BELLA THORNE
The bisexual actor speaks to Alim Kheraj about living life in the fast lane, and how her I.D.G.A.F. attitude has helped her find success.
Bella Thorne’s life is unpredictable. Although, that’s how she likes things. The 21-year-old former child star, actor, singer, writer, entrepreneur and social media sensation thrives on keeping people on their toes. It’s why she has over 18 million followers on Instagram and why, for the last few years, gossip rags have stalked and obsessed over her – you never know what she’s going to do next.
The Daily Mail and commenters on Instagram would like you to believe that Thorne is out of control (she might be), taking on a number of hardcore drugs (she’s not, just weed) and following in the footsteps of former Disney stars like Lindsay Lohan and Demi Lovato, whose wild antics we now know were a mask for something much darker. Indeed, if you were to just read the headlines – impromptu trips to Cannes where she canoodled with notorious philanderer and party animal Scott Disick, love triangles with Hollywood’s hot young things, Snapchat videos of her making out with a number unidentified men and women, filming herself getting a bikini wax, nudie Instagram snaps – you might even start to believe that Thorne enjoys courting press attention. And in a way, you’d be right. “I’m bored of all this clean queen shit,” she says over a crackly phone line calling from LA. “If you’re gonna talk shit [about me] then I’m going to talk shit, too. I’m not a publicist. I’m not like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to let it die down.’ I’m like, ‘FUCK YOU!’” Quite.
“I’m rebellious in that way,” she continues. “If you come at me with something, I very much have something funny, witty and ballsy to reply with pretty much at all times. You never know what’s going to come out of my mouth. I’m all over the place in that sense.”
This unpredictability is something that over the course of two frenetic phone calls, I experience first-hand. One minute I’m talking to Thorne and the next she’s gone mid-answer to attend a meeting. There’s also the sound of chaos in her home. Her dogs, she says, “are being so annoying right now”, and at one point one of them even bites her. I can hear her climbing in and out of cars as she drives around LA and, initially, she’s distracted and unfocused, ju¤ling the interview with conversations she’s having with people in her house and in the car.
While this is unsettling for an interview, it’s not surprising that Thorne subscribes to a life of uncertainty. Growing up in Florida, her life irrevocably changed when she was nine years old after her father died in a traffic accident. While she had modelled and acted in the past, Thorne has spoken about how she became her family’s sole breadwinner. But being an actor is a precarious career filled with instability. After securing small roles on The O.C. and HBO’s Big Love, her big break came when she auditioned for Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up aged 12, which she starred in alongside Zendaya. At that time, Thorne has said that her family were facing homelessness. “When you’re a single mom raising four kids with debt and you have nothing to your name, it’s fucking shitty,” she said to MTV podcast Happy Sad Confused in 2017.
What working so young did do was instil an unwavering sense of ambition. “Being six weeks old and modelling before I even knew how to talk is an interesting thing,” she says. “But I think that set me up for the rest of my life. I don’t know how to not work. I’ve been working for so long that I don’t know how to stop working. I don’t have a turn off button. It’s very stressful.” Nevertheless, graduating from a
Disney Channel show had its own problems. Thorne has spoken about how casting directors didn’t want to read her for parts because of her Mickey Mouse affiliated past, forcing her to start at the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder. Yet, this also created a sense of freedom, too. “I was super obedient and I never talked back as a kid,” she recalls. “I was so obedient that I think that when I turned 18 I was like, ‘Holy fuck, I can breathe. I only have to obey myself now at this current moment in time.’”
Breaking out on her own on the cusp of adulthood and with only $200 to her name, she started hustling, be it in TV (she’s starred in the small screen remake of Scream), music (she’s just started her own record label), films (she loves doing horror movies) and, most importantly, on social media. It’s because of Instagram that Thorne was able to buy herself a house. In a documentary she made with Vogue, she can be seen detailing how she charges $65,000 for a single post on the platform, with a post on her Instagram Stories or on Snapchat costing between “10 to 20K”.
Still, unlike numerous influencers or social media stars, Thorne’s output on her social platforms feels genuine, even if she is charging brands to advertise products like green tea detox facial masks or video editing apps for smartphones on her accounts. These posts appear next to Thorne lounging on boats in swimwear or videos of herself mucking around with her friends. She often writes mini-essays to accompany posts, too, opening up about herself in that way that social media stars do, revealing enough so that their followers feel like they’re friends.
That’s not to say that she necessarily enjoys social media. “I’m not gonna lie, Instagram never really makes me feel comfortable,” she admits. “I’m never like, ‘Oh, I feel so comfortable that I’m scrolling through Instagram.’ If anything, Instagram makes me feel uncomfortable at almost all times. Yeah, it’s nice to know what everyone is doing, like literally, what the fuck is everybody doing right now? But beside that, when I scroll through my phone on social media at night, it ends up making me really sad. Something about it makes me depressed, so I always end up tossing my phone down and lying on the bed huffing and puffing.”
I say that I also get fatigue by Instagram and often feel bad after spending time using the app. “It seems like that’s what Instagram is for these days,” she says, agreeing. “It’s this social ladder and this stepping stone for who can get more likes, for who can post better content and who can this or that more. It makes it so exhausting.” Does she feel that she could ever get rid of it? “Er, no.” She pauses. “It doesn’t affect me enough to get rid of it, I don’t think.”
While I’m not necessarily convinced that’s true, I understand the important role that social media plays in Bella Thorne’s life – it pays her bills. But most notably, social media has allowed Thorne to control her narrative. In 2016, against the advice of her then publicity team, she used social media to come out as bisexual in a tweet to a fan.
