Bella Thorne Says She Lost Role at 10 Because Director Accused Her of ‘Flirting with Him’
Bella Thorne is recounting a shocking moment from her childhood acting career which she thinks about all the time.
The 25-year-old actress appeared on model and actress Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast High Low with EmRata for Tuesday’s episode. During the wide-ranging conversation, the two discussed how girls become sexualized at a young age working in Hollywood.
Bella Thorne has been acting and modeling most of her life, finding fame in 2010 after starring alongside Zendaya in Disney Channel’s Shake It Up.
She said it was “f—ing stressful” being a child actor in the public eye, especially when it came to discovering her sexuality with “not only the whole world watching you, but specifically men, and people and women around you telling you this is the box you have to fit in.”
“I feel like I’ve rocked the word ‘sex’ for a long time and I’ll always keep rocking this word because it’s what’s been put on me since I was so little, and yet it’s still something that I’ve taken so much of my own power back by owning that word,” Bella Thorne said on the podcast.
Ratajkowski, 31, then shared a story from when she was 16 and a modeling agent told her, “This face — this is how we know this girl gets f—ed. You gotta give a lesson, Emily, on this.” She added, “But that is the reality of being a young woman in the industry.”
Thorne then shared a similar “insane” story that involved an unnamed director when she was a kid.
“I had a director give me feedback once and I was 10. The casting director calls my agent and the agent calls my mom, and they’re like, ‘So, she’s not moving forward because the director felt like she was flirting with him and it made him really uncomfortable.’ What the f— are you talking about, man? I don’t give a f— what I said. I don’t care if I said, ‘Eat my p—y right now’ — she is 10 years old! Why ever would you think that? Why?”
Thorne said she goes back to this moment “every day.” “I’m trying to find, almost, fault in myself,” she continued.
“Like, ‘What did you do, Bella? What did you do that made him feel like this?’ And every time I’m like, ‘Bella, stop it. Even that thought right there is becoming part of the problem. Don’t even think that thought.’ It does drive me crazy.”
