The actor who played Woim in the 1994 hit The Little Rascals spent his teenage years working fast food inside a Walmart, a choice he says reflects how little money most child stars actually take home.
Blake Collins was nine years old when he appeared alongside a cast of kid actors in one of the most quotable family comedies of the 1990s. By fifteen, he was wearing a headset and punching in combo-meal orders at a McDonald's, fielding double-takes from customers who recognized him between the fryer and the register. Now 41, Collins works behind the camera in Hollywood and has started talking publicly about what child fame actually looks like once the credits roll.
In a recent interview with People magazine, Page Six reported, Collins described the surreal experience of getting spotted at work as a teenager:
"It's very awkward to be working a cash register at McDonald's; you're 15 years old, someone going like, 'Can I get a number one, please? Wait, I know you from somewhere. Were you in The Little Rascals?' And I'm like, 'Yes.' And they're like, 'Now you work at McDonald's?' I'm like, 'Yes.'"
The McDonald's sat inside a Walmart. Collins said all his high school friends worked there too. For him, that was the point.
Collins did not stumble out of the industry. He chose to leave. And the daily routine he described makes the decision easy to understand.
During his years as a working child actor, Collins said, he and his co-star Jordan Warkol, who played Froggy, juggled five to seven auditions a week, sometimes more. The circuit ran from school pickups to casting offices in Santa Monica and Hollywood and back again, with Collins arriving home around nine o'clock most nights.
"You get picked up from school early every day and you get taken to Santa Monica, to Hollywood, back to Santa Monica, and you're home at nine o'clock every night. It's a grind, especially if you're a working child actor like Jordan and I were. I mean, we have five to seven or sometimes more auditions a week, and we spend most of our week in the back of our parents' car just waiting to get home."
Collins's mother doubled as his manager, a setup he handled carefully when explaining why he stepped away. He called her "a wonderful mother" but said the arrangement created a "manager/employee relationship to some degree." He wanted to reset that dynamic heading into high school, and wanted what most teenagers want.
"I just kind of wanted even more normalcy going to high school. I wanted to play sports. I wanted to hang out with my friends."
So he quit. And he went to work at McDonald's like every other kid in town.
Collins has made the financial reality of kid acting a recurring subject on "The Not So Little Rascals," a podcast he co-hosts with Warkol, now 39 and working in business development. The two have interviewed former child actors about what happened to their earnings, and Collins says the answers vary sharply.
"My parents handled it very bad, or stole it, just straight up stole it," he said some guests have told them. "And then there's the great stories where like, 'Oh yeah, I got every dime. And my parents were so proud when they got to give me access to my bank account.'"
Collins noted that his own fast-food stint was a prime example that child actors "don't make as much money as most people would've thought." The assumption that a kid in a hit movie is set for life does not survive contact with the actual pay stubs.
Collins and Warkol stayed in or near the entertainment world. Their co-star Bug Hall, who played Alfalfa, did not. Hall now lives off the grid in Arkansas with his wife and five children in a camper van. He does not own a computer or a television. Page Six described his lifestyle earlier this year as a "vow of poverty", a phrase that would have been unimaginable to anyone watching him mug for the camera in 1994.
Three kids from the same cast. One works behind the camera. One went into business development. One lives in a van in the Ozarks. None of them got rich off the movie that made them famous.
Hollywood sells the dream that a breakout role changes everything. Collins's story is a reminder that for most child actors, the biggest payoff is figuring out who you are after the cameras stop rolling, and sometimes that means punching a clock like everybody else.
