|
Post by Admin on Jun 24, 2021 19:49:23 GMT
Joshua Bassett went to the hospital days after Olivia Rodrigo's song Driver's License came out and on the exact day his single Lie, Lie, Lie released. As it turns out, the High School Musical The Musical The Series star was suffering from heart failure and the doctors told him he only have a 30% chance of survival. Thankfully, the HSMTMTS actor beat the odds! Joshua Bassett, the 20-year-old singer and star of Disney’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, is sitting at a West Village restaurant in a light purple shirt, charming anyone and everyone who comes his way. "I love your pin," he says, complimenting a waiter on the small rainbow peeking out of her apron. It only takes a few minutes before a collection of young women clocks him from outside and peers through the small, discreet window in front of us. "I have a sixth sense for that now," he says, while kindly smiling at two other teenagers who are shooting video with a hot pink iPhone covered in stickers. "We're chilling," he says, as the fans move away and we watch their matching tiny backpacks dissolve down the street. Bassett jokes that he can’t wait to see our private lunch pieced together in video form, all over TikTok. The fan attention isn’t surprising—after all, High School Musical is a major Disney franchise that has, in earlier iterations, produced stars like Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. But Bassett has also found himself at the center of entertainment news in the past few months for other reasons. When his HSMTMTS costar Olivia Rodrigo released the hugely popular single “Drivers License”—it’s racked up over 1 billion streams since January 8 and sat at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for eight weeks—the lyrics of which revolve around a recent breakup, online speculation instantly focused on Bassett, who many fans already believed to be dating Rodrigo. The single he released a week later, “Lie Lie Lie,” in which he sang about his reputation and false narratives, only added to the gossip, even though the song had been written months prior. Media exploded: Regé-Jean Page, Kenan Thompson, Bowen Yang, and Pete Davidson sang “Drivers License” on Saturday Night Live; explainers were written; memes were made; and TikTok videos went viral. Then, last month, a video interview with Clevver News in which Bassett called Harry Styles hot was released, fueling another news cycle around his sexuality, and leading to the release of a statement that read, “love who you love shamelessly. it’s ok to still be figuring out who you are. life’s too short to let ignorance and hatred win. i choose love.” The day before, he’d posted on Instagram about how he was taught not to cry as a child, and his belief that the suppression of emotions “is the root of the majority of toxic masculinity.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 24, 2021 21:19:58 GMT
When Bassett imagined growing up, he saw himself majoring in directing and scoring movies at USC. That turned out to be unnecessary, because when he was 16, an acting manager friend of his oldest sister suggested that he give acting a try. One audition later, and without any formal training, Bassett found himself being called back for James Cameron’s Avatar sequels. "I was so confused," Bassett says, but soon he nabbed stints in Dirty John, Stuck in the Middle, and Grey's Anatomy, and then the starring role of Ricky in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. As soon as Bassett was cast, the show’s writers explained that his success would depend on his chemistry with his onscreen love interest. Bassett was thrown into rooms with dozens of Disney hopefuls, before two auditions with Bizaardvark's Olivia Rodrigo and her on-the-spot acoustic version of Bruno Mars's “Count on Me” sealed her as the costar. "It was very obvious, in my opinion, that she was the perfect one for it," he says about his last audition with Rodrigo. "I think people can tell when they watch the show. It was just an instant sort of connection." The success of the series came with intense speculation about the lives and off-screen relationships of its stars. If you scroll through #Jolivia on TikTok, you'll quickly find yourself in a matrix of never-ending, hyperbolic theories. Some of the most popular include driving in an In-N-Out parking lot, Girl Meets World's Sabrina Carpenter, strawberry ice cream, and Billy Joel. By the time “Drivers License” was released, fans were convinced that they had accurately uncovered #Jolivia’s relationship timeline. Bassett has wisely remained mostly silent about all of this, releasing only sentiments of support for Rodrigo. Sounding levelheaded and calm, he says that “people don’t know anything they’re talking about.'' He explains that “the hardest thing” has been “biting my tongue, in a lot of ways, but the reality is it’s kind of like a lost cause trying to talk about any of that stuff, and I refuse to feed into any of the bullshit, so I just don’t.” Media outlets keep trying to trick him into discussing it; he says one even went so far as to deceptively edit a video interview. "[Everyone] is asking me about Sabrina [Carpenter, another singer/actress with whom fans are eager to link Bassett] and Olivia," he says, gesturing to a new duo of teenagers approaching the small window. "Why don't we focus on these women for who they are? Let's focus on the art that they're making and how great they are instead of their relationship to a boy." Unprompted, Bassett tells me a different story about “Drivers License.” Two days after the song was released, he “started getting very ill, and it kept getting worse," he says. "I thought it was, like, food poisoning or whatever. It got worse, it got worse, it got worse, it got