Soleil Moon Frye’s doc ‘Kid 90’ is a time capsule for Gen X
One thing to understand about Soleil Moon Frye is that she is a historian of her life.
While many of us may have saved diaries from our past, Frye can do you one better. She has diaries, videos and voicemails. It’s all documented and recorded.
Frye says occasionally over the years she would pick up a diary and “skim through” and “then put it back.” She stashes her keepsakes away until she’s ready, sometimes decades later, with fresh eyes and a clear head.
Such is the case with “Kid 90,” a new documentary available on Hulu Friday.
Soleil, now 44, who is best-known for playing the plucky, mismatched star of “Punky Brewster,” only a few years ago felt a pull to open the vault to her teen years — coming of age in the 1990s in Los Angeles and then moving to New York for college.
She knew she had enough for a documentary and at first she didn’t want to be in it at all.
“When I started the doc, it wasn’t meant to be about me. I tried to make it about everybody but me,” she said in an interview.
When watching, viewers will see she really did know everybody. It’s a who’s-who of young Hollywood at the time. There’s Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Connelly, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Jenny Lewis and even Charlie Sheen. At one point Frye listens to a voicemail from a sweet-sounding Mark Wahlberg and she remarks she’s nervous to call him back.
Frye cherishes watching them all just being regular kids in the days before TMZ, camera phones and social media.
“We were really able to live our lives with a sense of privacy, and not under the microscope.
We were able to have a lot of fun. I mean, yes, I had fun and experimented, but there’s also so much innocence there,” said Frye, who added there were hours of documentary footage of the kids just going to the movies.
There’s also pain. Frye’s friend group experienced an extraordinary amount of loss. She was close with both actors Justin Pierce and Jonathan Brandis, who each died by suicide, and Harold Hunter who died from a cocaineinduced heart attack.
A “Punky Brewster “revival dropped its first season on Peacock in February. Frye plays a grown-up Brewster who is a single mom. (Freddie Prinze Jr. plays her ex-husband.) She’s still as sunny as she was as a kid.