Publish date: 2023-12-15

Millennials can get a taste of their youth back with Disney+ making Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century available on the streaming service. The 1999 Disney flick was beloved by a generation, and now those same viewers are sharing it with their own children. Three of the popular actors, Kirsten Storms, 36, Phillip Rhys, 48, and Gregory Smith, 36, got together for a reunion where they dished  in a remote video chat with PEOPLE  about the impact of the film on their lives, as well as fun memories of shooting in Vancouver, Canada.

In the film, Kirsten’s space-station living 13-year-old character of Zenon Kar gets grounded and sent down to Earth to live with her Aunt Judy. She has problems blending in at school, then uncovers a sinister plot against her outer-space home. Kirsten was just 14-years-old when she shot the film, and had such a blast hanging out on set with Greg and his friends, as they were all the same age.

The movie just so happened to film all of the classroom and school scenes at Greg’s real life high school in Vancouver, BC, so it literally felt like home to him. “It was such a fun shoot, we all hung out together. Because we shot it at my high school during the summer break, they let a bunch of my friends be extras (in classroom scenes). So in all those scenes, that’s who I palled around with growing up.” Kristen added that, “I hung out with Greg and his friends the entire shoot. I still look back on that time as being so much fun.”

Kirsten is a mom now to six-year-old Harper Rose Barash, her daughter with ex-husband and her former General Hospital co-star Brandon Barash, 40. She showed Zenon to her daughter earlier this year, but said that she was too young to really understand the storyline. But that didn’t stop Harper from recognizing that 13-year-old Zenon and mommy were the same person.

‘”She was really excited to see me on TV cause she had not seen me in anything before. We had to clear up some confusion that I wasn’t really Zenon in real life. She thought when I left her I went to be Zenon,” Kirsten sweetly shared.

Despite her long run as Maxie Jones on ABC’s General Hospital, and her five years as Belle Black on NBC’s Days of Our Lives before that, Kirsten says that she’s still stopped by fans and recognized the most for her role as Zenon. “All the time, it never fails. I get recognized more for Zenon than I do from General Hospital, still. And with Disney plus coming out it just increased that.”

“But I think it’s funny, I get asked to say ‘zetus-lapeutus’ all the time, and I just go with it,” about her character’s beloved catch phrases. “I love that this movie stuck around for so long. And now people are playing it for their kids, which I think is really cool.”

As for hopping into their characters 21 years later, Kirsten is all for a revival. “I would be down for that. They’re rebooting a lot of the OG Disney stories so I think that would be fun,” she reveals. Phillip explains, “There’s definitely something there. There’s a reason it connected with so many. The story, the sensibility, the universal tale…ultimately ‘there’s no place like home’ from the Wizard of Oz…everyone can identify with that.”

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