Nickelodeon actor Drake Bell has come to the defense of Amanda Bynes saying that his former Amanda Show costar is not crazy as many people think.
“Amanda and I are close… I talk to her every day. She’s a sweetheart. I had lunch with her yesterday, and she’s brilliant. She’s good, and she’s healthy,” Bell explained to OK! Magazine on the red carpet.
Bell explained people are taking Bynes’ seemingly odd tweets and notably erratic behavior out of context saying that the actress is simply “in a place right now where she is searching.”
“She’s ready to be her own person, and do her own thing,” he continues. “She’s experiencing life for real, without the spotlight, for the first time. She is a girl who is finding herself.”
Bynes found herself back in the spotlight after a series of car incidents which lead to the actress having her licence revoked. The 27-year-old moved to New York and announced that she had retired from acting.
Since, Bynes has been arrested, lashed out at a series of media outlets for using unflattering photographs to which she threatened to sue, slammed Rihanna, Chrissy Tiegan, Lance Bass and others on Twitter and has been compared to Linda Blair of The Exorcist.
Bell explains that seeing all of Bynes’ bad press “hurts me and it upsets me.” He explains, “I look at her and talk to her, and we’ll sit down for lunch or dinner, and I’m like ‘Amanda, what is going on?’ And she’s like ‘whatever.’"
"She’s the same beautiful, funny, artistic, thoughtful person that she’s always been, but she decided to change her hairstyle," Bell defends. "She got a bad hairdo and shaved her head, so she had to get extensions. Now everyone’s like ‘oh, you’re crazy.’”
He continues, ”I’m like ‘dude, you come off crazy.’ She’s like, ‘I know, but I don’t mean to. I just changed the way I look!’”
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