Nikki DeLoach
The Hallmark Channel star and “Mickey Mouse Club” alum discusses grief, motherhood, and her path from actress to advocate.
Nikki DeLoach is an open book. Or two. Maybe even several.
Her journey from actress to advocate is so vast it could be broken down into volumes instead of chapters.
At fourteen, the multi-hyphenate – actress/singer/writer/producer – got her start on the “Mickey Mouse Club” alongside future superstars Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, and close friend Justin Timberlake. DeLoach then traveled the world as a singer with Innosense before music manager Lou Pearlman bled her (and all of his clients like ‘N Sync) dry. DeLoach then married her childhood sweetheart, a former boy bander, and went on to gain industry cred with roles on “Mad Men” and “Awkward” – all while completing a college degree in psychology.
No question, she has an incredible work ethic, but DeLoach has admittedly worked even harder on herself. “Being in a business where you're only as important as your last job – your self-worth becomes completely dependent on that,” DeLoach reflects, seated on a gray couch inside a Valley Village home she's renting while her permanent residence is being built. “I still struggle with this, but when you're raised as a child to believe that your value is dependent on if you're working; if you're succeeding; if you're doing all of these things – when that's not there, you feel worthless. Also, there’s the trap of the ego of feeling like you are important because you have a hit show or a movie that just did well.” She now knows better. “Of course, none of that makes you important. You’re important because you’re human.”
But it’s been a journey to arriving here – as DeLoach’s early Hollywood experiences merely scratch the surface of her story.
DeLoach’s life changed once she became a mother. And not in the cliché, “I can’t imagine my life without them,” kind of way. After battling postpartum anxiety with her first son, DeLoach put her career on hold when her second son was given a life-threatening prenatal diagnosis that would require multiple surgeries and special care once he was born.
“Bennett turned me into the best version of myself,” she says, referencing her now five-year-old son. “I had such warped priorities in so many ways before he came into my life. Even after having had my first kid, I still had those same warped priorities. I got myself on a red carpet two weeks after giving birth. Bennett blew all of that out of the water.”
While preparing for Bennett’s arrival, DeLoach re-strategized her career. “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to act again,” she remembers. “I had no idea what we were up against and we were told a lot of really scary scenarios. So I said, ‘Listen, if I can never leave him or I don’t want to leave him, I’ll pivot. I will write. I can do that from home and that’ll be the new way forward.’”
DeLoach and her writing partner Megan McNulty now have countless projects in various stages of development in addition to writing for and acting in movies for the Hallmark Channel, where DeLoach has become something of a fan favorite. “Luckily, Hallmark wanted to use me,” she says. “It was perfect because I could work for three weeks and come back, be a mom, and take care of Bennett.”
DeLoach has found comfort in helping others navigate the path of becoming a medical mom, which requires superhuman strength, patience, and a new vocabulary that one might call “hospital speak.” In short, it’s a new way of life – and as a result, DeLoach is also now President of the Foundation Board of Trustees for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
She credits her family’s experience with putting everything into perspective as she continues to pursue her entertainment career in addition to her passion for philanthropy and advocacy.
“The most important thing is, ‘Are we healthy? Are we happy?’” she says. “Nothing else outside of that matters. I feel like I’m leading some kind of different charge inside this [entertainment] industry of saying, ‘You don’t get to own me. You don’t get to tell me what’s important in my life. I’m going to make decisions that are best for me and my family and I’m going to trust that opportunities will still be there if they’re meant to be.”
GROWING UP
DeLoach was born in Waycross, Georgia. “I was from a small town,” she says. “At the time, it had, like, one traffic light. My mother was a teacher. My dad worked in timber and trucking. I was raised on a farm. I was the kid that didn't come home until it was dark and even then I would put on the porch lights and would play basketball with the neighborhood kids. I was a dirty, filthy, lizard-chasing child who liked to be outside.”
Raised in a religious household, DeLoach says her curiosity often landed her in the hot seat. “I was the kid that got in trouble every single week in Sunday school because I asked a lot of questions,” she says. “I was way too curious about things.” While the attribute has served her well as an adult, it wasn’t necessarily encouraged at the time. However, her family did support her interest in the arts.
“I knew at three years old what I wanted to do,” she says, explaining she was exposed to musicals through her grandmother. “I stayed with her every weekend. She was a singer and I learned later in life that she would perform in her small town in the little café they had. But she got married young, had kids young, and sang in the choir. We would rent three movies on Friday after school. I remember watching ‘Singing in the Rain,’ ‘The Sound of Music,’ and ‘Funny Girl,’ which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I said to my Nana, ‘I want to do that. I want to be a part of something that’s making people feel how I feel when I watch it.’”