worse”—until he was hospitalized with “unimaginable pain” on the day “Lie Lie Lie” was released. He’s slightly vague on the cause of all this—although, he says, “I’m sure stress had a part in it”—but it turned out to be septic shock and heart failure: "[The doctors] told me that I had a 30% chance of survival. They told me that if I had not checked into the hospital within 12 hours, I would have been found [dead] in my apartment." While social media gossiped, Bassett "didn't have any energy to be able to focus on anything but staying alive." Bassett generally steers clear of social media except for TikTok, where the algorithm only shows him “philosophy and music,” and there are no mentions for him to look at. He’s working on "like 12 different things” that he's “trained” not to discuss, but he knows he has to make space for solitude. For the time being, that means therapy (“I didn’t start going until I was 19”), meditation, long ice-cold showers (“I have not missed a single morning for the last year and a half”), dissecting self-help books and poems on his fire escape, and long phone calls with his HSMTMTS costar turned best friend, Matt Cornett ("He was my therapist for a lot of season two"). Bassett has released a couple of singles since “Lie Lie Lie,” but he alludes to a hypothetical forthcoming body of work that will divulge some of his more intimate feelings about his past 12 months. "I've had a hard time writing just because it's been so painful, and I've had a hard time facing it in the way that I need to," he says. When I ask whose career he looks up to, he mentions Harry Styles and Sabrina Carpenter, whom he first contacted over Instagram, on his label’s advice, about recording a song. (“I was like, that’s terrifying. I’m not going to DM her. I’ve never DM’d anybody. I don’t DM people.”) He adds that it’s an artist's job to “carry the emotional weight for other people. That's what's so great about Olivia's album. She was able to articulate the feelings that she felt in a way that works on behalf of other people." At the moment, he explains with a heavy exhale, "I haven’t been able to face any of it. I’ll get back to it.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 13, 2021 21:31:41 GMT
When Olivia Rodrigo released her debut single “drivers license” in January 2021, speculation about her love life reached unprecedented levels. Now, Olivia is speaking out on the drama, saying she “resents” the narrative that was “tossed around” as a result. http://instagram.com/p/CSa07zmrcn4 In case you need a refresher, shortly after the song came out and reached TikTok virality, people started theorizing Olivia’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-star Joshua Bassett and Sabrina Carpenter were the inspiration behind the song. Though none of the parties ever directly addressed the speculation, the rumors took over various social media platforms, and, understandably, fans ran with it. “I totally understand people’s curiosity with the specifics of who the song’s about and what it’s about, but to me, that’s really the least important part of the song,'' Olivia told Billboard at the time. Both Sabrina and Joshua also reacted to the song and, due to the intense scrutiny, Joshua admitted that a duet featuring Sabrina was cut from his debut album. In a new interview with Variety, Olivia finally addressed all that “drivers license” spurred – good and bad – saying she put out the song “not knowing that it would get that reaction” from the general public. “It was really strange [when] it did,” the musician added. “I just remember [everyone being] so weird and speculative about stuff they had no idea about.” Speaking to GQ recently, Olivia also built upon that thought, admitting that “it was really hard for me to watch people on TikTok and stuff that dissects my 17-year-old love life. That was really weird. But again, I think I understood the curiosity.” In her interview with Variety, Olivia also addressed the “Sabrina vs. Olivia beef” resulting from the speculation. “I don’t really subscribe to hating other women because of boys,” Olivia said. “I think that’s so stupid, and I really resent that narrative that was being tossed around.” On the flipside, Olivia also opened up about women supporting women, namely her mentor and idol Taylor Swift. “It’s so nice to be welcomed into the music industry and so great to be supportive of other women,” Olivia said of her relationship with the folklore musician. “She wrote me a letter a while ago, and she wrote something about how you make your own luck in the world, and how you treat other people always comes back to you.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2021 4:59:53 GMT
Joshua Bassett is doing his best to get ahead of any ill will as he prepares for the release of three new songs, which he's teased on his social media. The High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star, 20, sent a text message to fans on Thursday, just hours before he's scheduled to drop the tracks "Crisis," "Secret" and "Set Me Free." http://instagram.com/p/CW_ff3tpig7 In the message, Bassett called 2021 "the most challenging year of my life," and thanked his fans for their "kindness." "Thank you for seeing me, and each other, as living, breathing, healing and hurting human beings," he wrote. "Due to the nature of pop culture, and the current public perspective, [there] will be a lot of loud voices in this next chapter — positive, negative and everywhere in between." He then shared a request that all of his listeners keep things civil and kind. "all i ask is you treat everyone with respect and love," he wrote. "anyone who sends hate on my 'behalf' is no fan of mine."
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2021 21:15:13 GMT
Joshua Bassett - Secret (Official Music Video)
|
|