Interview with Bella Thorne #VeryBadDayEvent

So I hope you have had a chance to see Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day in theaters. If you haven’t, you should go soon! It is beyond adorable and with the all star cast, what is not to love? You can check out my review of the movie as well as the reasons why I loved it so much! While I was on my #VeryBadDayEvent trip, I got to interview Bella Thorne.  Yes, the Bella Thorne and she is even more lovely in person. I hope she had fun with us bloggers. If you do not know who she is and my husband had no clue either, she was CeCe Jones on Disney’s Shake It Up.  She also plays Celia in the Alexander movie.

Now I have never seen Shake it Up but my son has and he told me all about Bella Thorne. I had no idea she was so young. She is only 17 and she has done so much in her life. He loves her character and she is one of the main reasons he was so excited about letting me go to LA without him. We wanted to get to the bottom of her being a sort of ‘mean’ girl in Alexander.

Question: Being the mean girl is kind of a departure for you. So, I mean what were you channeling? Some of your own experiences or I mean how did you find Celia?

Bella Thorne – You can’t think of Celia as a mean character, ’cause she’s not. You have to think of Celia as a perfectionist. Now, you guys are all moms, so let’s say I’ve completely organized these phones all in a very great order, okay, very straight, and somebody comes in and knocks this water over all your guys’ phones. Are you guys gonna be mad? And so, Celia’s, um, she’s, she’s a perfectionist, and when things don’t go her way, she wants to make them perfect, and when someone keeps messing that up, she ends up getting angry. That’s understandable.

We also wanted to find out her advice for young girls. As an influential star, of course young girls look up to her and Bella Thorne was able to give us some great advice for our young girls.  And older ones I guess.

Question: I have two teenage girls and so they are very familiar with who you are. So what kind of message do you want as an actress to two teenage girls who look up to you?

Bella Thorne –  I’m gonna give them a piece of advice that I was given and I wish I would’ve taken it. Growing up on TV — and I really grew up mostly on Shake It Up — and I always tried to be perfect for everybody and I wanted everyone to like me. For some reason, I really cared what other people thought so much and I would do anything to get someone’s stamp of approval. And now that I’m, you know, 17, I really don’t care. I don’t. And I wish I would’ve cared so much, because I changed who I was as a person to be who everybody wanted me to be, and that’s not a cute look.

And you have to realize that I don’t care who you are; I don’t care if you’re in high school and you have glasses and braces and you don’t think you’re cool, people will like you for being you, no matter what. It’s impossible for people not to like you when you’re just being you. It really is. You will find a branch, and I have. I have a great group of friends now and we don’t have to impress each other. I’m not wearing makeup when I’m with them. I look ratchet. I’m looking ratchet when I’m with them. I’m in sweat pants. I am oily, greasy, sweaty. I don’t care. And we don’t have to prove anything to each other. And that’s what’s cool.

I wish I had known that when I was her age.  Or my nieces ages. They worry so much about boys and what everyone thinks and here is this actress with tons of experience saying that she worries about the same thing. And she said ratchet. I hate that word. My nieces say it all the time but then again, she is 17 so I guess that is the cool thing now.

I think it was very amazing that she was so open about being dyslexic.  She mentioned it several times during our questions. She said that the scene at Tokyo Wako with Steve Carell lighting himself on fire was one of the hardest to film because she could not get the name right.

Bella Thorne – It was like 11:30 and I was tired.  I was tired, and I’d been doing this scene all day long.  There’s a word in the movie and it’s the name of the place that they go to dinner that weird, weird name.  I had to say this name, and when you’re dyslexic, you’re usually really good at memorizing, so I’ll read something once and I have it completely memorized.  But that word when I first read it, I didn’t say it correctly, and so I was on set and somebody said, no, it’s actually like this.  So, I had already memorized it wrong. They kept trying to get me to do it right.  I did maybe 25 takes of that same exact line over and over and every time I got it wrong.

She also mentioned it when we asked if she had read the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day which the movie is based on.

Bella Thorne – When the book was really, really famous I was young and I was really uncomfortable having dyslexia at that point.  So, I didn’t read it, because I didn’t want to read.  Now that I’ve read it, and I’ve read the script and the movie, obviously.  Now I’m familiar with the story.

Having dealt with this with my husband and oldest son, I appreciate it when influential actors talk about real issues.  She is very real and I think it is awesome that she shared that with us.