Miranda Cosgrove’s Almost Normal Life

The first thing you notice about Miranda Cosgrove is her giggle. A lightly bubbling sound that she emits through a wide smile and scrunched-up shoulders. It’s a constant presence over the course of our lunch conversation, regardless of the subject. Her friend, comedian Esther Povitsky once joked on her podcast that Cosgrove could make a killing on Cameo delivering bad news for other people.

“It’s something I’ve done my whole life,” Cosgrove says of her trademark nervous chuckle. “When anything really scary or crazy happens, I always try to find a way to laugh about it. It’s kind of a way of processing it and getting over it without it getting to you too much.”

The actor arrives at the Tower Bar in West Hollywood looking neat, seemingly makeup-free, her long raven hair down and almost blending into her lightweight black jacket and bottoms. She’s a familiar face after spending her teenage years leading Nickelodeon’s iCarly, and a reboot of the show set roughly a decade later, which aired on Paramount+ for three seasons before its shock cancellation last year.

She’s back on screens this month in her first romantic comedy, Netflix’s Mother of the Bride, which follows a meet-not-so-cute during a destination wedding in Thailand, in which Cosgrove’s character, Emma, learns her dreamy fiancé (Sean Teale) is the son of the man who broke her mother’s (Brooke Shields) heart.

When the trailer dropped in April, fans who grew up watching Cosgrove were delighted, if startled, to see her finally playing a new, adult character. Due to her childhood fame, she’s in a rare category of actors people use as measuring sticks for their own aging (see: Daniel Radcliffe). Apparently her fandom extends to whoever runs the official Subway X account, which commented on the trailer, “Tell us we’re all grown up w/o telling us we’re all grown up.”

The project hit Cosgrove at a prescient moment of adulting. “I would say I was probably the most sad I’ve been in my life right before I went to make the movie,” she says over a chopped salad. She was fresh off a breakup when shooting began, and filming a happily-ever-after felt like an emotional grenade. “During my breakup, I also was doing the wedding stuff on iCarly. It’s the whole scene of Freddie asking Carly, ‘Would you want to marry me?’ And then I did 50 takes of getting married in Thailand and I was like, this is kind of hilarious, going through a breakup in real life and then having to be this happy, madly-in-love, and married person.”

Luckily, the project turned out to be just the break she needed. “Something about being in Thailand, it’s so beautiful there and all the people in this movie were so nice, from the crew to all the actors. It couldn’t have come at a more perfect moment in my life.”

Though she has a thriving love life on screen, the actor is currently single in real life. “I would love to meet somebody and be in a relationship,” she confesses now, “but I’m not doing a whole lot to make that happen.” She decided to forgo dating in 2024, but finding love is still on her to-do list. “I’m still on Raya,” she sighs, “but I never actually talk to anybody. I sort of feel like it’s my fault because I’m not talking to people, but I barely ever even look at it. And when I do, I kind of just swipe. It feels almost like a game. And even when I talk to someone a little bit, it doesn’t really turn into meeting up.”

The problem, according to her father, might be her type. “I always go for like really thin and nerdy,” she says. Her two serious exes “weren’t people who could ever survive if there was an apocalypse,” she jokes. “In my dad’s mind, the perfect guy for me would be somebody kind of like in The Notebook. You know how Ryan Gosling’s character, Noah, basically built an entire house? My dad would love Ryan Gosling in that movie for me. When I got into my last relationship, I remember telling him, ‘I really like this guy and I think I’m maybe going to end up with him.’ And my dad was like, ‘What can he build?’” she recalls with a laugh.

The actor, who turns 31 this month, spends most of her time with her “three or four closest girlfriends” whom she’s known for years. They alternate between hiking near LA, where she lives, watching movies at an out-of-the-way theater in the San Fernando Valley, and dining out or Postmating in (“The thing that I spend the most money on is food. I can’t cook a single solitary thing”). Her Sunday ritual involves washing her family’s three elderly dogs.

She also moonlights as a cat rescuer. “It’s not really an animal rescue, but it kind of is,” she says, explaining the operation she runs from her parents’ garage at the family home in Downey, California. “Where my parents live, there are a lot of stray cats, so I just started bringing them home years ago, and it’s been going on forever.” She works with a rescue in Los Angeles County to find permanent homes for the animals, and once had 12 cats at the same time after two of them simultaneously birthed litters. “I kept one of the [mom] cats, and that’s my cat,” she says.