While 2018 was dubbed #20GAYTEEN by Hayley Kiyoko, numerous bi and pansexual people have renamed 2019 #20BITEEN. Is this the year of bisexuality? “I hope so,” Thorne says emphatically. “It seems like no one understands bisexuality at all. In this world it’s like you’re either gay or you’re straight; there’s no in between. If you fucked a guy once, you must be gay. Like, what? No. That’s just being fluid.”
She su¤ests this misunderstanding about bisexuality comes from a need to confine everything within binary boxes. “It’s not a gay or straight box, it’s this middle in between world that nobody can put in a box, which makes them so mad,” she argues. “People are so mad that they can’t put it in a box, can’t explain it and can’t see how it works that they hate on it.”
This is how she approaches her relationships, too. Thorne made headlines last year when it emerged that she was in relationships with both 31-year-old rapper Mod Sun and controversial YouTuber Tana Mongeau, a situation she doesn’t want to label as polyamorous. “I don’t think anybody will really understand the bonds that I share with Mod or Tana,” she says. “Yeah, we joke around about poly, but we aren’t in the sense that we don’t put a word, a box or label too many things. It is what it is.”
As is so common with former Disney stars, there are reports that during Thorne’s tenure working for the mega-corporation she was chastised for behaviour that was at odds with brand’s tight restrictions (Thorne, aged 14, wore a black bathing suit to the beach). She says that Disney threatened to fire her because of it, a claim that Disney have refuted. Still, unlike her peers who have shru¤ed off their squeaky clean images and purity rings with raunchy sex bops and twerking,
Thorne says her resistance to conformity isn’t because of her time at Disney. “That’s the easiest narrative to follow,” she explains, “but I’ve always been like this. If you could see my audition for Shake It Up, I’m like, ‘I don’t dance, I don’t sing and I’m not funny. I don’t know why I’m here.’ Everybody just started laughing. I was so serious about it. I was 12 years old.”
While she may have been obedient at home, Thorne describes herself professionally as “a bit of a shit kicker”. “I think Disney knew that about me,” she posits. “It’s part of why I think they liked me. It obviously got worse because I had to be so clean, but I’ve always been grown up and unwilling to fit in a prescribed box.”
It’s infuriating, then, that being put into a box can affect your career. After she came out as bisexual, Thorne informs me that she experienced some pushback from casting directors. “There were a few places on the acting side that were very negative about it,” she reveals. “There was someone who, right after I came out, cancelled my audition. It’s not like anybody comes up to you and says, ‘Well, you’re gay so I’m not going to hire you.’ I haven’t had that. But you can just tell by the way that people act differently around you, the way they treat you differently, the way that they look at you or the way that they tip toe around certain subjects because they’re walking on e¤shells. In this business, that behaviour makes it all very obvious.”
One area that Thorne is unwilling to comment on extensively is politics. While we’re talking, she gets distracted by a demonstration of teachers protesting. It’s probably because of the government shut down, I say. “Are you serious?” she asks, clearly oblivious to the fact that President Trump has instigated the longest shut down in American governmental history due to funding disputes regarding his infamous proposed border wall. “I choose not to read the news because every time I read the news it makes me feel bad,” she explains. “I don’t feel good. I know that’s being a bit ‘close your eyes’ and that’s not a good thing, but reading the news everyday would make my day so much worse.”
She says that she never really paid attention to politics until Trump was elected. “That’s when we started noticing how bad things were in our government,” she says carefully. “But I think they’ve been really bad for a long time and we’ve never been keen on noticing. It’s a time and a place where rebellion is coming up. So now, everyone is picking the government apart. But the government has always been fucked up. That’s just my personal opinion; it’s dark up in there.” An eyes closed approach to politics, especially in today’s era of socio-political instability, is concerning. But Thorne is wary that the marriage of celebrity and politics can be tricky to navigate. “With people asking me [about politics] all the time, it does make me feel like I have to say something,” she says. “They need another face to stick up to these people. But at the same time, I don’t know. It’s a really hard one.”
It’s a weirdly non-committal answer from someone who, in 2017, wrote an op-ed for the website Refinery29 about campaigning for women’s rights. But I’m getting the sense that, at this stage in our interview, Bella Thorne is over it. While we were cut off earlier when she went to her meeting, the constant driving around the Hollywood hills has meant that, again, our connection is lost. When we reconnect, I’m accidentally added early to the call and I overhear her saying that she wants to wrap things up.
As someone who knows when they’re not welcome, I ask her the most inane closer question possible about how she measures success given how long she’s worked in the entertainment business expecting a generic answer to tie things up.
“Fuck, I’ve been trying to figure that out my entire life,” she says. “Success is one of those things: you can never have enough. You make a goal list and when you accomplish them those goals seem so small and mean nothing when they used to mean everything. Then the next goal you have is the bi¤est thing. It’s a perpetual cycle. I wrote this piece for my upcoming book about when I’ll be able to accept myself. That’s a really big part of it. But I also think that’s what helps drive my ambition – nothing will ever be enough. That’s why I work so hard. It’s also the reason why I stay up at night and can’t sleep.”
And then just like that she’s gone. It’s hard not to feel a little concerned and baffled by her response. Although, given the chaotic nature of our interview – complete with dog bites, meetings and teacher’s protests – I shouldn’t be surprised by Bella Thorne’s unorthodox answer. Anyway, she did warn me: “You never know what’s going to come out of my mouth.”