Drake and Josh are back together again.
Drake Bell sat down with his former “Drake & Josh” co-star Josh Peck in an episode of the “Good Guys” podcast released Monday for a candid discussion about their friendship and the Investigation Discovery documentary series “Quiet on Set.”
Bell and Peck began working together when they were co-stars on the Nickelodeon comedy series “The Amanda Show,” which led them to be paired for their own Nickelodeon series “Drake & Josh” in 2004.
“Quiet on Set,” which aired last year, prompted calls for better protections for child actors after revealing stories of alleged misconduct at Nickelodeon. The biggest revelation was Bell’s allegation that dialogue coach Brian Peck, who he worked with on “The Amanda Show,” sexually assaulted him when he was 15. Bell also revealed he participated in an investigation leading to Brian Peck’s arrest on a charge of lewd acts with a child. He was convicted in 2004.
Josh Peck reveals Drake Bell told him his alleged abuser was ‘a really bad guy’
Peck told Bell on the podcast that he “can’t even imagine” what he went through, as he described in “Quiet on Set.”Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
“I didn’t know any of this at 14, and in watching the documentary, at 38, as a father, as a grown-up, so much was revealed to me,” Peck said. Though he said he wasn’t aware of details at the time, Peck recalled Bell once telling him that he doesn’t talk to Brian Peck anymore because he’s a “really bad guy.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Gotcha,’ and it was all that I needed to know,” Peck said. “I didn’t know anything more than that, but I was like, ‘That’s clear.'”
Bell and Josh Peck, no relation to Brian Peck, have rarely appeared together since “Drake & Josh” ended in 2007. The two had also previously revealed a rift in their relationship, with Peck saying in 2022 that they are not friends.
Are Drake Bell and Josh Peck friends? Actors open up about their relationship
Reflecting on the evolution of their relationship, Peck said he and Bell became “inseparable” after they started working together on “The Amanda Show” but said that sometime after their own show “Drake & Josh” began, there started to be a “separation” between them.
“I was just looking at it through the prism of a 14-year-old’s brain going, ‘Ah, he doesn’t want much to do with me,'” Peck recalled.Drake Bell alleges ‘extensive,’ ‘brutal’ sexual abuse by Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck
But Bell indicated the distance that developed was related to the situation with Brian Peck.
He said that that when the pilot for “Drake & Josh” was shot, an investigation into Brian Peck’s alleged sexual abuse was underway, but his colleagues were unaware because no arrest had been made yet. He said this knowledge was always in the back of his mind during this period when he and Josh Peck should have been bonding as partners.
“I had to come back to working with my partner going, ‘I’ve got all this stuff that nobody knows about that’s going on. Is this going to hurt our show? When this drops, is Josh going to look at me and be like, Bro, you took our dream away. Are we going to lose our show?'” Bell said.
At a certain point, though, Peck said he felt the friendship with Bell started “coming back.” Bell summed up their relationship as having its ups and downs, saying there were “times when we hung out a lot and were close” and times when they weren’t.Drake Bell says Josh Peck ‘reached out’ after Brian Peck sex abuse allegations: ‘It’s been very sensitive’
“When you are working with somebody every day, day in and day out, and you’re going through stuff at home … they come out with the person,” Bell said, adding, “I think we suffered the brunt of that a bit.”
Peck, who was not interviewed in “Quiet on Set,” also slammed the “lack of protection” that existed for child actors at the time. Without getting into details, he recalled dealing with “tyrannical bosses” and “people acting inappropriately” on sets, thinking, “I don’t know if that’d be cool anywhere else but here.”
The second part of Bell and Peck’s conversation will air on Thursday. The first part of their chat ended with Bell tearing up while reminiscing about how much he loved working on “Drake & Josh” and stressing that fans should not feel the need to avoid rewatching the show in light of the “Quiet on Set” allegations. “I’m very proud of what we did,” he said.