90s Stars We Completely Forgot About

The decade between 1990 and 2000 was a special era for television. It brought us Must See TV, TGIF, and those Joey and Chandler haircuts that guys are still getting as of this writing. Many actors who appeared on these shows, such as Katie Holmes, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Jessica Biel, have gone on to forge lucrative careers and interesting public lives (ahem, TomKat). Others haven't been able to repeat their initial stardom or have pursued careers off the screen. Here are some of the forgotten stars of '90s TV.

Andrew Keegan's IMDb page reads like a '90s Greatest Hits list. He was in Boy Meets World, Party of Five, 7th Heaven, and Baywatch. What, no time for 90210? He even had a part in 10 Things I Hate About You, which is considered a cornerstone of the teen romcom genre. Somewhere around the end of his 7th Heaven run, Keegan's acting gigs became increasingly inconspicuous, as in a TV movie called Teenage Caveman inconspicuous. He worked in relative obscurity for around a decade. Then things took a turn.

In 2014, Keegan founded Full Circle, a spiritual movement of sorts whose mission statement, according to its website, is "to activate community through a curation of heart-centered, spirited programming that creates space for authentic connection." A Vice reporter who visited the church's Venice Beach, Calif. headquarters seemed to find that Keegan's brand of new-wave spiritualism was filtered through a lens somewhere between the L.A. hipster scene and whatever those people are doing at Burning Man. Asked to explain the church's name, Keegan replied, "Synchronicity. Time. That's what it's all about. Whatever, the past, some other time. It's a circle; in the center is now. That's what it's about." And if that made as little sense to you as it did to us, perhaps this Full Circle follower's description of the movement to ABC News will clarify: "Just rad, funky people to do rad, funky things." Nope, still no clue. Oh well, Keegan seems happy, so let's just hope this doesn't end with "special applesauce" and a brand new pair of sneakers for everyone.

Like Keegan, Marla Sokoloff is also an alum of Boy Meets World, Party of Five, and 7th Heaven. Also like Keegan, she starred in a genre-defining film, Dude, Where's My Car?, although technically that was in 2000 and we're not sure "stoner comedies" is an actual film genre. Anyway, unlike Keegan, Sokoloff did not start a religion that attempts to "end the conflict between Israel and Palestine," using meditation and water crystals, so it's safe to say she took a different path.

While finding continued success with roles on The Practice and Desperate Housewives, Sokoloff got married and had two kids. No, she didn't marry James Franco, who Sokoloff dated for four years, and who for some reason decided to go on The Howard Stern Show years later and talk about a sex tape he once made with her. Instead, she wed some composer dude, and after she'd been a mom for a while, Sokoloff decided to start blogging for People about it. What could go wrong, right?

Well, she sparked some controversy when she decided to stop telling her 15-month-old daughter "no," because she felt she was saying it so much that it became ineffective in deterring her daughter's behavior. And like any parenting opinion on the internet, Sokoloff's unique approach to discipline started an endless debate to the point where Good Morning America brought in a parenting expert to basically refute Sokoloff's method. There was no harm done: Sokoloff still acts, she still occasionally blogs, and the internet is still and will always be a place where strangers will argue with each other about literally anything.

Despite being known for his current long-running role as Tucker Dobbs on Baby Daddy, and the voice work he did on Kim Possible, Tahj Mowry is also the little brother of Tia and Tamera Mowry, which you may not have realized, but now that you're looking at his face, you're wondering if you might need glasses. Tahj is not just the Sister, Sister stars' mini-me. He's a Renaissance man of creative talent. Recently, Tahj expanded his portfolio into music with the release of his EP, Future Funk. He told the Los Angeles Times that music is his passion, and when describing his sound, he said, "It's funky, it's upbeat, it's got swag, it's got its own thing going—you can't help but dance to it."

Sharp-eyed readers will also recognize Tahj as Teddy from Full House. You may remember him as Michelle Tanner's best friend who ripped audiences' hearts out when he had to move to Amarillo, Texas for his dad's new job. He even took Pinky, Michelle's favorite pig! Here's the clip if you'd like to take the "Am I Dead Inside?" challenge and attempt to watch it without bawling. (It's not possible.)