Her grandmother put her in dance and voice lessons. “Dancing came super naturally to me,” DeLoach says, sharing her grandmother then put her in pageants. “I was not interested in the pageants,” she admits. “I didn’t like dresses. I didn’t like pantyhose. I didn’t like my hair or make-up being done. I was a tomboy. I was into dance, gymnastics, sports, and athletics, but I did the pageants because I liked the talent portion of the competition where I got to perform. I ended up winning a bunch of things and that took me to New York when I was ten years old.”
DeLoach spent a summer auditioning in New York where she won a competition, which attracted the attention of people within the entertainment industry. “A bunch of agents were like, ‘You should move out to L.A.,’” she says. “My mother was like, ‘Absolutely not. I have another child and I just gave birth to another one. I worked my whole life to build my career. I am not giving that up.’ She had two masters. She had been a teacher, but she wanted to go all the way in education.”
After DeLoach’s brief stint in New York, she returned home to Georgia but remembered advice one of the industry insiders had given her grandmother. “An agent said, ‘Your kid would be perfect for a show called the ‘Mickey Mouse Club. They're doing auditions. They're going to hire some new kids this next year. Be on the lookout for that,’” DeLoach recalls being told. “I had an agent in Jacksonville named Denise Carol. So my Nana told Denise, ‘If this audition comes around, will you let us know?’ I spent a year working on dances and songs – just in case I got an audition.”
THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB
The time came. “It was a cattle call,” she says. “I think something like 24,000 kids in the United States and Canada auditioned.”
DeLoach’s preparation paid off. “I went to my first audition, went to my callback, and ended up in Orlando, [Florida] for a weekend,” she says, explaining she had no idea at the time that the casting directors were watching her every move to see who had chemistry. “They brought 24 of us down there to see how we would interact. I thought we were there for our screen test, but they were always watching. It didn’t feel like it, but they were good at being stealth.”
DeLoach remembers: “Justin [Timberlake] and I connected immediately and have been family ever since. So did Britney [Spears], T.J. [Fantini], and Ryan [Gosling]. We gravitated toward each other. The very first day at lunch, we were all sitting at the table eating together. Then, at another table, Christina [Aguilera] was sitting by herself. I walked over to her and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come and eat with us?’ So she ate with us and then every day we all ate lunch together. [The casting directors] clocked it and they were like, ‘Oh, [Nikki is] going to be the glue that holds them all together,’ and that was the thing that made them choose me over somebody else.”
DeLoach says that the casting team was vacillating between her and one other girl. “Jessica Simpson was also in the group and she had an insane voice,” she says. “But I think the thing that put me over the edge and the reason I got the job is – [Justin, Britney, and I would all hang out together in between auditioning], and that was the thing that made them choose me.”
DeLoach says she relished the opportunity to do what she loves around the clock. “It was like somebody had picked me up and dropped me into my version of heaven,” she says. “I danced every single day, learning new routines and new choreography. I was never the strongest singer, so I worked hard on becoming a better singer. We got to do skits and sketches—that's when I realized that I loved acting. It was like Julliard on steroids but for kids. We did everything on that show. In the last season, we were doing three live shows a week. SNL puts on one live show a week. We worked six-day weeks, but it never felt like work.”
Because they were kids and, thus, were still in school, she and her MMC castmates were tutored on-set and had class in between rehearsals and filming. “I met my favorite teacher in the world on that show, Chuck Yerger, who I ended up going all the way through high school with,” says DeLoach, who studied with him from ages fourteen through seventeen. “He was our principal and the head of the school there.”
DeLoach says the “Mickey Mouse Club” team created a safe and nurturing environment. “Our executives and assistant directors did such a beautiful job of letting us be children,” she says. “They realized, ‘These kids are working exceptionally hard. They’re doing something pretty extraordinary and we have to give them grace.’ I don’t know how they knew to do that but they were so gifted and I’m so grateful because I don’t feel like my childhood was taken away from me in any way, shape, or form.”
Quite the contrary, she has the greatest childhood memories. “It was some of the greatest years of my life doing that show,” she says. “One of my favorite memories is in Orlando during a certain time of the year the skies open up and it pours rain for thirty minutes straight. Justin and I would go outside and dance in the rain and stomp in mud puddles and twirl around and get soaking wet. Not on shooting days of course. But on all the other days.”
DeLoach also remembers Gosling and Timberlake being in cahoots. “Ryan and Justin would steal the golf cart and go on a joyride through the park,” she laughs. “The A.D.s would be like, ‘They’ll be back.’ They let us be kids. We left work and then we would hang out after work every single night, every single weekend. We went on trips together. It was a camp. For three years of our lives, it was incredible.”
Between moments of joy, DeLoach also learned a few hard truths about life and the business she was entering. One incident, in particular, has followed her into adulthood. “I did not think of myself as a Christina [Aguilera] who has the voice,” she says. “I was always happy to do backup vocals and backup dancing, but I finally got my first solo and I was so elated and started working really hard on it. Within twenty-four hours, it was pulled from me because one of the mothers of another child was upset that her daughter had not been chosen.”
