LazyTown star who played pink-haired Stephanie looks unrecognizable years later with a very different career
Julianna Rose Mauriello was the face of LazyTown as Stephanie, the bubbly pink-haired 8-year-old who teamed up with Sportacus to get a town of couch potatoes moving.
Cast at around 12, she played the character across the show's first 52 episodes and even earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for her work.
When the series returned in 2013, she was gone, and she didn't go chasing other roles.
Mauriello is now a licensed pediatric occupational therapist, having earned a Master's degree in Occupational Therapy from Columbia University.
Advert
The Ivy League graduate specializes in sensory needs and child development and, according to her LinkedIn profile, is also a certified autism specialist.
She keeps a low profile, with no public social media accounts, and has never publicly announced her exit from show business.
Why did Stephanie leave LazyTown?
Viewers got a shock when LazyTown returned for its third season in 2013 with a different actress in the pink bob.
Chloe Lang took over for seasons three and four, as well as the show's Motivational Campaigns. No official press release explained the change, and with LazyTown memes taking off online, forums filled with wild theories, from fake reports of her death to legal troubles.
None of it had any basis in reality. After leaving, Mauriello took a handful of minor voice roles, most notably in the 2013 animated miniseries The Doc Files, per IMDb, before going back to school.
She isn't the only child star to swap Hollywood sets for higher education. Danny Lloyd of The Shining, Ross Bagley of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Erik Per Sullivan of Malcolm in the Middle all did the same.
How popular was LazyTown?
Make no mistake, LazyTown was a huge success when it aired.
The Icelandic series was created by world-champion aerobic gymnast Magnús Scheving, who also starred as Sportacus.
It debuted on Nickelodeon and ran from 2004 to 2014. Mixing real actors, physical puppetry and CGI sets, it was reportedly one of the most expensive kids' shows ever made, costing more than five times the average budget per episode.
LazyTown was a major ratings hit when it debuted in the United States in 2004, drawing 10 million viewers in its first week and ranking as the top-viewed children's program on Nick Jr. for ages 2 to 11. It reached 57 million viewers in the UK alone and was dubbed into more than 30 languages, airing in more than 180 countries.
The premise saw an 8-year-old girl move in with her uncle in a town of terminally lazy residents.
Stephanie teamed up with Sportacus to get everyone moving, swapping candy for fruits and veggies dubbed ‘sports candy’.
Scheving explained the idea behind it: "LazyTown is basically about motivation. So what do I call motivation? I call it ‘go.’ The show is going to inspire kids to go. Go fishing. Go dancing. Go live."
The effect was real. When the live stage show launched in Iceland, supermarkets sold mini-vegetables under the ‘sports candy’ label.
"They couldn't import enough baby carrots to Iceland. They were sold out throughout the country," Scheving recalled in a 2007 BBC interview. In 2011, UK Health Secretary Andrew Lansley looked to the show for the Change4Life healthy living campaign, with official briefing documents sent to health experts citing a goal to ‘harness the popularity of LazyTown’.
Mauriello's acting career began at age six in Sesame Street: Fiesta! in 1997, followed by voice work in Midori's Nintendoland Bakery in 2003. Around 2008, a mashup of her signature song Cooking by the Book with hip-hop artist Lil Jon racked up millions of views on YouTube.
Topics: Nostalgia, Film and TV
Thomas Bamford