“Little Rascals ”Actor Opens Up About Financial Reality of Life After Child Stardom (Exclusive)

Virginia ChamleeFri, July 31, 2026 at 9:17 PM UTC

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The Little RascalsCredit: Moviestore/Shutterstock -

Former child actors Blake Collins and Jordan Warkol are reflecting on life after The Little Rascals and leaving life in front of the camera

Collins and Warkol share stories of child stardom on their podcast The Not So Little Rascals

Warkol now works in business development while Collins transitioned to behind-the-scenes camerawork for a more normal life

A former child actor is opening up about the realities of growing up after a youth spent in the spotlight.

In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Blake Collins and Jordan Warkol — former actors who both starred in The Little Rascals in 1994 — opened up about their lives after the blockbuster film, and leaving life in front of the camera.

Collins, 41, played Woim in the film and also starred in “150 national commercials in the ‘90s,” he explains.

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Credit: Blake Collins

Warkol, 39, played Froggy in the film, and was six years old at the time. Collins, meanwhile, was seven when the film was made.

Following the film’s premiere and a life in Hollywood, Collins resumed a normal life, attending high school and getting an after-school job.

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“I worked at McDonald’s in high school,” he says, adding that people recognized him from the film “all the time.”

“It was in a Walmart,” Collins adds. “All my friends worked there in high school. It was fun, but 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.’”

Collins said the experience is illustrative of the fact that child actors “don’t make as much money as most people would’ve thought.”

“And unfortunately, which is a common story with a lot of child actors, the money doesn’t get always handled very well,” Collins said, adding: “But one of my favorite things to talk about with our peers is like, ‘How is your money handled?’ And we’ve gotten some very mixed answers.”

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Collins and Warkol wade into the topic of finance as actors on their new podcast, The Not So Little Rascals, in which they interview other former child stars.

Among what they’ve heard from others, he said, is that some former actors “got nothing” from their years working, or saw their money mismanaged by their family members or others they thought they could trust.

“[We hear], ‘My parents handled it very bad, or stole it, just straight up stole it,’ in some cases,” Collins, who now works behind the scenes, doing camerawork, says. “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.’ Like Jordan. There’s some interesting things that, again, nobody really knows about.”

Warkol, meanwhile, now works in business development at OTTera, a global content distribution marketplace that connects media publishers with major platforms like Roku and Samsung TV Plus.

Speaking to PEOPLE, he notes, “From the industry itself, it’s very flat now, which is nice. When we grew up, if you weren’t either the good-looking person or the weird-looking person, you don’t really work. But now if you’re creating stuff on your own, if you have a following, all the stuff that you’re in much more control of ... you don’t have to be a certain look to get a part.”

“I think more people don’t want to be an actor. They actually want to be just someone that creates,” he adds of how the industry has evolved.

Collins says he made the conscious decision to leave acting when he entered high school, because he wanted a “normal relationship with my mother.”

“It was a manager/employee relationship to some degree,” he says. “She was a wonderful mother, but 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.”

Blake Collins and Jordan Warkol, then and nowCredit: Blake Collins

He continues: “The child actor grind is wild. 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 jokes that his lengthy resume of commercial work makes him something of an “original influencer.”

“There was a time where I was doing every commercial,” he adds. “It was a cereal commercial or a toy commercial, and if they needed a redhead, I was the one they called. And that was a pretty significant part of my career. [But] working on a big Hollywood film set, I mean, it’s wild and I have a lot of gratitude for having that experience.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”