Bella Thorne revealed on the latest episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast that she was aggressively pitted against her “Shake It Off” co-star Zendaya amid the height of their Disney stardom. The two actors became household names among Disney Channel viewers for playing CeCe Jones (Thorne) and Rocky Blue (Zendaya) on “Shake It Off,” which ran for three seasons and 75 episodes between 2010 and 2013.
“With women it’s like, ‘We have to make you all beg for one spot… if you can beat each other down and scrap to whatever extent we’re asking you two [and] eat yourselves alive while we have all these spots but for women, it’s just one of you…’ The patriarchy has been doing it since the beginning of time,” Thorne recalled. “You go back and we were 12! What’s wrong with you? We are supposed to be best friends. We play best friends. It got pretty bad.”
The situation at Disney got so bad that one day while filming an episode Thorne and Zendaya snuck off so they could be alone together and have a heart-to-heart about the situation.
“It got to a point where when we were on our ‘Good Luck Charlie’ crossover, we escaped to another set in the middle of live taping — which is really ballsy, badass and rebellious. We snuck out. We knew we had three scenes until we were up again and we like just went to talk,” Thorne said. “We got into it, hashed it out, and it was so beautiful”
“It was my first experience — woman to woman, girl to girl — where you actually can speak,” she added. “You can both be heard about the different things you’ve been experiencing and what people are saying and how they’re trying to do this to you. You can walk out of there seeing each other… It was one of the most genuine girl-on-girl talks.”
Thorne and Zendaya have been honest in the past about how being pitted against each other threatened to derail their friendship. The former told Us Weekly in 2021 that “all of a sudden everyone is pitting you against each other and that fed into our heads. It made us not [be] friends in that first season.”
Watch Thorne’s full interview on “Call Her Daddy” in the video below.