“VICTORIOUS” STAR DANIELLA MONET RECALLS AUDITIONING AGAINST MILEY CYRUS AND TAYLOR MOMSEN FOR “HANNAH MONTANA”: 'A WILD, WILD DAY'

Monet says she pictured herself in the role of Hannah Montana before losing out to Cyrus.

Key Points

• Daniella Monet auditioned for Hannah Montana.
• She was beat out by Miley Cyrus for the part.
• Monet went on to star in Victorious, and will appear in the sequel series, Hollywood Arts, this year.

Daniella Monet has enjoyed a successful career on Nickelodeon, but she originally had her heart set on a Disney Channel classic.

The Victorious star recalled auditioning against Miley Cyrus and Taylor Momsen for the titular role on Hannah Montana — ultimately losing out to Cyrus, who led the show for four seasons from 2006 to 2011.

“It was a wild, wild day” she explained of the final auditions on the Zach Sang Show podcast last week. “I’ll never forget it because it was a long test session, and I remember we were at this Disney building, and there was a restaurant below, and I asked if anyone wanted French fries because I was, like, ‘This was a long day.’ So that’s what I remember. It was a long day.”

Monet, now 37, admitted she began to picture herself in the role throughout the stretch of auditions.

“I think a lot of us probably look back at some of these auditions where we got really close and we had already seen the future for ourselves, right? Like you try it on, and that’s our job as an actor. Like you try it all on, and so, of course, like I tried it all on. I felt like it was mine,” Monet said. “Any time I get really invested in something, I almost, like, without getting too psycho about it, I try to believe that this is mine, and I walk into the room with that kind of energy. And so the tricky part about fully embodying that sort of experience is knowing how to very quickly cipher it off when it doesn’t go your way, so that’s a skill in itself. But that experience was a rush and, yeah, it taught me a lot. I had so much fun with it.”

Monet also talked about why her agents initially didn’t want her to get into the Disney or Nickelodeon worlds at all following her stints on network TV. (Monet appeared on NBC’s American Dreams and ABC’s 8 Simple Rules before landing a starring role opposite Jason Alexander and Malcolm-Jamal Warner on the short-lived sitcom Listen Up, which ran from 2004 to 2005.)

“It was a different world,” she told Zach Sang, admitting she was receiving a bit of attention and was featured in TV Guide and Seventeen magazines. “It was, again, a very different landscape. I was not the type of person, like, my parents didn’t have publicists for me. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was a very accidental kind of buzz, and so I was getting opportunities to potentially be in, like, 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I was in the mix for certain bigger stuff. And [my agent] thought you go from a network show to the big screen, and you don’t turn back. And if you do turn back, it’ll be another network show. That was the world that we were living in.”

Monet, however, knew she didn’t want to take the route of comedy flicks but stick with teen-driven shows.

“I was like, ‘I want to be on Nickelodeon and Disney, and I want to be around kids,’” she explained. “I was on the show that I was on. I had one brother, but I very rarely was around kids. And this was like 14 through 16 years old, where I wasn’t in school. So I’m like, ‘How do we have some fun with this?’ This is an adult world, so yeah, that was myself and my agent trying to protect me in a way and guide me to like something bigger and better in their eyes.”

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After losing out on auditions for Hannah Montana and Stuck in the Middle, Monet did a guest spot on Disney Channel’s Suite Life with Zach and Cody and then decided to go out for Nickelodeon projects.

She booked Zoey 101 fairly quickly, and, after “a small trickle effect,” she landed her role of Trina Vega, the older sister of Victoria Justice’s Tori Vega, on Victorious. She is set to appear in the sequel to the series, Hollywood Arts.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly

2026-07-15T13:36:06Z