Maitland Ward says Hollywood’s treatment of young performers in the 1990s left her feeling like a product, not a person, and she is revisiting that period in an upcoming episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Hollywood Demons.” At 49, Ward said the show gave her a chance to speak about what she saw as a teenager on set and how the industry handled young actors at the time.
Ward first found fame as Jessica Forrester on “The Bold and the Beautiful” and later played Rachel McQuire on “Boy Meets World,” but she said her early experience in the business came with pressure she did not fully understand then. She said young actors were treated like “property coming in,” that studios wanted to mold them into what they wanted, and that the whole system felt like a “factory kind of environment.” “You were just a product being sold, and you knew that yourself,” she said.
She said telling the story now was therapeutic, especially when looking back on her 16-year-old self and the years that followed. Ward said she was exposed to a dark side of Hollywood as a teenager and was put in compromising and “provocative” positions as a minor on set. She added that the show examines how women were boxed in during the 1990s and early 2000s, when culture pushed them into narrow labels she said she hated, including the idea that a young woman had to be both “a virgin and a slut all at once.”
The tension in Ward’s account is between the polished image of young Hollywood and the environment she says sat behind it. She said she cannot speak to what the business is like today because it is “such a different animal” from when she was getting started, but her account lands as a reminder of how much power studios and sets could hold over teenagers chasing a career. The episode gives her a public stage to say what she says was happening then — and to argue that the cost was not just professional, but personal.