Elizabeth Gilles, Ariana Grande, and More React to Quiet on Set
Nickelodeon stars are reacting to Investigation Discovery’s harrowing docuseries, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV. In the midst of revelations that a dialogue coach sexually abused Drake Bell and allegations that producer Dan Schneider wrote lewd jokes for child actors to perform, former Nickelodeon stars have shared messages of support to survivors or have apologized (twice now) for mocking survivors’ experiences. The four-part series zeroes in on the network, tracking child abuse at the hands of crew members, the sexual innuendos in Schneider’s shows, and accusations that the producer fostered toxic work environments on his many productions. It also focuses on Bell, who, in on-camera interviews, discloses that he had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by his dialogue coach, Brian Peck, while working at the network. All That and The Amanda Show actors also shared their discomfort on sets along with Alexa Nikolas, who previously spoke about her experience in a 2022 exposé of Schneider.
Amid the abuse revelations, Nickelodeon colleague Devon Werkheiser, star of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, initially mocked Bell’s testimony in a TikTok, only to later apologize for his actions. Below, what the network’s stars have said about Quiet on Set so far.
Elizabeth Gilles, Victorious
In a Variety interview, Elizabeth Gilles said she and Ariana Grande watched Quiet on Set together over FaceTime. “We watched it together, and then we got together later that week or the next week, and we sort of broke the whole thing down and talked about it, and reprocessed everything together,” she said. “There was a lot to go through.” Gilles played Jade on Victorious, and knew Grande from starring on Broadway together in 13.
Gilles said she looked back on her show “incredibly positively,” but that it was good to revisit those memories “as an adult through a new lens.” Gilles recommended that parents be “wherever they want to be, whenever they want to be” during a shoot with children, while also recognizing that sometimes the parents are part of the problem. “I almost wonder if a psychiatrist or a psychologist should evaluate the child and speak to the parents before they sign them off to let them be on a set or a show, just because it’s such a huge undertaking, and children don’t often know what a huge undertaking it is, and then they can feel trapped or pressured,” she said.
Ariana Grande, Victorious and Sam & Cat
Ariana Grande addressed Quiet on Set on Podcrushed, saying she has been reprocessing her memories of the shows she starred on. “Obviously my relationship to it has been — and is currently — changing,” she said. “I’ve been reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like.” Grande also said therapists should be involved on sets with child actors. She also reevaluated the online content that people have found sexually suggestive. “You think about it, If I had a daughter…,” she said “There’s a bottom line. The things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto our website. That is another discovery. Going into it, I guess I’m upset.”
Kel Mitchell, All That and Kenan & Kel
Kel Mitchell spoke about his experiences with Dan Schneider on the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast in June 2024. He said the vibe on All That changed when Schneider took over for former showrunner Brian Robbins. “They left us with the head writer, Dan Schneider. So he’s writing, and me and him kind of bump heads a little bit,” Mitchell said. “I remember me and Dan had a big argument on set. He was like, ‘Let’s go over here to this room right here, in this closet.’ He closed the door and he just took off, you know, just yelling all this wild stuff.”
Matthew Underwood, Zoey 101
Underwood, who played Logan Reese on Zoey 101, shared a statement to Instagram revealing that he was sexually harassed and assaulted when he was 19 by his then agent. “I reported him to the agency and he has since been fired — although he is still active in the industry. This experience provoked my move away from LA and ending my pursuit of acting,” Underwood wrote, explaining that he was sharing this as the result of pushback urging him to speak out following the release of Quiet on Set. “I imagine many of my friends in the business are being equally harassed if they aren’t joining in the chorus, so I’m sharing this with hope that some of you can recognize that just because a person doesn’t shout from the rooftops that pedophiles are bad or that people can suck — that does not mean they don’t have their own reasons for staying silent, good reasons, personal reasons,” he wrote. Underwood continued on to address his own experience at Nickelodeon, and with Dan Schneider, writing, “I never had a bad experience working on set of a Nickelodeon show and I never had a bad experience with Dan. I have nothing to add to the conversation that anyone would care to hear. I like to believe people have the capacity to be better humans and Dan appears to recognize that he had been an asshole in his past. I like to believe he is fully capable of being a creator and coworker everyone can enjoy working with.”
Kenan Thompson, All That and Kenan & Kel
Speaking on the Tamron Hall Show, Thompson said he personally had not experienced situations like the ones in the doc. “It’s tough for me because I can’t really speak on things that I never witnessed, you know what I’m saying? Because all these things happened after I left, basically,” he said. Thompson said that Dan Schneider’s “created by” credit on Kenan & Kel was basically the extent of his involvement with that show. “Our worlds wasn’t really overly overlapping like that outside of All That, necessarily,” he said. “And then all of that negativity kinda started happening outside of our tenure there, you know what I mean? So I wasn’t really aware of a lot of it.” Thompson said his heart goes out to anyone who’s been victimized. He urged interested parties to “investigate more,” because “It’s supposed to be a safe place for kids. And to hear all about that is just like, ‘How dare you?’”
