Drake & Josh are no more, at least as far as Josh is concerned. Comedian Josh Peck opened up about his current relationship with Drake Bell in a podcast interview published last week. The comedian said that he and Bell are “not really” on friendly terms right now in spite of their viral moment on social media together in 2017.
Peck and Bell were the titular co-stars of Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh in the early 2000s, which itself was an offshoot of The Amanda Show where they appeared together as well. In a new interview on the BFFs podcast with Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards, Peck said that he and Bell did not really keep in touch after their sitcom ended. This put their 2017 reconciliation into a new perspective. When asked if he and Bell are friends right now, Peck said simply: “Not really. No.”
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For those that don’t recall, in 2017 Peck married Paige O’Brien, and Bell made an angry tweet about not being invited to the ceremony. In last week’s interview, Peck revealed how bizarre he had found that complaint at the time. he said: “The dirty little secret, I guess, was like, I knew that Drake and I didn’t stay in touch for the 10 years since we made the show. But no one needed to know that. I was happy to just die with that secret that like, we made this thing that people really love, but maybe we weren’t that close.”
“So I didn’t invite him to my wedding because I hadn’t really talked to him in many, many years,” Peck continued. “Cut to, I’m getting married that night and I see these text messages from him, like cursing me out, coming for me. On the night of my wedding… I don’t care about me, it’s, whatever, I signed up to be a public person. It is what it is. But here’s my wife, who’s like, getting torn down on the Internet and I’m like, she’s private and she just got married.”
Still, Peck humored Bell and fans by playing along with their public reunion and reconciliation at the VMAs six months later. However, he told the BFFs podcast that there was a private, more serious conversation beforehand.
“I go up to him-and this might be the most Sopranos thing I’ve ever done, I look at him and I go, ‘Go apologize to my wife right now,” he said. “And he goes, ‘OK’ and he like, made a beeline for my wife and I see him do like, this whole five-minute performance of an apology and I was like, ‘Go apologize to my wife or something bad’s gonna happen.’”
Bell’s wife Janet Bell specifically refuted this part of the story in an Instagram Story video posted the very next day. She said: “I stay quiet until lies happen. And the fact [is] that I was there at the VMAs I was next to Drake. I was one who told him that Josh was coming up with the camera. I literally was there, heard it all. Drake was never threatened by Josh, like, ever. That’s actually hilarious that he would act like he could be the tough guy. Like, bro, you’re not tough.”
Janet told fans that Peck had “nicely asked” Bell to apologize to O’Brien, with no hostility at all. She addressed Peck by saying: “You said, ‘Could you apologize to my wife?’ And Drake was like, Absolutely.’ And he did, and it was great. And we actually hung out after that, multiple times. We’ve talked multiple times since then. So like, you’re a f-ing liar. A f-ing liar, Josh.”
Bell has told numerous reporters that he and Peck have stayed close over the years, and as recently as 2019 he told E! News that they were working on pitches for a new joint project together. Peck never commented on these claims. Bell was arrested last year and pleaded guilty to endangering a 15-year-old fan by sending “inappropriate social media messages” to her for months before meeting her at a concert. She later claimed that Bell had also sexually assaulted her. Bell posted his own version of events on TikTok.
So far, Bell has not responded publicly to Peck’s podcast story. Peck has not responded to Janet’s Instagram video, which has now been deleted.
