Brenda Song Recalls Landing Suite Life Role as Mom Had Breast Cancer: ‘A Big Turning Point’ (Exclusive)

Brenda Song is opening up about what it was like having to choose between going to Harvard and taking her role on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody — all while her mother was in treatment for breast cancer.

In an exclusive preview of Tuesday’s episode of Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meals provided to PEOPLE, the Running Point star sits down with host Josh Scherer to discuss the pivotal moment in her life and career.

“I remember, I found out my mom had breast cancer and it was just — I mean, cancer is the scariest six-letter word in the dictionary, because it just means, like, death or unknown,” Song, 36, says. “Like, you just don’t know. And I think it just didn’t even hit me.”

Song’s star was already on the rise at the time, having appeared in a number of films and TV shows as a child actor in the ’90s and early 2000s. Then, in the wake of her mother’s diagnosis, at age 15 she was cast as spoiled heiress London Tipton on the Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Around the same time, she received an early acceptance letter from Harvard.

“It was the first time in my life that I was like, ‘Oh, this is a crossroads in my life. Like, this is a big turning point. Whatever choice I make is going to change the course of my life,’ ” she tells Scherer. “My dad, who’s a second grade schoolteacher, was like, ‘You go to college to figure out what you wanna do, and if you want to continue to act, you have a beautiful opportunity to do it, but it can’t be an after-school activity anymore. It has to be your career.’ ”

Song says the decision was an easy one: “For me it was like, hands down, this is my dream. There’s no way that I can say no to this.”

The actress took the Suite Life role, costarring with Cole and Dylan Sprouse and Ashley Tisdale in the show’s entire three-season run from 2005 to 2008. But it was a “really hard” time for Song’s already close-knit family, drawing them even closer together. “We really leaned on each other all the time,” she recalls.

“I look back and I don’t know how my mom did it, because she got breast cancer in her early 30s, when she was, like, 31,” the Last Showgirl star says. “And at that time, she’d had a teenager and two young kids and going through all of this. And I don’t know how she was going through this and still my support system.”

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Song says her mother’s diagnosis also drew her particularly close to her younger brothers and influenced her work with families who were also dealing with the disease.

“When I was working with Disney, I worked a lot with families with kids who have been affected by cancer, because of course we wanna focus on whoever’s going through the treatment,” she says. “But also, you know, having the conversation with your family and being able to have an open conversation with younger children, because it’s just so confusing and scary. And because I had two younger brothers, it was something that I felt very passionate about.”

Song’s full episode of Last Meals premieres Tuesday, March 4.