Bella Thorne reflected on her dynamic with Zendaya during their time on Disney’s Shake It Up.
“I remember at the mix and matches, I think I liked her immediately,” Thorne, 28, said on the Wednesday, August 5, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, recalling when she met Zendaya, also 28, at a screen test. “I think that our chemistry was the best and I remember thinking, ‘She’s so tall and I’m so short.’ Then when they put us together for the screen test, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, they like it.'”
The former child star admitted that she and Zendaya had different skills.
“I remember us having to do the dancing and the freestyle, and I was like, ‘She can dance and I’m not a dancer.’ As a child, my mom was like, ‘You’re gonna work on it.’ For seven months, I took three dance classes a day and would do the auditions during the day and at night,” Thorne recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna be able to do this.'”
Thorne acknowledged that the pair were pitted against each other, adding, “People can’t [deal with] women [leading a show together]. … The patriarchy’s been doing it since the beginning of time. But you just go back and you’re like, ‘God damn, they were 12. What’s wrong with you? You’re an adult.'”
According to Thorne, things “got pretty bad” when she and Zendaya were working together.
“We’re supposed to be best friends. They play best friends,” she continued. “It got pretty bad and then you have your families and you have the rest of the set and everything. It got to a point where when we were on our Good Luck Charlie crossover and we escaped to another set in the middle of live taping, which is really ballsy, badass and rebellious.”
The costars took the opportunity to be alone and hash things out.
“Escaped is a funny word. 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.’ And we did. And we escaped to another set that wasn’t being used on another soundstage and we’re hiding up there,” Thorne shared. “Then they were looking for us. We stayed a little too long. They were looking for us for that next scene and we got into it, hashed it out and it was so beautiful.”
She continued: “It was my first experience — girl to girl — where you actually can speak and 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. And you can walk out of there seeing each other. I think it’s definitely in there in the book still as one of the most genuine girl-on-girl talks.”
Shake It Up aired on the Disney Channel from 2010 to 2013, helping to launch both Thorne and Zendaya’s careers. More than a decade after the show ended, Thorne opened up to Us about her dynamic with Zendaya on set.
“One of my favorite memories is me and Zendaya getting really close on Good Luck Charlie’s ‘Shake It Up’ episode,” she shared in 2024. “We had a struggle in our relationship beforehand with everything and we sat down for, like, two hours on a closed-off set on a different stage and really got personal and one-on-one with each other.”
Thorne also had fond memories with the rest of the cast, including Kenton Duty, Adam Irigoyen and Roshon Fegan. “That was always really, really fun [and] they were so lovely,” she recalled. “We definitely did have quite a family.”