I like my little bubble and my life, so I’m torn a lot because I’m like, how much should I put out there on social media? How much should I really want people to know about me?

If it all feels like a one-off iCarly episode, she gets it. “In some ways, I haven’t really completely broken out of playing [Carly],” she says. “A lot of people think that that’s exactly what I’m like.” In many ways, her squeaky-clean public image is an offshoot of viewer familiarity with Carly’s sweet girl-next-door personality. Even now, it’s hard to tell if people are seeing similarities or just conflating the two. (Case in point: An interview snippet from 2020 of her innocently admitting her favorite curse word is “probably f*ck” became a viral lip dub in 2022.)

Cosgrove used to be more bothered by the wholesome label. “Now that I’m older, I don’t mind as much,” she says. “But there’s still a little part of me that’s like, It’d be nice if people could see me in a different light.” It’s something she turns over in her mind often. “I like my little bubble and my life, so I’m torn a lot because I’m like, how much should I put out there on social media? How much should I really want people to know about me? Maybe it’s nice that I just have one thing people think of me [for], and at least it’s a nice thing, and then I can live my life on the inside.”

Unlike her child-star peers, Cosgrove’s success hasn’t barred her from having a relatively normal life. In fact, she’s widely known (and celebrated) for it. As one fan shared on X, “The funniest thing ever to me is how icarly, a wacky cultural phenomenon integral to our generation’s collective memory, produced miranda cosgrove, the most normal girl ever.”

“It hasn’t been too crazy for me being in the entertainment business since I was little, because I haven’t had any crazy scandals,” she says. “I’m sure that would be really hard to handle, especially as a kid, having people say bad things about you or judge decisions you made. That probably would’ve made it harder for me to stay sane.”

Still, she isn’t immune to the darker side of celebrity. She went through her own Baby Reindeer nightmare eight years ago when a man who’d been stalking her lit himself on fire and fatally shot himself in her yard. He’d previously shot at a woman who’d driven near Cosgrove’s home who looked like her. The actor actually ran into the woman at an event for Kitten Rescue LA years later.

“This girl came up to me, and she was like, ‘I didn’t know if I should tell you this here or how to say this, but I’m actually the girl that was at your house that got shot at,’” Cosgrove recalls. Luckily, the two had more than looks in common. “She seemed like she processes things in a similar way that I do,” Cosgrove says. “She said she’d just gone through a breakup the night before and was going to her friend’s house because she was so distraught. When they brought her into the Hollywood Police Station to ask what he looked like and how it all happened, the detectives were like, ‘Start from the very beginning. What happened?’ And she was like, ‘Well, he broke up with me last night,’ and she started telling them all about her breakup.” She laughs, the disarming giggle.

She can joke about it now, but the impact of the incident lingers, especially since she still lives in the same house. “That’s another reason why I go back and forth to my parents’ house so much,” she says. “I just don’t feel super safe in that house. For two years after it happened, I wouldn’t really stay there. Then I got into a relationship and because that person was there with me, I was less scared. But I don’t really like being there on my own that much.”

When she turned 30 last year, a “huge goal” was “to find a place that I feel really safe, to kind of start a new chapter.” She hasn’t found it yet.

As jarring as her story is, the experience hasn’t kept Cosgrove from enjoying Baby Reindeer like the rest of us. “I didn’t think about it very much,” she says of watching the show, adding that it’s commendable Richard Gadd was able to act out his own trauma. “I feel like if that were me, having to go back through your most terrible experiences and then try to act them [out], that’d be so hard.”

Even though she’ll watch dramas, she’s more keen to do lighter fare — like this foray into adult romantic comedy. “It’s my favorite genre of movie,” she says, citing Notting Hill as “probably my favorite rom-com.” Also, iCarly fans shouldn’t give up hope just yet, because Cosgrove hints that there’s serious cast interest in a wrap-up movie.

Right now, though, she’s just happy to be in her bubble: engaging in cat work, actively house hunting, and passively browsing Raya for her Noah.

Photographs by Kat Slootsky

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