Drake Bell and Josh Peck warmly recalled their Nickelodeon days with Amanda Bynes during the second part of their recent podcast conversation.
The duo began their careers on The Amanda Show, which aired for three seasons from 1999 to 2002. They played various characters before landing their own show, Drake & Josh, which ran for four seasons in the mid-2000s. On Peck and Ben Soffer’s Good Guys podcast, the former co-stars talked about working with Bynes, who left Hollywood following a mental health crisis over a decade ago. The actress now lives privately away from the spotlight.
“I randomly talked to her, like, it was 2017, maybe. It’s around that time,” Bell shared about Bynes at the 36-minute mark of the video below. “I randomly messaged her. She was in the news or something, and I was just thinking about her. And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna message her. She’ll never see it. She’ll never respond.'”
Bell mentioned they “messaged back and forth a little bit,” though that was his last contact with the She’s the Man actress.
“Other than being on the show, and, you know, she was an idol to me. I mean, I grew up on ‘All That.’ One of the most talented people on the label,” Bell added. “When I got to audition for ‘The Amanda Show,’ she may as well have been Rachel on ‘Friends.’ She was the biggest thing on the planet to me.”
Peck said he “bump[s]” into Bynes randomly “every two to three years” and called her “the greatest.”
“She was great then, she remains great, and such a good person,” he noted. “Obviously, has had some public struggles, but I just think she’s got one of the great hearts and great skills, great talents of anyone there is.”
Peck also described Bynes as “a dynamite force of nature when it comes to talent.” “Watching her was like watching Carol Burnett, was like watching Tracey Ullman,” he concluded.
Bynes, who maintains accounts on Instagram and TikTok, stepped away from fame around 2010. Her parents put her under a conservatorship in 2013 due to financial and mental health concerns, which ended nearly a decade later. During this time, Bynes received a bipolar disorder diagnosis.
The actress has since embraced a more private lifestyle and reportedly turned down an appearance on the controversial docuseries Quiet On Set. On that show, Bell disclosed he was sexually abused by former Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck (unrelated to Josh) when he was 15.
