Forget child star. Jerry Mathers was practically a baby star, landing his first acting role as a 2-year-old.

Mathers might have been more famous as a child than he is today, thanks in large part to his role as Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. But despite his young age and starring role, there was one group that surprisingly wasn’t all that familiar with him: other kids.

In an interview with the Gannett News Service, Mathers explained why.

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"To be honest, as a kid, not that many people recognized me," Mathers said. "Leave It To Beaver was primarily an adult show, so most of the people that were kids had never really seen it."

That didn’t mean Mathers was short on fans. They just tended to be a little older...

"The fans of Leave it to Beaver are real, real nice," Mathers said. "Leave it to Beaver fans are like people you went to high school with. They come up to me and ask 'Hey, how's Wally and how's Eddie' and sometimes they ask me for my autograph."

In an article published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mathers also revealed that landing the role of the show’s protagonist wasn’t quite the stroke of luck it might have seemed.

Even as a little boy, he had already built a reputation in show business as a dependable and talented child actor. And that reliability mattered.

"Leave It To Beaver was a great show and we did it in the days of live television when there was no such thing as a re-take," Mathers said. "That's actually one of the reasons why I got cast as The Beaver. There were only a few of us kids whom the network trusted when it came to commercials and television shows."

So while Mathers may have been one of television’s most recognizable child stars, he wasn’t necessarily the most recognizable kid on the playground. At least, not if those kids weren’t watching Leave It to Beaver.