BELLA OF THE BALL
At 21, former Disney star Bella Thorne is spreading her wings to take on darker roles and conquer the internet, one Instagram post at a time
“Come upstairs with me,” Bella Thorne says. She takes off, racing up the neon-lit steps she has painted — every one a different colour of the rainbow — to her bedroom, above which iridescent pink bulbs warn: “[expletive] off.”
She waves me in anyway, past her bed — a mattress on the floor, encased by a tepee — and into the bathroom. There are stacks of clear acrylic drawers on every surface, all filled with hundreds of makeup products. She picks up a pencil, dotting beauty marks onto her face. This is one of the ways she deals with her acne, she explains — highlighting her freckles to distract from the blemishes on her face.
Downstairs, two publicists, an assistant, a stylist, a make-up artist, a photographer and — inexplicably — the director of one of the movies she is in are waiting for Thorne to touch up her face. She had been in the midst of a photo shoot when, after reviewing some of the images, she grew self-conscious about her skin.
As she finishes touching up, I take a look around her bathroom. Like every room in her house, which she purchased two years ago for $2 million (Dh7.34 million), it’s a craft store hodgepodge. Her shower is covered with a wall of faux ivy, and inspirational notes she’s written to herself hang from the ceiling: “Follow your instincts, Bella.”; “Your worst mistake is your best advice.”
Thorne’s home appears to be her canvas — the medium she uses
to express herself, be it through her hand-painted 12-foot unicorn statue, the hundreds of felt roses she’s glued to the wall or the castle she created for her 19 cats.
The abode — the exterior of which Thorne immediately had painted a loud violet — is wildly symbolic of where she is in her life. She bought it with money she
“I don’t even know what Bella would look like if she hadn’t been molested growing up, or her father hadn’t died. I don’t know that I like that girl.” BELLA THORNE | Actress
made via her Instagram account, where she says she can charge around $65,000 to blast an ad to her 18.2 million followers.
Thorne became Disney Channel-famous on Shake It Up, a show about a pair of adolescents balancing school with jobs as backup dancers. It wrapped five years ago, and Thorne has been trying to figure out the kind of star she wants to be since.
While her Shake It Up co-star Zendaya has landed major roles in blockbusters such as The Greatest Showman and
Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thorne has enjoyed a quieter but remarkably steady career for a former child star.
This year, she will have appeared in five movies — four of which are out this fall — and headlined the second season of Famous in Love, a recently cancelled Freeform series about a young woman trying to balance college with the perils of sudden stardom. And yet Thorne’s biggest impact at the moment is on social media, where she documents the exploits that have forged her reputation for being a wild child. Pictures of her topless. Pictures of her with red hair and orange hair and pink hair. Pictures of her kissing her boyfriend and her girlfriend. (Her boyfriend, Mod Sun, is a heavily tattooed “hippy hop” star. Her girlfriend, Tana Mongeau, is a YouTube star.)
But she’s also serious about acting in a way most people probably don’t realise. Every year, she says she makes a new vision board, and it always includes her desire to win an Oscar. This autumn, she had a small role as a cheerleader in the Sundance buzz movie Assassination
Nation, plays a girl who sees ghosts in the horror flick I Still See You, fights for her life in the rideshare-gone-wrong thriller
Ride and stars as a teen who coaxes her boyfriend to commit suicide in Lifetime’s Conrad & Michelle.
When he hired her on Ride, director Jeremy Ungar was slightly unsure of which Thorne he was going to get — the young woman who’s been working for over half her life, or the exhibitionist she appears to be on Instagram. “But she was a consummate professional,” the filmmaker said. “She is really passionate about delivering the best possible performance. There’s this sense that she has this crazy, wild side — and that is a part of her — but there’s another layer to Bella that I think there’s kind of a purity to.”
Still, it’s entirely possible that more of her fans will watch her Instagram stories than any of the independent films.
Like many people her age, Thorne spends a lot of time contemplating what people think of her. When people look at her Instagram, for instance, who do they see? We pull up her account, and I scroll through some of the images. “I mean, OK, this girl, she’s showing off her body. She’s got armpit hair,” she says, taking my phone in her hands.
“That’s just my [breasts] looking huge. And that’s a photo I like because I have no make-up on. But people say, ‘She’s crazy. She’s probably giving it up all the time. That girl’s a [expletive].’”
But Thorne isn’t like most people her age; as a Disney star, she was famous young, which meant people have long felt they could comment on how she looked. When she was
13, she and Zendaya went to the beach and posted a photo of Thorne in a black bikini.
Perez Hilton wrote a post saying he’d “really be more comfortable if she would just cover up.”
“Excuse us, Bella? WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER???” the 2011 post read. “Does she know you own this outfit? Please don’t tell us she bought it for you??”
The post caused such an uproar, Thorne says, that Disney Channel executives “tried to fire me.”
A Disney Channel spokesperson responded that Thorne’s “job was not threatened and would not be jeopardised merely over her bathing suit choice.”
It was this disconnect between brand expectation and reality that led to Thorne revealing the even greater battle she had been fighting in secret. Last December, when someone on Twitter trolled her with the message: “What did Disney do to this girl?! I think she was molested.” Thorne replied: “Yeah, I was. So it wasn’t Disney.”
From age six to 14, she subsequently wrote on Instagram, she was sexually abused by an older man in her home.
Thorne has never named her abuser because she does not want to relive the traumatic memories. “And I guess that makes me selfish,” she says, her voice growing quiet. “I could do it. I should do it. You should tell every girl to go after her attacker. You should tell every girl that she has the right to go out there and speak her truth.
“But then you don’t. Then you can’t even [speak out]. I always want to be a good person. And that makes me qualify as not as good of a person.”
Later, Thorne’s older sister, Dani, tells me that she learnt of Bella’s alleged abuse only “recently.” “I think the day that she did open up about it, it was a weird sense of — not, like, relief — but holy [expletive], this is real,” said Dani, four years Bella’s senior. “Really, that was the first step to leading her to where she is today.”
DARKER FARE
After Shake It Off, Thorne says her agents saw her emulating Rachel McAdams and transitioning to romantic dramas and comedies. She diligently took roles in broad commercial films with family appeal such as Blended and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
But she was really interested in darker fare — the kind of stuff she’s doing now. “I grew up loving The Grudge and The Shining,” she says. “Horror is the thing that most keeps my eyes on the screen, so I don’t think about myself or whatever I’m going through.”
It’s getting dark, and I suggest I should leave because I’ve probably been here too long and I can also no longer pretend I’m not allergic to her intergenerational family of cats. “Hey, Bella, one more thing,” I say. “Do you ever wonder if it would be easier to be in an industry where there isn’t so much judgement aimed at you?”
“No,” she replies without hesitation. “Because I like my life. All of the things that are awful — especially all of the things that happened growing up — I’ve always looked at it as: ‘Why me?’ Because I am strong enough. Because it has gotten me here. I don’t even know what Bella Thorne would look like if she hadn’t been molested growing up, or her father hadn’t died. I don’t know that I like that girl.”