“It was taken and given to somebody else,” DeLoach continues. “I was thirteen. As a [43]-year-old, which I am now, I would be like, ‘Whatever. It’s the game. That’s the way it goes sometimes.’ But as a 13-year-old, it was such a deep, creative wound. ‘How could another mother think it’s okay to take that from a child? Her child will get something too.’ But woof. It was that first moment of realizing that anything can be taken from you at any moment in time.”
DeLoach says the incident contributed to her work ethic. “What that put in me was, ‘I just have to work harder. If I work harder, then I won’t get it taken away from me,’ which I learned later on in life—that’s also not true,” she laments. “You have to do the work for sure, but you can be the best in the room and it doesn’t mean you’re going to get the job. It’s such a tough business in that way. In most other businesses there's this ladder that you move up. You put enough years in and then you get to the next level and the next level and then you become a partner at a law firm and then you become a name partner. There's this very set way of moving up a ladder and in our industry, it doesn’t exist. That was a hard lesson because I am that person that will put in the extra hours.”
“Humility is a big thing for me,” DeLoach adds. “I will earn something any day of the week. If you tell me that you’ll give me an opportunity if I work hard enough, I will be the hardest working person in the world.” She pauses. “So that pattern began. 'I have to be the hardest working person in the room so that I don't get stuff taken away from me.’ I’m still unwiring some of that stuff.”
Three years into her time on the show, the series was canceled. “Some of them were on the show for seven years and were ready to move on, but [Justin, Ryan, Britney, Christina, and I] came on at the tail end,” she explains. “The seven of us were devastated when the show ended. We were thick as thieves. We were so close. The show ending was another creative wound.”
Now sixteen, DeLoach left Florida and returned home to Georgia where she regrouped. She recalls, “Right after ‘Mickey Mouse Club,’ one of the acting coaches, Gary Spatz, reached out and said, ‘Your daughter is a talented actress and I think she could do well. Why don’t you guys come out to L.A. for a pilot season and try it out?’”
HER TEEN YEARS
DeLoach and her grandmother temporarily relocated to Los Angeles, where they stayed in the Oakwood Apartments, a former right of passage for aspiring actors auditioning for projects during pilot season.
“I auditioned a ton,” she says. “I didn’t get a ton. Up until then, everything I had auditioned for, I had gotten. I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So there are a lot of things you don't get? Good to know.’ We had only booked our little apartment at Oakwood for [a small] amount of time and the last week I was here, I ended up booking a pilot, which kept me here.”
From there, DeLoach landed several television and film roles. “It kept keeping me here in L.A. with my grandmother,” she says, explaining she had no interest in a more traditional teenage experience. “I did not want to be a teenager. I was not interested in going out and having karaoke night and getting in trouble at the Oakwood Apartment complex. I was interested in doing my school work.”
She loved learning and worked hard at her studies when she wasn’t filming. “Remember the teacher I told you about—Chuck Yerger?” DeLoach asks. “When I came out to L.A., I was still dating J.C. Chasez [who was in ‘NSYNC] at the time. ‘NSYNC had come together in Orlando and Chuck, my teacher, was in Orlando. So I would fly back to Orlando once or twice a month and I would do all of my testing and all of that with Chuck and I would do four days with him at a time and then I would fly back to L.A., work, and audition. I did this every single month as a kid. Chuck kept tutoring Justin [after MMC], but Lance [Bass] was also still in high school. So he was also tutoring Lance.”
DeLoach graduated from high school with Bass by her side. “I graduated two years early,” she says. “Lance was two years ahead of me and two years older but because I graduated early, we ended up having a graduation ceremony together.” She laughs. “I graduated with Lance Bass. We walked together in our olive green caps and gowns. Chuck did the whole ceremony for us. It was me and my family; ‘NSYNC and their families. That was our graduation.”
Shortly after, her grandmother moved back to Georgia while DeLoach stayed put in Los Angeles. “She could only be away from my grandfather for so long,” DeLoach says. “Joey Fatone’s girlfriend at the time, Kelly, had moved to L.A. and I think she was 19 or 20 and I had just turned 17. So I moved in with her because I couldn’t sign for an apartment.”
DeLoach was then presented with the opportunity to join a girl group called Innosense, which was managed by Lou Pearlman, who famously created ‘NSYNC and several late nineties boy bands. DeLoach’s team in Los Angeles strongly advised her against it. She says, “My lawyer was like, ‘You’ll be committing career and financial suicide if you do this because the contract is the worst contract I’ve ever seen in my life. Please don’t do this.’ And my career acting wise was taking off and my agents were like, ‘No. You’re about to be 18. You’re about to be legal. Don’t do this.’”
 | A guest post by
|