Bella Thorne says ‘Shake It Up’ years with Zendaya included major backstage conflict, later they found ways to cool off

Bella Thorne, reflecting on her time as a Disney Channel child star, said she and Zendaya Coleman were at times “pitted against each other” during the run of their series “Shake It Up” from 2010 to 2013, a dynamic she described as difficult to navigate. In remarks reported by Deadline on August 6, Thorne said the situation led to conflict between the two performers and that it sometimes reached a point where they stopped resolving issues in regular work settings.

Thorne described how disagreements would spill over during production, saying she and Coleman would “escape to another set” to work through issues more privately. She said the tension “got pretty bad,” according to the account in the outlet’s report. Thorne’s comments position the rivalry framing as coming from the way the show’s circumstances and publicity treated the pair, rather than from any public-facing effort to undermine one another on camera.

Despite Thorne’s description of those episodes, she characterized the later stage of their careers as a time when she could look back with more perspective. The recollection, as described in the Deadline report, ties the backstage friction to the pressure of being paired as the leads of a youth-focused TV series and the way internal competition can become personally harmful when it is constant.

The interview also centers on how Thorne and Coleman managed the aftermath of those disputes while continuing to perform as a team. By relocating to other parts of a studio during tense moments, Thorne suggested, the actors created a controlled environment to prevent conflicts from derailing day-to-day production obligations.

The account comes as both actresses have spent years building separate professional paths beyond Disney Channel. Thorne’s remarks were published the same day as Deadline’s report, dated August 6, and accompanied by a captioned still described by the outlet as featuring Thorne and Coleman in 2012.

Thorne’s comments do not provide additional specifics about the nature of any particular incident on set, nor do they identify who, beyond the broader “pitted against” framing, was responsible for escalating tensions. The report likewise does not include statements from Zendaya or from Disney Channel personnel responding to Thorne’s characterization.

For audiences, the recollection offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how public branding and competitive storylines can create strain among performers, even when the work itself requires collaboration. For industry observers, it underscores the operational reality that production teams often rely on performers to maintain professionalism amid pressures created by marketing narratives and the logistics of long-running schedules.