When Bella Thorne and Zendaya initially appeared on Disney’s Shake It Up, the former felt like she was ‘pitted against’ her co-star.

Thorne, who portrayed CeCe on the Disney Channel sitcom Rocky from 2010 to 2013, said in an interview with Us Weekly on Wednesday that the two had to have an honest chat about being pushed to compete with one another on set at a young age in order to overcome their issues.

On Wednesday, February 17, while promoting her new track, the Famous in Love star, 23, told the publication, “We had to deal with that so much on Shake It Up. It’s like we said [in] a couple interviews when we were younger, how we explained how in the first season we weren’t friends and it took us those other two seasons of becoming so close. [It was hard] not having someone pitted against you [before] and then all of a sudden, now everyone is pitting you against each other. That fed into our heads. It made us not [be] friends in that first season.”

When the two starred together in an episode of Disney’s Good Luck Charlie, the dynamics of their relationship shifted. “We were really able to put our cards out on the table and understand each other,” Bella said of the pair’s “beautiful talk.”

Bella went on to say that she and Zendaya were both “so young and so mature at such a young age.”

The Chick Fight star has already recounted how they were forced to compete with one another.

In 2017, she told J-14, “We wanted to love each other, but yet we were constantly being put against each other. It was, ‘Who’s better at this?’ and ‘Who’s better at that?’”

Thorne, who is now promoting her new single “Shake It,” is full of praise for her former co-star.

“Zendaya is amazing,” she said. “I f*cking love her. She’s always been amazing and she’s always gonna be amazing and I’m just happy that people see that. That she’s getting the recognition she deserves. That just makes me so f*cking happy.” Of course, Bella is referring to Zendaya’s recent Emmy win, as well as her overall success on Euphoria and her upcoming Netflix film Malcolm & Marie.

Thorne says she’s perplexed by people’s intentions when they compare the two. “Why are you doing this? Is it just because we’re women?” she wondered. When dealing with such a situation, Thorne recommends “blocking it out and just don’t even listen to the noise.”

Zendaya recently told Seventeen that she and her boyfriend are conscious of the attention their relationship receives, particularly when it comes to social media interactions, and that they prefer to communicate in a more private manner. “We’ll post things to each other on social media, but we know everybody’s looking at that. So, if she wants to talk, she’ll call me or text me,” she explained.