Nick Jonas is looking back at his Disney days with fondness — and shouting out some of his peers, too. The musician addressed his “graduating class” in a new interview with Variety, noting the qualities that made each star successful then and now.
While it may not have been a high school in the traditional sense of the word, Nick Jonas considers his Disney experience to be the closest thing to lockers, algebra, and homecoming games. “I absolutely look back at [Disney] as a creative school,” he explained. “It was also school, to be honest. I was between the ages of 14 and 18, which is my high school years. That graduating class of Miley, Selena, and Demi, it was all of us coming up together and you can see, frankly, the length of our careers and the success we’ve all been able to have.” (ICYMI: Jonas and Cyrus also dated during that time period, which adds another layer of high school nostalgia to the whole thing.)
The Disney crew has never really left the headlines since their time at the House of Mouse, but they've really been in the spotlight as of late, what with Gomez's Golden Globe nominations for Emilia Pérez and Only Murders in the Building and Cyrus's recent Grammy win and Golden Globe nod for Best Original Song.
“I think that’s a real testament to Disney’s ability to find and foster talent and understand what makes someone unique while finding a way to make it work within their ecosystem,” Jonas said of their legacy.
Jonas is currently working on a film role of his own, playing a musician named Danny in the upcoming movie Power Ballad. “Danny is someone who has come from a band, is becoming a solo artist and making that transition,” Jonas explained of his character. “Luckily, I had a lot of real-life experience to pull from.”
He also gleaned inspiration from his peers, though he didn't specify whom. “He is dealing with a lot of the pitfalls that I was fortunate enough to circumnavigate by way of being very close with my family,” the star shared. “Having a tight-knit inner circle that hasn’t changed over the years has helped me get through relatively unscathed, but I was able to look at some of my peers over the years, see what some of those pitfalls were, and draw on those experiences.”
