Justin Timberlake got himself into a bit of trouble after The Mickey Mouse Club was cancelled in 1994 when he was just 13 years old. In his new memoir, Hindsight: And All the Things I Can’t See in Front of Me, the singer, now 37, revealed that he acted out when he had to return to school in Tennessee after the children’s variety series ended.
“After I was on the show for two seasons, MMC was cancelled, and I went back to Tennessee,” he wrote. “I came home a lot more sophisticated and aware than I had been before the show, but I tried to downplay it because I just wanted to seem like everyone else. I became the class clown, disrupting class with my bits, not caring if the teachers were mad, only wanting to be accepted by the other kids.”
The “Can’t Stop The Feeling” hitmaker added that he tried smoking weed at the time, too. “I started getting in trouble. I smoked pot for the first time. I got myself a can of tobacco and almost got expelled for that,” he wrote.
Timberlake starred alongside Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Ryan Gosling on the show. He became good pals with Gosling, and the pair got into some antics while they filmed the show in Florida near the Walt Disney resorts. “We had employee cards that gave us access to the theme parks for free,” Timberlake recalled. “Ryan and I once stole a golf cart and drove it to the employee entrance for the Tower Of Terror. We went on that ride 12 times in a row.”
As you likely know, Timberlake also struck up a relationship with his other cast mate, Spears, a few years later in 1998. They later broke up in 2002, and the Friends With Benefits star wrote his hit song, “Cry Me A River” just two hours after the split, he confirmed in his book.
“I’ve been scorned. I’ve been pissed off. The feelings I had were so strong I had to write it,” he wrote of the breakup ballad. “I translated my feelings into a form where people could listen and hopefully relate to it. People heard me and they understood it because we’ve all been there.”