Revisiting her Disney Channel glory days. Demi Lovato sat down with the podcast Call Her Daddy to reminisce about her time as a child star and the role she almost booked.
After host Alex Cooper likened making it onto the Disney Channel in the mid-2000s to “winning an Oscar as a child,” the singer revealed her first audition for the network was actually a surprising miss.
“It was the golden era of Disney,” she said. “Hannah Montana had just started, like, a year or so before. High School Musical had just happened. Selena [Gomez] was on Wizards, and I auditioned for the Jonas Brothers‘ TV show. I was up for the role of their, like, female best or whatever. And I remember I didn’t get it, and I was crushed. I was heartbroken.”
While the role of Stella Malone in the JoBros’ eponymous sitcom ultimately went to Chelsea Kane, things ended up working out just fine for Lovato in the long run. “Disney was like, ‘Well, we want to see you for these other two projects,’” she recalled. “I had taken the hardest ‘no’ in my life, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go audition again, but I will.’ So I did, I went and auditioned and I ended up booking them both. One was Sonny With a Chance and one was Camp Rock. So that, for me, was like, ‘I get my own movie and my own TV show? Are you kidding? Like, on Disney Channel?’ And I knew my life was about to change.”
Another hot topic from Lovato’s teenage years that came up during the interview was the purity ring phenomenon that swept through the Disney Channel at the time. And while the Jonas Brothers were most well-known for sporting the celibacy bands, it turns out the “Get Back” singer briefly wore one too!
“I had a purity ring that came from my church,” Lovato confessed. “Like, way before Disney Channel even happened. I was, like, 11 or 12. Obviously, that shouldn’t have even been implemented on 11- or 12-year-olds. But I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do this, whatever.’ That quickly went out the window at a certain point. And then I left the others to have their purity adventures on their own. But, I mean, to each their own. I don’t know, it was an interesting thing to come out publicly and say.”
Watch Lovato’s full conversation on Call Her Daddy below.
