Drake Bell Displays on Life After ‘Drake & Josh’ (Unique)

• Drake Bell starred in The Amanda Present and Drake & Josh on Nickelodeon within the 2000s
• The actor tells PEOPLE he felt overwhelmed by the choices he needed to make after Drake & Josh got here to an finish: “You need to know all the things about taxes, financial institution accounts, automobile loans and insurance coverage and mortgage funds and rents”
• Bell says music has “all the time been my ardour” and he’s at present on tour in assist of his newest album, Non-Cease Flight

Drake Bell admits that life after Nickelodeon got here with lots of uncertainty.

Drake & Josh led to 2007 and left Bell, 38, to determine his subsequent step at age 21 after rising up on tv. “You are thrust to the world and nobody’s telling you what to do,” Bell, who revealed he has a brand new girlfriend after splitting from his ex-wife Janet Von Schmeling in 2023, tells PEOPLE. “You are thrown to the wolves and also you’re anticipated to make the fitting selections, do the fitting issues with none steerage.”

Bell says he and his former costar Josh Peck felt additional stress “to be good function fashions” as younger males within the highlight. “That is the place all the stress [came from],” Bell continues. “You are like, ‘Whoa, I do not even know … do I purchase material softener? Does that go within the washer?’ You need to know all the things about taxes, financial institution accounts, automobile loans and insurance coverage and mortgage funds and rents. I do not know what I am doing!”

The previous little one star refers to that interval in his life when he “misplaced my path” as “a curler coaster.”

However touring to Mexico to advertise his music in 2008 put him again on monitor.

“I put out an album round 2006, and I went on the market in 2008 after a tour within the States, and it was only a utterly totally different expertise,” Bell recollects. “We obtained on the market and we have been promoting out 10,000-, 20,000-seat arenas, and the album was No 1. The music was No. 1. It was like we stepped into an alternate actuality.”

Since then, Bell — who’s at present on tour in assist of his newest album, Non-Cease Flight —  has continued to develop his worldwide viewers.

“It unfold by means of Latin America, and so, I simply obtained again from Ecuador. We have reveals arising once more in Ecuador and Paraguay and Argentina and Peru. It has been lots of enjoyable,” the Amanda Present vet says.

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Bell says Mexico “appears like house” lately. “I am in Mexico 99, 98% of the time proper now,” he continues. “Generally the music hits in several areas that you do not count on. After I went to Mexico in 2008 was the primary time actually proven love for my music and for the artwork that I am creating.”

He’d all the time wished to concentrate on music, because it has “all the time been my ardour,” Bell says. “With appearing, you do not actually have the flexibility to simply create everytime you need. I suppose these days it is just a little totally different with know-how, YouTube, however with my technology, you needed to go to an audition, you needed to get picked. Whereas with music, I might at any time going to the studio and report a music and produce a report. That is what I like.”

And the ”Dandelion” singer has the assist of his Nickelodeon household — actually. Bell shares that his on-screen dad and mom Jonathan Goldstein and Nancy Sullivan attended a live performance of his in December and he stays “just about involved with everyone” from Drake & Josh.

“My make-up artist who I labored with 20 years in the past, I discuss to him thrice per week,” Bell says. “I used to be simply speaking with our stand-in Lane Napper, who lives in New York. I used to be simply texting with Yvette [Nicole Brown] two days in the past. We actually all have been getting alongside and having a good time. We have been like a household.”

Bell continues to embrace his Nickelodeon roots. He attended The Nostalgia Con in Houston in December and in Might, he’ll host a 2000s bar crawl in Washington, D.C., the place he’ll carry out the Drake & Josh theme music.

“It is superb since you actually see the multi-generational fan base that the present nonetheless has,” he says. I imply, we have now children arising which are 7, 8 years previous, they usually’re quoting the present. And I am like, ‘You were not even born after we obtained canceled! So superior.’ It simply reveals that the present’s nonetheless obtained love and it is nonetheless rising and it lives on. It is actually, actually cool.”