the all-time great Hollywood comeback stories. After achieving fame at a young age in movies like "The Goonies" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," Quan largely stepped away from acting — he appeared in only a single movie between 1996 and 2021, instead mostly working behind the camera. After returning to acting for 2021's "Finding 'Ohana," Quan appeared in his Oscar-winning role the following year. He's since joined the MCU as Ouroboros in Season 2 of "Loki," and played a role in 2024's "Kung Fu Panda 4."

In one of the most heartfelt moments of his very emotional Oscar acceptance speech, Quan pointed out that his 84-year-old mother was watching from home, at which point he looked into the camera and said, "Mom, I just won an Oscar!" After his win, Quan further explained to Variety why it was so important to share that moment with her. "I didn't have the maturity to process the sacrifices that my parents made so that we could have a better future," Quan said of everything his parents did for him and his siblings. He spoke of how his parents decided to take the family from war-torn Vietnam in 1978, initially ending up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. They spent a full year in that camp until they were finally able to head for Los Angeles — where Quan's long journey to the Oscar stage began.