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.”
Now, over oat milk iced coffees, Bassett is ready to talk about all that—albeit quite carefully, and up to a point. In person he’s polite, confident, and sometimes even loud. “People don’t realize that this is all very new to me,” he says. “I haven’t been in the public eye for long.” Nevertheless, he’s a savvy steerer of conversation, alert to the implications of questions and quick to clarify what his responses do and do not mean.
"I always had a pretty feminine sort of energy in my life," he says of growing up in Oceanside, California, in a house with five artistically minded sisters. "My sisters would put me in a Snow White dress and have me run around my house.” Bassett was homeschooled by his parents, Laura and Taylor, played drums, and studied musical theater.
"I was a very emotional kid," he explains, up until age 11 or 12, which is when he feels that most young men learn it isn’t okay to be vulnerable. “I was constantly yelled at for crying. I would spend every night being like, Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. I remember beating myself up every night.” (In fact, Bassett teared up three times during our interview.) He wanted to grow up as fast as possible: “I remember spending every day looking in the mirror, seeing if I had any hairs on my chin. Every day I was hoping that I was finally going through puberty.”
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.”
Bassett’s sexuality is another aspect of himself that he says he's still figuring out how to articulate out loud. In that interview where he talked about Harry Styles, he had added that “this is also my coming-out video.” It was hard to tell how serious he was, but now Bassett clarifies that "I wasn't joking." The interview had actually been filmed months before, and Bassett had shared that part of himself without second thought. Replaying the moment, he says the myriad of reactions—the love, hate, anger, confusion, texts, and calls—gave him “an opportunity to say something that I believe in." He adds, "I stood behind every word that I said," referring to his Instagram post. Bassett later says with confidence, "Even if there are consequences, I would much rather deal with consequences and live my truth than live in fear."
When I ask Bassett if he still thinks young people need to “come out” in the same way that other generations have been expected to, he explains, “I am anti–coming out in the sense that there’s no need to.” But, he adds, “people are welcome to have boxes if they want them.” Remembering that Snow White dress, he says that even as a child, he would hear comments like “When’s he gonna find out he’s gay?” Or, conversely, “people would tell me that I’m straight or [I] can’t be gay because XYZ thing.” And then “people not believing me either way if I talked about my sexuality in any way.”
Later, when I follow up, he adds, “There are plenty of letters in the alphabet... Why bother rushing to a conclusion? Sometimes your letter changes, sometimes you try a different one, other times you realize you’re not what you thought you were, or maybe you always knew. All of these can be true. I’m happy to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community because they embrace all. Don’t let anyone tell you love isn’t love. They’re the ones who probably need it the most.”
Bassett cares deeply about how his messaging will spark conversations about identity. In a recent popular TikTok video, Ariella M. Elm pointed out that the cast of HSMTMTS now has more young LGBTQIA+ identifying cast members than straight ones. “I think nothing is more powerful than speaking the truth,” Bassett tells me as we finish our food.
“That’s why when I watched Joe and Frankie [Serafini and Rodriguez, who play a gay couple on the show] film the scene in season 1, episode 5, ‘Homecoming,’ where for the first time they danced together, I just remember full body chills, weeping.” Thinking back to that moment, he adds after a pause, “I didn’t connect the dots why until recently...the reason that made me so emotional. I’m getting so emotional now because they were speaking their truth despite the inevitable reaction that they were going to get.” When I ask if Ricky will be given the space to explore his queerness onscreen, he responds, “I would love that.”
"I just hope that this generation can feel comfortable, confident, and safe talking about sexuality without needing to be a box and without needing to have it all figured out," he says. His eyes start to water for a second, before he reaches for his glass and closes them. "It makes me emotional. I didn't necessarily have that when I was younger. I didn't have a me saying stuff like this," he says. He reiterates: "I'm very at peace. I'm celebrating Pride all month long."
Two affogatos later, Bassett stands up to get on with his day. "I'm growing so much. The year that I've had has been earth-shattering. I'm still landing on my feet," he tells me. Within seconds of his exit, I open my phone to a 15-second TikTok of him roaming around downtown, in a different bright shirt, with a different collection of teens documenting his every move. The caption read: "Joshua BAssSeTT is in NYC fOr Pride 🏳️🌈."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Andy Jackson with Born Artists
Styled by Brittany Bryant
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate with Kalpana
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