Brenda Song Believes She Was ‘Underpaid and Overworked’ as a Disney Channel Star, Admits It Was ‘Hard’

Brenda Song has spoken out about the reality of her Disney Channel years.

Song — who starred on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody from 2005 to 2008, and its spinoff The Suite Life on Deck from 2008 to 2011 — reunited with former costar Dylan Sprouse on the Tuesday, November 10, episode of his Wildmen podcast to reminisce.

“I had a lovely time,” the Running Point actress, 38, told Sprouse, 34, and his cohost, Brendan Columbus. “I think the only thing that was hard about that time was, I feel like we were underpaid and overworked.”

Song noted that every Disney Channel alum “has their own journey,” and that she’s well aware that she and Sprouse might not be where they are today without the franchise.

“Disney did give us a platform to be sitting here right now,” she admitted. “So it’s very hard to complain about certain things. But we’re also very lucky that we had parents who were very involved in our lives and protected us.”

“But I look back on it, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, we did actually pay them to work,'” she said, seemingly referring to Disney.

Song has been in a relationship with fellow child star Macaulay Culkin since 2017, and the couple share two children, Dakota, 5, and Carson, 3. She previously opened up about the shared understanding she and Culkin, 46, have about their childhood experiences.

“We’ve had certain trauma that we both share that we didn’t even quite realize stems from us being child actors,” Song told Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on their Sibling Revelry podcast in February 2025. “Certain anxieties or stressors or even triggers that you don’t realize. You don’t realize as a kid, how much that affects you as an adult.”