Barry Watson has done lots of TV work, but nothing defines him more than his role as Matt Camden, the quintessentially '90s-haired eldest child on 7th Heaven. Interestingly, it was a role that Watson was wary about, despite the show being the brainchild of TV legend Aaron Spelling. In an interview with Refinery29, Watson explained that his hesitation had to do with a previous Spelling role he'd just finished shooting. "I read it, and I was like, 'I don't know. I just got done playing this guy who rapes these girls on this other show of his. Why does he want me for this?" Yeah, we can understand why he thought it was odd that his prior gig somehow prepared him for the role of a sensitive minister's son, but Spelling is also the man who turned a racist family patriarch into a widely beloved figure with All in the Family, so clearly the guy knew what he was doing.

While Watson was on 7th Heaven, he seemed to be expanding his portfolio. He got into movies during the show's run and had some hits with Sorority Boys and Boogeyman, but after brief runs on the shows What About Brian and Samantha Who?, opportunities seemed to dry up. And by dry up, we mean he starred in a Lifetime Christmas movie about a con man who is forced by his parole officer to take a job as a mall Santa, which is the acting equivalent of using your MBA to manage a retail store.

Jason Behr is best known for his role on The WB's Roswell, a drama about teens who are part alien and part human and have to live in Roswell, N.M until they can return to their home planet to save their race. It was a relative hit that ran for three seasons, because as long as a show has hot people and drama, teens will watch it. Unfortunately for Behr, the biggest part he would get post-Roswell was in the American remake of The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar, which came out in 2004. From there, he scored a handful of roles in stuff nobody would recognize, such as the movie Dragon Wars: D-War, which sounds like a Bollywood knockoff version of Game of Thrones. As of this writing, Behr hasn't had a screen credit since 2012.

Behr did, however, meet his wife on the set of The Grudge. She's fellow actress KaDee Strickland, and she's been steadily working throughout her husband's dry spell with roles on The Practice, Secrets and Lies, The Player, and Shut Eye with only a brief pause to give birth to their son, Atticus. To summarize, Behr doesn't have to work, has a successful actress wife, and has a son with a badass name. If that's the definition of "forgotten," it really doesn't sound that bad.

When you've starred on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, your status as a cult TV legend is secure. When you add voicework for animated Marvel shows such as Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. and Ultimate Spider-Man, you can forget about ever being able to walk through a Comic-Con without a full security detail. Eliza Dushku has done all of those things and also landed a juicy part on the Cinemax action series sleeper-hit Banshee. So why do people think she's forgotten?

In 2014, Dushku broke up with NBA star Rick Fox and moved back to her native Boston to attend college at Suffolk University, where she's studying Sociology. According to blogs such as Perez Hilton, that was taken as a possible shunning of Hollywood, despite the fact that Dushku told the Boston Globe she "is not abandoning the movie and TV business, but after 22 years in LA, she missed Boston." Seems pretty cut and dry to us. Plus, she's tallied plenty of acting credits since her move, although taking roles in stuff such as Princess Rap Battle proves Dushku still has a soft spot for the obscure.

Jenna von Oy played Six on Blossom, and you're welcome for us just putting the earworm that is the opening piano riff of that show's theme music into your head. After her five year stint as Blossom's fast-talking bestie, von Oy moved on to lots of bit parts until her next long-term role as Stevie Van Lowe on The Parkers, which, let's be honest, you're lying if you say that's what you know her from. We all remember her as the girl with the floppy hats who was in love with Joey.

As an adult, von Oy has taken to writing, penning guest pieces for People's celebrity baby blog, as well as her own blog, The Cradle Chronicles. She's also written a book called Situation Momedy, because if you haven't guessed by now, she's a mom, too. She has two daughters with husband Brad Bratcher, and they all live together in Nashville, Tenn. According to her blog, in addition to wrangling her two children and five dogs, von Oy is already working on the sequel to Situation Momedy, so it sounds like her hands are plenty full without tossing a return to acting into the mix.

Because Jessica Biel seems to have been the only breakout star of 7th Heaven, Beverley Mitchell is also counted among the '90s forgotten. After her role as Lucy Camden, she enjoyed a brief resurgence into the mainstream as Kaitlin O'Malley on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which was another wholesome, family-centric show.

