Bella Thorne said she and Zendaya snuck off the set of a Disney Channel live taping to “hash it out” after being “pitted against each other” as child stars, revealing that the pressure surrounding their friendship “got pretty bad”.
The 28-year-old starred opposite Zendaya, 29, in Disney Channel’s Shake It Up, which ran for three seasons and 75 episodes between 2010 and 2013. The pair played aspiring dancers and best friends CeCe Jones and Rocky Blue who went on to land roles on the fictional dance show Shake It Up, Chicago.
They reprised their characters in the 2011 Good Luck Charlie crossover episode “Charlie Shakes It Up”, where Thorne said the pair slipped away from the set for a conversation that ultimately repaired their friendship.
Looking back at their time together, Thorne said women in entertainment were often encouraged to compete with one another. “They don't want women with women. With women it’s like, ‘We have to make you all beg for one spot so that we can have the 80 other million ones,” she told host Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “If you guys can beat each other down and scrape to whatever extent we’re asking you to, eat yourselves alive while we have all these spots. But for women? Just one. Just one of you. The patriarchy has been doing it since the beginning of time.”
Thorne said the experience was even more disturbing in hindsight given how young she and Zendaya were at the time. “You just go back and you’re like, ‘God d***, they were 12. Literally 12. Crazy. What’s wrong with you? You're an adult.’ And also, it's a duo. Like, we’re not beating each other out. Like, they are supposed to be best friends,” she said.
Thorne said the atmosphere surrounding the pair eventually “got pretty bad”.
“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. Very rebellious,” she said. “We didn't escape but we snuck out. We knew that we had three scenes until we were up again and we were just like, ‘Let's just go talk.’ We escaped to another set that was not being used, on another soundstage, and we were hiding up there. We stayed a little too long. They were looking for us for that next scene.”
Thorne said that she and Zendaya “got into it, hashed it out, and it was so beautiful”.
“It was my first experience, woman to woman, girl to girl, where you can actually speak and you can both be heard about the different things you've been experiencing, what people are saying and how they're trying to do this to you. You can walk out of there seeing each other,” she said.
The Independent has reached out to Zendaya’s representatives for comment.
Thorne previously talked about the rivalry set up between her and Zendaya, stating that they “weren’t friends” while working together in the first season. “It took us those other two seasons of becoming so close,” she told Us Weekly in 2021.
Thorne most recently starred in the revenge thriller Find Your Friends earlier this year and was now preparing to make her feature directorial debut with Color Your Hurt, a coming-of-age thriller that she wrote and produced as well. She also revealed on Call Her Daddy that she was writing, directing and starring in Spring Breakers 2, a follow-up to Harmony Korine’s 2012 cult film.
Since her Disney Channel days, Zendaya has become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, winning two Primetime Emmy awards for her portrayal of troubled teenager Rue Bennett in HBO’s Euphoria. She’s enjoying one of the busiest years of her career in 2026, starring as Athena in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey and reprising her role as Michelle Jones-Watson opposite Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Earlier this year, she appeared in the A24 romantic film The Drama alongside Robert Pattinson.
She will return as the Fremen warrior Chani in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, set to be released in December this year.
