Lindsey Shaw is opening up about her sudden exit from Pretty Little Liars. Speaking on the podcast Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide, the former Nickelodeon star said that Pretty Little Liars let her go with “so much care” while she was struggling with drug addiction.
“I got basically let go from Pretty Little Liars Season 5 because of the weight that I had lost,” Shaw said on the podcast, “and it was really an embarrassing thing. I didn’t look good too skinny, and then when I started to put the weight back on, I couldn’t handle it.” She added that this pattern “kind of played into this dumb cycle.”
Shaw and her fellow Ned’s Declassified alums Devon Werkheiser and Daniel Curtis Lee had been discussing child stardom when their conversation shifted to body image issues. “When I had my drug problem and I was in between working on stuff, I would never have to address my relationship with food,” Shaw said, “because I was always like, ‘Oh, I could always just go get more Adderall and be OK with it.’ So it was really hard.”
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These days, the 34-year-old actress said, she’s worked to improve her relationship with her body and is now “so much happier.” Back then, however, she said that her insecurities fueled her drug use. “It was so bad.”
Shaw played Paige McCullers during the first five seasons of Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars, from 2011 to 2015. Eventually, however, she got called into creator I. Marlene King’s office. “She was just like, ‘So, we’re gonna let you go,’” Shaw recalled. “She’s like, ‘It’s not because of your acting.’ She’s like, ‘Do you have anybody to talk to?’” Shaw’s voice quivered on the last few words.
“I was like, ‘Um, no.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, find somebody, and we have to let you go now.’”
King delivered the news “with so much care,” Shaw said, and the actress praised the show for bringing her back in Season 7. “It was so lovely of that writing team to see that relationship and that character out,” she said, “but it was rough.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Freeform for comment on Shaw’s departure from PLL but did not immediately receive a response.
This isn’t the first time Shaw has discussed her struggles with substance use or the underlying anxiety that manifested them. In 2020, she recalled on the Women on Top podcast (co-hosted by fellow PLL alum Tammin Sursok) that eventually, she “couldn’t leave my house when I was here without being wasted; I would feel like there was voices in my head. I would feel like everybody was judging me. The social anxiety was crippling.”
Looking back during this week’s podcast, Shaw expressed her regret over how she “just gave away everything I cared about” while she avoided her body image issues. “I just don’t know that I’ve ever gotten back to the point in my career that I was before that talk, that meeting, or that whole season of using. It’s a fucking lot, dude. It’s a fucking lot.”
At this point, however, Shaw said that she’s finally “starting to be able to step away from it more and forgive and appreciate and accept. But that was a kind of wild time, and it kind of brought me here to where I am now.”