Like her 7th Heaven co-star Watson, Mitchell also found her way into the realm of holiday-themed basic cable movies with roles in Lifetime's A Gift Wrapped Christmas and the straight-to-DVD classic, The Dog Who Saved Easter. All of this family-friendly entertainment apparently had a personal impact on her, because Mitchell got married in 2008 and started her own family. She had two kids, and—stop us if this sounds familiar—started blogging for People about being a mom. Was that written into 1990s TV contracts or something? Anyway, she also runs her own blog, called Growing Up Hollywood, where she once wrote that she'd be open to her own kids getting into the entertainment business as long as they stay grounded and never start thinking "they are better than anyone else." We'll find out in a couple decades how that all worked out when Mitchell's kids get their own People blog, since apparently there's room for everyone over there.

Robert Iler had only done commercial work before landing the role of A.J. Soprano on The Sopranos at age 12. At the time, he reportedly didn't have career ambitions as an actor, but in a 2007 interview with PR.com, which was just as the HBO smash was ending, Iler admitted that he had "developed a passion for [acting]" and hoped that he'd do it for the rest of his life. Something definitely changed, because since The Sopranos, Iler has exactly two screen credits to his name: a bit part on Law & Order in 2009 and a role on a 2016 show called Four Kings, which is about high stakes poker players in Vegas, something Iler definitely knows a little about.

Iler has spent much of his acting hiatus at card tables. He hasn't done much press after getting slammed in the headlines for a marijuana possession and robbery bust when he was 16, but Poker News talked to him in 2012 while he was in Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. Yeah, he's that serious of a player. In fact, Iler told the publication he'd played in the WSOP for the past five years as well. As a guest on Artie Lange's podcast, Iler also revealed that playing poker is pretty much all he does these days.

Another Sopranos alum to fade from the spotlight after the show's infamous cut-to-black is Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Meadow Soprano, Tony's bleeding heart liberal daughter. Unlike her on-screen brother, Sigler booked steady acting work post-Sopranos, although her most notable role was probably as a fictionalized version of herself on Entourage, in which she played Turtle's girlfriend. In a meta on top of meta twist, she and Jerry Ferrara, the guy who played Turtle, tried to take their relationship off screen, but it only lasted about a year.

In early 2016, Sigler revealed to People that for much of her recent career, she's been dealing with the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which she was diagnosed with at 20. "I can't walk for a long period of time without resting. I cannot run. No superhero roles for me. Stairs? I can do them but they're not the easiest. When I walk, I have to think about every single step, which is annoying and frustrating." Despite that major obstacle, Sigler continues to work. She is also the wife to pro baseball player Cutter Dykstra and mom to their son Beau, so even though she's no longer starring on the show everyone's talking about, her plate seems full enough.

Party of Five star Lacey Chabert probably has the most post-'90s credits of anyone on this list, but for some reason, she's chosen to focus on voiceover work for animated TV shows. In fact, Chabert was actually the voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy before Mila Kunis, though the role was uncredited. As for why she loves voicing cartoons so much? Maybe it's because her amazing turn as Gretchen Weiners, the heiress to the Toaster Strudel fortune, in Mean Girls inadvertently turned her into a walking meme. Chabert told EW that during a trip to the pharmacy to get medicine when she was sick, a pharmacist said to her, "You don't look like you feel very fetch today." So, it's not really a surprise that Chabert chooses to hide out in a sound booth.

But it's not just randos screaming "You can't sit with us!" that drove her to voice acting. Chabert said she liked being able to play characters that she otherwise wouldn't be able to because of physical limitations. She also confirmed the thing that everyone always thinks would be so sweet about being a voice actor. "The upside is you don't have to have hair and makeup. You can go in your sweats if you want—that's always a plus!"

Jonathan Taylor Thomas, or JTT, as he was known to squealing tweens, has been acting since he was 8 years old. He was 13 when he voiced Young Simba in The Lion King, which means at an age when most of us were whining about having to deliver newspapers, he was starring in one of Disney's most famous films. Simultaneously, Thomas starred on Home Improvement, one of the biggest sitcoms of all time, so when he decided to leave the show to pursue education and take a break from fame, it was a real shock. "I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break. To sit in a big library amongst books and students, that was pretty cool. It was a novel experience for me," he told People.

