Jennie Garth has spoken about the psychological impact of becoming famous as a teenager on Beverly Hills, 90210, saying the experience “really does screw with your mind”. The actress, now 54, shot to stardom at 18 playing Kelly Taylor in the landmark teen drama, but has said she spent two decades “trying to keep my head above water”.
In a new interview, Garth described feeling like an outsider in Hollywood and said her formative years on set left her developmentally “held back from the realities of the world”. She recalled watching peers leave school and go to college, while she was “slammed into it at 18”. Although she bought a ranch and spent weekends there with her parents, she said the experience of growing up in the public eye was a “crash course in survival”.
After the show ended in 2000, Garth continued to work, including on spin-offs, but admitted that acting jobs had become “few and far between”. She said she rarely heard from her agent and was used to rejection, but that it was “getting a little scary”. Feeling stuck and unfulfilled as her daughters grew up, she began to ask what she was “meant to do”.
Garth has since launched a podcast and written a memoir, both titled I Choose Me, drawing on therapy and self-help reading to help other women at a standstill. She said the deaths of her former co-stars Luke Perry in 2019 and Shannen Doherty in 2024 brought home a sense of mortality and spurred her to act. “Having it happen around me made me feel like it was time to do what I know I’m here to do,” she said.
Reflecting on her childhood on a farm in Illinois, Garth said she had never intended to become an actor, and that she entered an unfamiliar world when she was discovered at a beauty pageant. She hopes her new projects will resonate with women experiencing similar uncertainty. “I was feeling stuck and I thought, how am I going to get out of this?” she said.
