Dylan Sprouse and Zendaya Coleman took to the Internet to respond to Joe Jonas’ New York magazine confessional where he described the pressure and expectations of being a star on the Disney Channel.
Among the many other revealing tidbits in Jonas’ tell-all, the singer says:
Being a part of the Disney thing for so long will make you not want to be this perfect little puppet forever. Eventually, I hit a limit and thought, Screw all this, I’m just going to show people who I am. I think that happened to a lot of us. Disney kids are spunky in some way, and I think that’s why Disney hires them. “Look, he jumped up on the table!” Five, six, ten years later, they’re like, “Oh! What do we do?” Come on, guys. You did this to yourselves.
While the feature is getting a lot of attention, apparently not all of the Disney Channel’s former stars feel the same way about the company’s methods. Zendaya Coleman, a singer and actress who starred on the Disney sitcom Shake It Up from 2011 to 2013 and goes by her first name, said that Jonas’ statements did not reflect her experience, tweeting:
Meanwhile, Sprouse —m who starred in the Disney sitcoms The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and The Suite Life on Deck from 2005 to 2011 — wrote on his blog that if the Jonas Brothers had been unhappy, “they could have told Disney ‘NO.’” He went on to say, “Nowadays artists just assume they have to do what they are told by their proprietors because there is a ‘rigid structure to achievement’…. You do not have to become something else to be successful. Not only is it not too late for them to redefine themselves now, it was never too late.”
So it seems that not all of the Disney Channel’s former stars are unhappy about their time working for the company.