Posts Tagged ‘Parade’

After competing in Dancing with the Stars this past season, JONAS LA actress Chelsea Kane sat down with Parade Magazine to talk about her experience on the show, as well as her Disney Channel past, and her boyfriend Stephen Colletti.

“Dancing With the Stars really opened a lot of doors for me, and I’m so grateful for that. I had such a blast. I can’t believe it’s already been over for a month since the finale, but at the same time, it’s been such a whirlwind ever since we ended. It’s been wonderful chaos.” Chelsea says. “It’s an audience that has never known me before. I’m so used to kids coming up to me on the street, but it’s really cool now to have people my age or older saying that they watched the show. It’s a very exciting time.”

Chelsea has also managed to stay friends with her DWTS partner Mark Ballas, “It’s great. When you go from spending 12 to 15 hours a day with somebody, you get very close and you also get to that point where you want to strangle each other! So it’s nice to go back into friendship mode as opposed to student-teacher mode.”

On Disney Channel: “I feel like a lot of it was luck. I fell into the Disney channel at an age when I had already gotten a lot of my growing and my experimenting and mistake making out of the way before I had kids looking up to me. I started on Disney at 19, so I had all of my high school years behind me. I think it’s the combination of that and being very close to my family and knowing that I’m really blessed to be working. A lot of kids with Disney sometimes feel like it comes really easy because they’re making a lot of money at a really young age and people are letting them do whatever they want. At this point, I’ve spent five years paying my dues, really knowing what it felt like to not get a job. So once I was there, I cherished it and I was going to take care of it.”

“I love my Disney fans. A lot of the kids want to grow up and push away from that image, but I don’t feel that way at all. These kids have supported me and had my back from day one. They tuned into our show and voted for me on Dancing With the Stars, and I’m going to do my best to continue to pick projects that they can watch with their family and enjoy, and we can all grow up together.”

Chelsea even admitted that she used to have a crush on her now boyfriend, Stephen Colletti, when he was starring on Laguna Beach. “At this point, I’ve been able to get to know him so well that I forget it’s the same person. But I do have my surreal moments. The first night I met him, it was definitely a rush. He’s really an amazing support, especially through DWTS. I don’t know what I would have done without that rock through the entire thing.”

Canadian actor Cory Monteith has revealed to Parade Magazine that he is nothing like his television character on Glee. In fact, Cory faced many problems as a young man before he broke into show business. Check out what Cory had to say in the article:

The actor grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, feeling like an outsider. His parents divorced when he was 7, and by 13, Monteith—once a promising student who at age 5 could read at a fourth-grade level—was skipping school to get drunk and smoke pot. Monteith estimates that by the age of 16, when he quit for good, he had attended 12 different schools, including alternative programs for troubled teens. “I burned a lot of bridges,” he says. “I was out of control.”

At that point, so was his drug use. Monteith admits, “Anything and everything, as much as possible,” he says. “I had a serious problem.”

Afraid that he “could die,” his mother and a group of friends staged an intervention when he was 19. “That’s when I first went to rehab. I did the stint but then went back to doing exactly what I left off doing.” Monteith might have continued down that path if not for what he calls “the crystallizing event.”

“I stole a significant amount of money from a family member,” he admits. “I knew I was going to get caught, but I was so desperate I didn’t care. It was a cry for help. I was confronted and I said, ‘Yeah, it was me.’ It was the first honorable, truthful thing that had come out of my mouth in years.”

He was given an ultimatum: Get clean, or the family member would report him to the police and press charges. Although it wasn’t the first time Monteith had taken something that didn’t belong to him (“A lot of things went missing when I was around; I had high overhead to take care of ”), up until that point he had avoided prosecution.

“I was done fighting myself,” he recalls of his turning point. “I finally said, ‘I’m gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I’m doing this.’”

Monteith moved in with a family friend in the small Canadian city of Nanaimo, where he quit using drugs, got a job as a roofer and began the process of rebuilding his life. He worked with an acting coach who put Monteith in front of the camera to do a scene about a guy contemplating suicide. It was a life-altering moment for Monteith, the first time he’d felt the satisfaction of “working hard and being good at something.”

The perspective Monteith has gained is part of the reason he is choosing to speak out about his past now. He tells PARADE, “I don’t want kids to think it’s okay to drop out of school and get high, and they’ll be famous actors, too. … But for those people who might give up: Get real about what you want and go after it. If I can, anyone can.”

Along with career success have come personal victories. This spring, Monteith received a high school diploma from an alternative school he attended in Victoria, British Columbia. And in late 2009, he reunited with his father for the first time in 17 years. “We’d spoken maybe three or four times were so happy they were almost crying. It was a good time. At some point, you realize your parents are human. They make the best decisions they can with the options available to them.”

Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Parade Magazine for more on Cory!