Josh Peck, Drake & Josh
Bell’s Drake & Josh co-star shared an Instagram post addressing the revelations on March 21. “I finished the Quiet on Set documentary and took a few days to process,” Josh Peck wrote. “I reached out to Drake privately, but want to give my support for the survivors who were brave enough to share their stories of emotional and physical abuse on Nickelodeon sets with the world. Children should be protected.” He added that he hopes “it can bring healing” for the victims and a “necessary change” to the industry.
Drake Bell, Drake & Josh
In his first interview after the documentary aired, Bell spoke with Sarah Fraser on The Sarah Fraser Show about his reaction to Nickelodeon’s response to Quiet on Set. “There’s a very well-tailored response saying, ‘Learning about his trauma,’ because they couldn’t say that they didn’t know about this or what had happened, or anything. So I think that was a really well-tailored response by probably some big attorney in Hollywood,” he explained. “I have to pay for my own therapy, I have to figure out what — I mean if there was anything, if there was any truth behind them actually caring, there would be something more than quotes on a page by obviously a legal representative telling them exactly how to tailor a response.” Bell also revealed he checked himself back into rehab after meeting with producers.
Bell also felt “cautious about involving” his father in the documentary, explaining, “I’m sure that my dad puts a lot of blame on himself, you know? And I thought that this might be an opportunity for him to realize that, you know, that it’s one person’s fault.”
Nancy Sullivan, Drake & Josh
Sullivan, who played Bell’s onscreen mom in Drake & Josh, sent a message of support on Instagram. “They weren’t my real kids, but I’ll always love them,” Sullivan captioned a photo of teenage Bell. “It broke my heart into a million pieces to hear just how much Drake was holding inside while we were working together. I was both devastated and proud seeing the man he’s grown into sit down on camera and bravely tell his truth.” Her message ends with the hope that “memories of the joy he had on our shows will someday greatly overshadow the pain” before “sending love” to the actor.
Devon Werkheiser, Lindsey Shaw, and Daniel Curtis Lee, Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide
The hosts of Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide, who were child actors on the Nickelodeon show Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, apologized for appearing to mock the abuse Bell faced earlier this week. “We fucked up,” Devon Werkheiser said on the podcast on March 22. Co-host Daniel Curtis Lee said “yeah, absolutely” in agreement. “Now, having seen the documentary, it’s disturbing,” Werkheiser added, “Now we’ve watched it, and I get it. If I had just watched especially that third episode and then watched us joking like that … I would be like, ‘Are they sociopaths? Is something wrong with them?’” Elsewhere on the episode, Werkheiser described how he felt gutted when Bell re-posted the clip where he joked about the abuse. “I have to say, when I saw our little fucking TikTok clip and that Drake had retweeted it, I was just watching his interview [in Quiet on Set]. And someone sent me that he had retweeted it, and then I saw the clip and like … I put out a fucking apology immediately. I felt like a piece of shit,” he admitted. Declassified star and podcast co-host Lindsey Shaw simply said, “I am sorry.”
It was a TikTok livestream on March 18 where Werkheiser joked about the abuse revelations with Shaw and Lee. “Daniel, we told you never to speak about that,” he told his co-host during the livestream. “Get back in your hole, Daniel, and give me your holes!” He tried to pull himself together on the livestream, saying, “Sorry, we shouldn’t joke about this. We really shouldn’t. Our set was not like that.” The following day, Werkheiser addressed his behavior on Twitter. “I feel horrible that my dumbass was even speaking about this without seeing it,” he wrote. “I watched Quiet on Set tonight and am horrified by the gravity of what Drake and others shared.”
So sorry to Drake. Gutted I hurt you. pic.twitter.com/WKzcOXL0p4
— Devon Werkheiser (@devonwerkharder) March 19, 2024
Alexa Nikolas, Zoey 101
Following Dan Schneider’s response to Quiet on Set, Nikolas, who participated in the documentary, spoke out against the producer’s comments. In a video posted to the YouTube channel for Eat Predators, her movement created to end predatory behavior in Hollywood, Nikolas said, “I’m sorry, him centering what he feels is bizarre to me. It’s like you literally… you are awful! To be quite honest with you, awful. You’re embarrassed? Not embarrassed enough! Not embarrassed enough to go reach out to the people you actually harmed.” She went on to add, “I’m going to cut to the chase here: you don’t feel anything, Dan. You have no idea what accountability is. You’re searching for it, maybe, but you haven’t landed on it. That’s for sure. This is not the way.”
Jack Salvatore Jr., Zoey 101
Salvatore, who played Mark Del Figgalo on Zoey 101 and worked in the writers’ room of Sam & Cat and Victorious, posted a video to his Instagram following the release of the documentary. “We could talk about the massages. We could talk about the fact that [Dan Schneider] would literally count his gold coin collection in front of his crew who was living paycheck to paycheck. We could talk about how sometimes he would bring out his shotgun to scare one of the writers when they were working at his house,” Salvatore said, before adding, “But what I do want to talk about is never letting this stuff happen again. This is an entire industry built on hope and dreams and adrenaline and wish fulfillment, and that can be a very dangerous thing for megalomaniacs to wield.” Salvatore continued on to say that despite worries that speaking out could impact his career, his silence would perpetuate this kind of behavior. “And until [Schneider] goes on 60 Minutes to answer some questions from some real journalists and not a cast member of his that he’s paying to be there…apology not accepted.”
This post has been updated.
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