Bella Thorne admits her family was close to being homeless before she was cast on “Shake It Up”
It’s hard to image the Disney Channel without Bella Thorne, but that was almost a reality. In fact, Thorne admits her family would’ve been homeless if she wasn’t on the network, which is why she auditioned in the first place.
If you look at Thorne now, she doesn’t scream Disney darling. She’s edgy, fierce, funky, and very unique. She loves to rock different hair colors on the regular and is open about everything from suicide to being bisexual.
All of those things aren’t exactly what comes to mind when you think about the Disney Channel. Now, the 19-year-old actress is opening up needing the role on Shake it Up to help her family.
“I literally said in my audition, ‘I don’t sing. I don’t dance. I’m basically tone deaf, and I’m not funny. So I don’t know why I’m here.’” Thorne revealed on MTV’s podcast Happy Sad Confused. “And everybody just started laughing. They all thought it was a joke.”
“We were about to live physically on the street if I didn’t have that role,” she admitted.
"We were living off Stouffer's coupons, and that's all we had to eat every day. That may not sound like a big deal to everybody, but when you're a single mom raising four kids with debt and you have nothing to your name, it's f**king shitty."
Now Thorne is back on TV with the Freeform series, Famous in Love, but says it was a long road to it.
“It was really hard to get a job after the show. People didn’t want to read me,” Thorne says of being type-cast as a tween-star, “It was like starting back at the bottom and working my way up all the way again.”
Lucky for us, Thorne stuck it out and paved her own path post-Disney Channel, and we love her for it.