Just like JTT wasn't just a teen heartthrob, he was the teen heartthrob, Taylor didn't just go to any old school. He got his degrees from Harvard and Columbia before returning to guest star on Tim Allen's new show, Last Man Standing. JTT also directed several episodes of Last Man Standing, because apparently having two Ivy League degrees wasn't a strong enough move; he had to come back to the biz and take a leadership position over his former TV dad. Like a boss.

Despite his prolific career after Family Matters, Jaleel White will forever be known as Steve Urkel, the suspender-wearing, cheese-loving dork who irritated Carl Winslow to no end both on and off the screen. In a 2010 Vanity Fair interview, White confirmed rumors that his sudden stardom as a late addition to the show—Urkel made his debut on the Season 1 finale—definitely made waves with the original cast, especially with Reginald VelJohnson, who was supposed to be the star of the show. Eventually, everyone smoothed things out and made "a s**tload of money," according to White, so it couldn't have been that bad.

White also told Vanity Fair he was nearly cast as Rudy on The Cosby Show until Bill Cosby decided he wanted a girl for the role. That means White was nearly an icon '80s TV too. As far as regrets go, he has none. He doesn't even feel like typecasting was ever a problem for him. "You're only as good as your opportunities. The nature of television is that it's a beast with a lot of opinions. I don't consider myself typecast any more than Neil Patrick Harris was as Doogie Howser or James Gandolfini is as Tony Soprano," he once told TV Guide. That's a surprisingly healthy perspective for a guy whose most recognizable credits since Family Matters are bit parts on Boston Legal, NCIS, and CSI, and who also admits that 20 years after the show, he still has drunk people in a bar asking him to do the Urkel voice.

When Sherry Stringfield walked away from her role as Dr. Susan Lewis on E.R. after just two years, no one understood why. She was on the hottest show on television, making $70,000 per episode, and she'd already walked away from brief stints on Guiding Light and NYPD Blue. It was almost like she was allergic to fame. But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly (Via Greenspun), Stringfield makes it clear that fame was never her goal. She cited extreme working conditions, which E.R. producers strongly refuted, and a general desire to have "a full-bodied life," which she felt wasn't possible while she "worked 18-hour days, suffered from sleep deprivation, and contracted both viral meningitis and pneumonia." That all sounds understandable, if we could relate to being on a show that did medical procedures on us for $70,000 an episode.

Stringfield's hiatus from the biz only really lasted two years. She did a few movies, then went right back to network TV, eventually landing a role on Under the Dome, the TV adaptation of the Stephen King novel. She was only on that series for the second of three seasons playing a character whose arc had a definitive end in sight, which we imagine is now part of the negotiation process for Stringfield when she takes a role. "This character sounds like a good fit for me, but I'd love it if you could kill her off way sooner," we imagine her telling producers.

As a guest on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Dana Carvey opened up about his conscious decision to walk away from mainstream show business following his brief and ill-fated foray into the movie business. In the wake of his early '90s Saturday Night Live success, as well as the two Wayne's World adaptations, Carvey told Maron that he had so many offers coming at him, he didn't really know how to choose, and at $3 million per film it was almost a no-brainer to say yes. That's how bombs like Clean Slate, The Road to Wellville, and Trapped in Paradise essentially scared the master of impressions away from the movie business.

Instead of pursuing films, Carvey claims he chose to do large-scale corporate stand-up gigs for a crapload of money—making up to $150,000 per appearance—which meant he could just do one of those every weekend, and still be mostly around to raise his kids. So, best case scenario, he was working one to two hours per week and making almost $8 million per year—schwing! As of this writing, Carvey recently released a Netflix standup special and is planning on doing an original series on a streaming network soon, to which we have to ask: why? If all we had to do was show up to a different Marriott every Saturday night, do the "church lady" voice for a bunch of insurance brokers at their yearly conference, then hop on a jet with 150K in our pockets, we would never do anything else. Neither should Carvey, except for Wayne's World 3. Let's be honest, we all still want that, and Mike Myers could use the work.