Alana ‘Honey Boo Boo’ Thompson on Her Child Star Nightmare and New Life at 19: ‘Love That I’ve Persevered’ (Exclusive)

It’s rare to see the exact moment a star is born but for Alana Thompson, that moment is etched in TV history. She was 5 years old and filming an interview on TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, when she quipped, “A dollar made me holler, honey boo boo!”

Then a rambunctious spitfire in the Georgia pageant circuit, the one-liner birthed her nickname and helped land her a spinoff reality show. “I don’t know why but I said it off the top of my head,” she recalls. “‘Honey Boo Boo’ stuck and she’s been there forever.”

But today, Alana is a calm and reflective young adult. Honey Boo Boo makes small, fleeting appearances throughout her interview for this week’s cover story — a giggle here, a slight neck roll there — but Alana, now a 19-year-old college student at Regis University in Colorado, is no longer a caricature of her own making. She’s also seen enough to know the world isn’t all trophies and tea parties. “Looking back it’s like, ‘Dang, I really went through all that s—? That’s crazy.’”

For well over a decade the highs and heartbreaking lows of her family’s life have been documented on TV. After her Toddlers breakthrough, Alana became the focus of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in 2012. Meant to be a lighthearted look at a low-income, self-described “redneck” Southern family, the show centered on pageant princess Alana along with her mother “Mama June” Shannon, three older sisters — Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell, Jessica “Chubbs” Shannon and Lauryn “Pumpkin” Efird — and Alana’s father, Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson.

But the folksy family spectacle took several bleak turns. Now for the first time Alana is telling her own harrowing story as she narrates the new Lifetime biopic I Was Honey Boo Boo, premiering May 17. “I’m a little nervous,” admits Alana, now studying nursing and living with longtime boyfriend Dralin Carswell, 24.

From Mama June’s wild stage mom antics to her downward spiral into toxic relationships and drug addiction, Alana is opening up about what she and her sisters, including Anna, who died in 2023, endured both on camera and off. “I did not want this movie to be throwing punches at my mama and making her out to be the bad guy,” Alana says. “But I didn’t hold back and if she gets mad, at the end of the day it’s the truth.”

Around 2019, Alana was a young teen and Mama June, who’d began experimenting with drugs as a teen herself, was deep in the throes of addiction to crack cocaine. Their family’s life imploded as cameras kept rolling. “I noticed something was off about her,” Alana says of that time. “She started locking her doors which really made me think, ‘Oh, what is she doing?’”

In March of 2019 Mama June and then-boyfriend Eugene “Geno” Doak were arrested and charged with felony possession of drugs. At school, “People were like, ‘I saw your mama on the news with a busted tooth, strung out,’” Alana recalls. “I’m like, ‘Great, like I didn’t see that too.’”

But Alana refused to let that situation define her. With the support of her sister Lauryn, who gained full custody of her in 2022, she focused on school and graduated in 2023.

“I just always told myself you know that you want to do something better with your life and bigger with your life than just being on TV, so you’ve got to get up and go, you’ve got to graduate so you can make it to college and be the nurse that you want to be.”

Getting to where she is now, a rising junior, wasn’t easy. One hurdle in particular was finances. Despite spending most of her life on TV, Alana says thanks to her mom, when she graduated there was little to show for it.

The teen claims Mama June, who sold their home and other belongings in the height of her addiction, took $35,000 of her earnings for appearing on Dancing with the Stars in 2019. Only recently did she return it, but “there was no, ‘I’m sorry,’” says Alana. Furthermore, she claims she’s never seen any money from her years on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

That said, she and her mom, who’s been sober for more than five years, have mostly reconciled. The two still film together on WeTV’s Mama June: Family Crisis returning for its seventh season on May 30. “I can’t really talk about [the money],” says Mama June. “That’s part of this season.”

Forgiveness, Alana says, “was hard, but at the end of the day, she’s my mom. When she was bad in her addiction I just kept thinking about the day she’d recover. We’re going pretty good. Hopefully it lasts. I just no longer have any expectations for her.”

Adds Mama June of her past transgressions: “I don’t remember who that person was, because I’ve worked so much on myself.”

These days Alana has high expectations for herself. “When I graduate I’ll be the only one in my family with a degree,” she says. “I love that I’ve persevered past who people thought I was.”