Bella Thorne Reveals She & Zendaya ‘Weren’t Friends’ at First on ‘Shake It Up’

Since the finale of Shake It Up in 2013, fans have wanted to know if Bella Thorne and Zendaya are still friends. Bella and Zendaya played best friends CeCe Jones and Rocky Blue on the Disney Channel’s Shake It Up from 2010 to 2013. Since then, the two have rarely talked about each other, which leads fans to wonder if they’re still close and what their relationship was like as Disney Channel stars.

In an interview with Us Weekly on Wednesday, February 17, Bella explained that she and Zendaya weren’t close in the first season of Shake It Up but became closer as the show went on.

“We had to deal with that so much on Shake It Up,” she said. “It’s like we said [in] a couple interviews when we were younger, how we explained how in the first season we weren’t friends and it took us those other two seasons of becoming so close. [It was hard] not having someone pitted against you [before] and then all of a sudden, now everyone is pitting you against each other. That fed into our heads. It made us not [be] friends in that first season.”

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The Famous in Love alum revealed that she and Zendaya became closer after they had a “beautiful talk in the middle of a sound stage” as they filmed an episode of Good Luck Charlie, another Disney Channel show at the time. “We were really able to put our cards out on the table and understanding each other,” she said, noting that she and Zendaya were able to be “so young and so mature at such a young age.”

In an interview with J-14 in 2017, Bella opened up about how constant comparisons to each other strained her friendship with Zendaya. “We wanted to love each other, but yet we were constantly being put against each other,” she said at the time. “It was, ‘Who’s better at this?’ and ‘Who’s better at that?’”

As for what their friendship is like now, Bella told Us Weekly that she has nothing but love for her former costar. “Zendaya’s amazing. I fucking love her,” she said. “She’s always been amazing and she’s always going to be amazing. I’m just happy that people see that. She’s getting the recognition she deserves. That just makes me so happy. I feel like when people put us against each other, it’s just like,…‘Why are you doing this? Is it just because we’re women?’”