At 14, Tamera Mowry-Housley Was Living Her Dream

In 1992, Tamera Mowry-Housley was on her way from feeling like a “small fish in a big pond” to bona fide pop-culture stardom. She had recently moved from small-town Texas to Los Angeles with her family and siblings who shared her acting ambitions. While her younger brother, Tahj Mowry, starred on Full House, Mowry-Housley and her identical twin sister, Tia Mowry, met the writer Kim Bass, who was inspired to create a hit show around them.

That show, Sister, Sister — an ABC sitcom about identical twins adopted by separate families at birth, who reunite after a chance meeting — became a beloved depiction of adolescence, propelling the pair to a stardom that would extend well beyond their teen years (see: their fan-favorite Disney Channel original movie, Twitches).

Thanks to the sisters’ behind-the-scenes input, the characters of Tia and Tamera felt like real girls — stylish, funny, and imperfect teens you would want to be friends with. “Every single year we would meet with the writers, and we would tell them the kind of stories that we wanted to tell, and we would tell them some of our personal experience,” says Mowry-Housley, 47, pointing to examples like when their characters met their birth father, who was white, a nod to their own biracial background. “We were producers without the producer credit. We didn’t realize it until we got older.”

The producer skills would come in handy later on, when Mowry-Housley inked an overall deal with Hallmark to star in and executive produce original projects for the network. Just in the coming months, she’ll lead the rom-com Tidings For the Season (out Nov. 16) and host Baked with Love: Holiday, a family recipe competition airing weekly from Oct. 27.

It’s a fitting partnership for Mowry-Housley, who, more than 30 years after the premiere of Sister, Sister, speaks with the perspective and warm-hearted sincerity of an actor who didn’t just play the beats of 30-minute sitcom lessons, but nurtured them in her own life, too. “I’m just so grateful,” she tells me today. “This is what I want to do. I love to act. I love to host. I love being a mother. I love being married. I love my husband. I love my job. I love me!”

Below, Mowry-Housley opens up about teen crushes, Sister, Sister paychecks, and finding individuality as a twin.

Take me back to 1992, when you turned 14. Was Sister, Sister in the works by then?

When we were 14, we did a pilot, and it took about two years for it to come into fruition. My parents loved that I was out there pursuing my career at a very young age, but their main thing was that I grew up to be a well-rounded, kind person. I am so grateful [I was on] television without social media. I really feel for the 13-year-olds now that are on television, you know? You had fan mail, but I didn’t have access to all of it. But I look back, and I’m like, Thank God for my support system. Thank God I had someone else to go through all of this with, and that was my twin sister. I got to live my dream at such a young age.

What was the first thing you remember buying with your paycheck?

The moment we got Sister, Sister, we started investing. We could not touch our money until we were 18. My mom would show us and say, “Look, this is how much you have. This is how much we have invested.”

My biggest expense was my car at 16. We could afford a Mercedes, but my mom was like, “Oh, no girl, this car is good. You don’t need a Mercedes.” A Ford Explorer was nice, don’t get me wrong! That was my first car, and my sister and I had to share it.

Did you have crushes?

Oh my gosh, yes! I freaking loved New Kids on the Block. Joey McIntyre was my thing. Boyz II Men. Michael Jackson was so talented. I was obsessed with Atreyu from Neverending Story. My dad had one of his friends call and pretend to be him. I was so heartbroken when my dad told me, “No, that wasn’t the real guy.”

I have to acknowledge that we’re speaking on the 20th anniversary of Twitches.

OMG. That Twitches, man.

Iconic!

Iconic. Rumors are circulating right now that they want my sister and me to do Twitches 3...

Is that something you would like to do?

I would love to! I would love to see what Camryn and Alex are up to next. We had so much fun doing that. For years, I swear I thought I had magical powers. My kids’ friends at school are like, “Oh my God, Twitches!” And my daughter’s like, “Yeah, that’s my mom.” I noticed the moment she became aware of, My mom is on TV, and my friends know who she is and love her, I saw it change a little bit. I became just slightly cooler.

What was it like navigating school?

That was the most challenging. We would have to condense all the work that we had to do in high school into three hours. Because my mom was momin’, she wanted to make sure that we were learning what we needed to learn, so that we could go to college. I graduated with honors from high school and college. I was on Sister, Sister [during both]. I had to be extremely focused. One biology teacher was like, “I don’t care what you’re doing. If you miss a certain number of classes, your grade goes a whole grade down.” So I made a deal with him and said, “Alright, I will come in and take the final, so you know that I’m not messing around. Whatever I get on that final is the grade that I get in your class.”

Negotiation, I love it!

And he accepted. I think I got a B+. A lot of the teachers didn't like the fact that we were on television, so I had to deal with that opposition. You had some kids who were just like, “Oh my God, Sister, Sister, that's so cool!” And then you had people who thought because we were on television, we were stuck-up. There was bullying, and that made me who I am today.

What brought you comfort at that time?

I loved TV dinners, especially the meatloaf one with the gravy and the mashed potatoes. They actually had these stands that you’d put your dinners on, and we would watch E.T., The Goonies, Kids Incorporated. Nesquik chocolate milk, Little League bubble gum, going outside and roller skating, jump roping to my cassette player — those things brought me so much joy.

You mentioned having support from your sister. How did you navigate that unique relationship while still becoming your own person?

I wanted to be seen as an individual, but I loved being a twin as well. I always say you can feel one thing and not invalidate the other. Around [my] early 20s, I started to see that we have different perspectives on life, we dated different people, we handled situations differently. And there was a moment of push-pull, like, Why aren’t you living life the way I am? And that was coming from both of us.

I had to learn to adjust to that and grow, make mistakes, and find my faith as my own person. It took years to own that, and then be OK with being different from my twin and her being different from me, [realizing that] different doesn’t mean bad.

What would you tell your 14-year-old self today?

I’m so proud of you. You believed in yourself. I never saw myself as the “it girl.” I was kind of nerdy, goody-two-shoes, a rule follower — not because I think I’m better than anyone else, it’s just how my cloth was cut. All those things that I was insecure about, I’m so happy that little girl never gave up on herself. That 14-year-old was a fighter.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.