This fall, Daniella Monet is returning to the role that made her.
A mother of two, she had stepped entirely out of her career for five years to have her kids. Her description of the woman she was before is uncomplicated: “I was just me, me without a plus two.” Monet had a career that moved when she told it to and time that belonged only to her. She has spent the last several years learning what it costs to give both of those things away, and what motherhood gives back.
It would be easy to label the timing of her return to acting as a comeback. Monet doesn’t see it that way. To her, it was the moment the math finally worked.
Three weeks became five years
For a stretch, the career simply receded. It wasn’t a decision she announced so much as one her body kept making for her. Monet had two babies in quick succession, and everything paused to make room for them.
She is careful to keep what came next in the context of her own experience. “My personal opinion,” she says, “is that the industry isn’t cut out to support women during pregnancy.” She describes the pressure to “snap back” as physical and mental, and on a timeline that she acknowledges “for some isn’t as easy.”
Monet decided to step away entirely—left her management, hung up acting. What she’d planned as a short pause kept extending itself, until weeks became years. She doesn’t frame those years as a loss. Her body wanted to be with her babies, she says, and she let it.
The fork
For five years, she felt like she was either pregnant or nursing. Then that chapter closed—she weaned her youngest, both kids grew more independent, more able to advocate for themselves—and her own life started to come back to her. The question was what to do with it.
She was at a fork: go back to work or have another baby. Two very different directions but both possible now that there was room in her life again. Monet felt ready for either—but understood it could not be both. She chose work. But it wasn’t just any job to take to dip a toe back in. There was a new Victorious coming together—Hollywood Arts on Netflix—with an opportunity for her to return as Trina. The thing she’d grown up inside was being rebuilt, and this time there was a bigger chair in the room, with a chance to come on as a producer, too. Monet met with a new manager, and with that, she made up her mind. She would dive into the waters—head first.
It is a choice plenty of mothers will recognize from the other side of a long pause. Anyone who has rebuilt a career after years at home knows the hardest part is rarely the work itself.
A comfort station
Acting isn’t her only reason for coming back. She also got a voice note from Ariana Grande, as one does.
Monet’s old castmate saw the news about Hollywood Arts and sent her a message about going back to help make Nickelodeon what it had been for the two of them. Monet knew exactly what Grande meant. “It had a feeling,” she says, calling it her “comfort station.” They’d both grown up on that feeling before they became part of it. Now Monet had the chance to do it again, this time on purpose: a new Victorious that could be a comfort station for a new generation of kids. She didn’t have to imagine that generation—two of those kids live in her house, and they’ve watched the original. She’d spent those years away raising part of her own future audience.
“It landed with me,” Monet says.
She wouldn’t just be rebuilding a show. She’d be rebuilding the shelter. This time from the inside.
She wouldn’t just be rebuilding a show. She’d be rebuilding the shelter.
The honest version
Monet’s work has always been, in part, about her kids. When she talks about why she does any of it, provision comes first—plainly, and without apology. She works to give her kids a good and secure life. What’s changed is that the work and the kids are no longer in a tug-of-war. Which is not to say that the days are entirely smooth.
Monet describes a real hard day: “Both my husband and I have work calls at the same time,” she begins, before describing the scramble. A quiet corner of the house with decent WiFi while the kids parked in front of a TV show. Everyone pulling on the same network at once. Nothing quite functioning the way it’s supposed to. At least one child in need of something at all times and there’s nowhere for anyone to hide. It’s not a crisis. It’s just the ordinary machinery of two working parents’ day seizing up, which is somehow worse, because there’s no one to call and nothing to blame.
She is honest about what keeps everything standing. When work pulls her away (long hours, or a shoot out of town), her husband manages the home so she can concentrate her work into finite, protected blocks—not endless availability, but real hours with a fence around them. But Monet acknowledges that even the careful structures don’t always hold. She recalls a holiday spent shooting, away from her kids. “I was so sad. I remember breaking down in my hotel room feeling awful to miss an Easter when they were such a sweet age to experience it.”
“So far that has been the hardest part,” she says. And she holds the reality inside a larger gratitude: “I’ve recognized how lucky I am to get to do what I love for a period of time and that work affords me the downtime to be a mom.”
I’ve recognized how lucky I am to get to do what I love and that work affords me the downtime to be a mom.
Wholeness, not balance
“Balance is a funny word,” Monet says.
The idea started coming apart for her in a session with her life coach, who challenged the entire premise. The logic goes that to hold two things in balance, you’re always giving each of them half of you. But motherhood isn’t a thing you give half of—nor is work. That’s not the life she’s describing.
Monet talks about wholeness instead: a self that holds the mother and the actor and the producer and the person at once—not a self forever robbing one to pay another. The way she talks, it sounds more like permission than discipline.
The through-line is attunement, not rules. She pays attention to what a given season is actually asking of her and answers that, instead of holding a fixed plan against a changing life. “The only time it goes wrong,” Monet says, “is when I ignore my intuition.”
Nowhere is that more literal than at the table. She raises her kids on a plant-based diet, but she’s allergic to running it like a rulebook. It started simply. As babies, they ate mostly vegan, because that’s how she cooked. And at some point, it felt right to introduce eggs, and to talk with them about choices: that they get to decide what goes inside their bodies. She isn’t after compliance. “It’s so much more about being well-rounded,” Monet says, “doing our best, making healthy choices that feel aligned with our bodies and morals,” and doing her best not to stress about it.
This is modeled, not enforced; noticed, not policed. When she talks about cooking, the wellness language falls away entirely and what’s left is plainer and warmer. Just cook, she says. It’s therapeutic.
What it all comes back to
Monet went back to Hollywood Arts to help build, for someone else’s kids, the exact thing she once had: a bright place to go when the day is too much. She built it, in a quieter way, for her own kids first — a home held steady, a mother who came back when the season was right, a table with something good on it. It’s all the same substance, moving in a circle.
She’s not calling it a comeback. She’s calling it the thing she does now, with her whole self, on purpose. And this time, the two people watching most closely are the ones who have only ever known her as Mom—just beginning to see she was all of this, too, all along.
In the kitchen with Daniella
A plant-based favorite from the Monet household: the homemade ice cream her kids actually ask for. (More at Daniella’s Digest, her space for recipes and family wellness.)
Coconut Ice Cream
- 1 can coconut milk
- Maple syrup, to taste
- Splash of vanilla extract
- Pinch of salt
- Handful of chocolate chips, melted
Blend the coconut milk, maple syrup, vanilla, and salt together until smooth, then churn in an ice cream maker per the instructions. Drizzle in the melted chocolate at the end.
No churn, no problem: Monet’s shortcut for a hot afternoon is even simpler. Melted chocolate over frozen fruit.
Follow Daniella Monet on Instagram at @daniellamonet, and find more recipes at Daniella’s Digest (@daniellasdigest).
- Cover & hero photography
- Eric Scott
- Photography
- Ben Cope
- Writer
- Kerri J. Kolen
