NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 15: Kenan Thompson speaks at the Hold The Sauce! Good Burger is Back! panel during New York Comic Con 2023 - Day 4 at Javits Center on October 15, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for ReedPop)
Kenan Thompson took a moment to share his thoughts surrounding the ‘Quiet On Set’ docuseries. During a sit-down with Tamron Hall, the Emmy winner explained that the revelations in the project were “hard to watch.”
“It’s tough, it’s a tough subject. It’s tough for me because I can’t speak on stuff that I ain’t never witness because all these things happened after I left basically,” Kenan Thompson told Tamron.
Thompson also shed light on his proximity to Dan Schneider during his time at Nickelodeon. The comedian said Dan wasn’t really involved with ‘Kenan & Kel,’ despite his creator credit. He added that his Nickelodeon claim-to-fame show had a different showrunner.
“Our worlds weren’t really overlapping outside of like that necessarily. And then all that negativity started happening outside of our tenure there. So I wasn’t really aware of all of it.
But my heart goes out to anybody that has been victimized or their families…I think it’s a good thing that the doc is out and it’s putting things in display that need to be, stories that need to be told for accountability sake. But it’s definately hard to watch because I have fond memories of that place, of my costars so to hear that they’ve gone through terrible things like that it’s really tough.”
In ‘Quiet On Set,’ Drake Bell revealed that dialogue coach Brian Peck repeatedly sexually assaulted him, beginning in the early 2000s. Bell described feeling “trapped” with “no way out.”
“The abuse was extensive, and it got pretty brutal,” Drake Bell revealed.
After ‘Quiet on Set’ aired, Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider released a video statement about his past behaviors. He denied being in charge of hiring Peck and shared that he helped Drake’s mother write a speech to read during the trial against Brian Peck.
“When Drake and I talked and he told me what had happened, I wae more devastated by that than anything that had ever happened in my career thus far, and I told him, ‘I’m here for you, what do you need,'” Schneider explained.
Sources close to Amanda Bynes also recently shared similar sentiments about her Nickelodeon experience. The ‘Amanda Show’ star reportedly turned down a request to appear in ‘Quiet on Set,’ saying hers didn’t compare to those exposed in the docuseries. She “didn’t have a bad experience” while working at Nickelodeon, the source told TMZ.
Meanwhile, Allie DiMeco
As for Kenan, last month, he spoke about how much money he lost after leaving Nickelodeon in the late 90s and early 2000s. He blamed his “bad accountant” at the time for losing nearly $1.5 million of his money.
These days, though, Kenan is in better business partnerships, including with John Ryan Jr. The entertainers co-founded Artists For Artists in 2021, which Deadline described as a “full-service artist incubator for content creation, production, commerce and management venture.”
“A lot of times artists don’t have any ownership in the process in the projects that they do. It’ll be a legendary project that will last 40, 50 years and they won’t be able to capitalize past the original acting check, which isn’t really fair in my opinion. Because some things turn into merchandise, it’ll turn into socks,” he said. “Artists should have some sort of peace in that.”
Watch him speak on their business partnership and why they are pulling in the clients and thriving at the 3:15 mark.
