Cole Sprouse says brother Dylan was a ‘huge bully’ in school: ‘He would beat them up’

The Sprouse twins shot to fame as child actors in Disney Channel’s ‘The Suite Life of Zack & Cody’

Cole Sprouse revealed that his twin brother Dylan was a “huge bully” in school during a podcast appearance on Wednesday (8 March).

The Sprouse twins became Hollywood stars from the age of six after sharing the role of Adam Sandler’s son in 1999’s Big Daddy.

They became best known for the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, in which they starred from 2005 to 2008.

During that time, the brothers were balancing time in school with their acting careers.

On the popular US podcast Call Her Daddy, Cole told host Alexandra Cooper that he and Dylan were “f***ing d***s” throughout elementary school and middle school.

“Dylan specifically was a huge bully,” Cole said.

Asked how Dylan would bully people, Cole answered: “He would beat them up! And then I became known as the twin that would come up and be like ‘I’m so sorry for my brother.’”

Cooper pointed out that their relationship sounded similar to that of their characters in Zack & Cody, which Cole confirmed. “I think the writers on Zack & Cody took a lot of cues from our actual personalities,” he said.

Asked if Dylan would be annoyed with his brother revealing this information about his childhood, Cole responded: “Oh no, everyone knows that he was a bully.”

Dylan has opened up about his childhood behaviour in an interview with the New York Daily News in 2020, saying he was “mostly a bully”.

“I was not a good kid,” he told the publication. “And I was always in trouble. And I was dealing with a lot of stuff at home that I was bringing to school and taking out on other people. And it wasn’t until I was kind of… in a nurturing environment where I became a much better person, for lack of a better way to describe it.

“… In high school, I was a very, very different person than I am now.”

The twins took a break from acting in the early 2010s to attend New York University, where Cole studied humanities and archaeology and Dylan studied video game design.

The pair returned to the acting world in 2016 when Cole was cast as Jughead Jones in The CW’s teen drama series, Riverdale.

Dylan, meanwhile, has starred in several low-budget movies and one Chinese film, The Curse of Turandot.