'Riverdale' heartthrob Cole Sprouse goes for leading man status in 'Five Feet Apart'
LOS ANGELES - When Cole Sprouse left Hollywood, he didn't think he'd ever come back. He was 18, and he'd been acting alongside his identical twin brother since they were in diapers. The choice to work as a kid had not been his own: His single mother wanted to be around for the boys and have a steady career, and putting her twins in the entertainment industry seemed like a "lucrative alternative," he says now.
But then Sprouse and his brother, Dylan, landed their own Disney Channel show, "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody." By 13 they'd signed a licensing agreement with Dualstar Entertainment Group, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's company, to develop their own quarterly lifestyle magazine, ringtones and cologne. They were full-blown teen heartthrobs.
And yet when it came time to apply for college, the twins decided - unlike fellow Disney stars Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez or the Jonas Brothers - that they wanted to pursue higher education and enrolled at NYU.
"My brother and I were getting recognized a lot. It became one of those things that we realized we had just sort of taken as gospel since we were little kids, and that there was
