Christina Ricci reveals she escaped her “failed” and “physically violent” cult leader father through child stardom

Christina Ricci revealed that finding fame as a child star helped her escape her father, a “failed cult leader.”

The 44-year-old Addams Family actress opened up about her past and her now-estranged father Ralph Ricci while speaking with Demi Lovato for Hulu’s new documentary Child Star.

“I had a very chaotic home,” she told the series’ co-director and star of her unconventional upbringing.

“My father was a failed cult leader,” Ricci admitted. “And he had that same kind of really crazy narcissism that comes with someone who wants to run a cult.”

The Yellowjackets star, who listed his gorgeous Hollywood home for $2 million over the summer, also said his father was “very physically violent.”

“There was never peace in my house,” he recalled.

During that time, however, she said she was able to “find peace on set,” which was a direct contrast to her home life.

Ricci said she felt safe when working on set.

“I knew nothing totally crazy was going to happen,” she said of when she first started working as a child actress.

“No one was going to get angry and pretend they were going to crash the car into a wall,” he said. “There was a haven of emotional safety.”

Ricci was born in Santa Monica, California and grew up as the youngest of four siblings, alongside her siblings Pia, Rafael and Dante, in New Jersey.

Ricci and her siblings were raised by their father, a primal scream therapist turned lawyer, and their mother Sarah Ricci, a model turned real estate agent and stage mother.

Her parents divorced when she was 13, just after filming Addams Family Values.

Many years later, she and her father eventually became estranged, she said. The Guardian in the year 2000.

Ricci, who was 20 at the time, said she had not been in contact with her father for about five years since she was a teenager.

“I know it sounds cold, but it was one of the first things I did in my life: take care of myself,” she said. “I decided that only people who deserved it could be in my life.”

In the same interview, she also spoke about how the abnormal world of Hollywood normalized her and talked about her turbulent relationship with her father.

She said he was “a very paranoid man” who taught them that “there is no such thing as altruism, no one really loves you, people only think about themselves.”

Ricci made her film debut at the age of nine in Mermaids in 1990, playing Cher’s on-screen daughter and Winona Ryder’s sister.

The following year, she landed her breakthrough role as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and its sequel, Addams Family Values ​​​​(1993).

She then starred in Casper and Now and Then in 1995, which cemented her status as a child star.