Josh Peck Revealed The “Dirty Little Secret” Behind His Feud With Drake Bell

Drake Bell and Josh Peck played stepbrothers with polar-opposite personalities for more than three years on Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh. As convincing as their close relationship might’ve been onscreen, Peck, 35, recently opened up about his longtime feud with his former co-star and why they are “not really” friends anymore on the BFFs podcast.

Though Peck insisted that the two “weren’t that close” to begin with, their feud reached a tipping point when the How I Met Your Father star married Paige O’Brien in 2017 and didn’t invite Bell. “The internet went crazy,” Peck recalled. “The dirty little secret, I guess, was that I knew that Drake and I didn't stay in touch for the 10 years since we had made the show. But no one needed to know that," he told hosts Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards. Peck continued:

“I was happy to just die with that secret that, like, we made this thing that people really love, but maybe we weren't that close. So I didn't invite him to my wedding because I hadn't really talked to him in many, many years. Cut to — I'm getting married that night and I see these text messages from him cursing me out, coming for me on the night of my wedding. And it's delusional because I'm like, ‘Bro, we worked at Coffee Bean when we were 16. I'm sorry, I'm 31 now. I might've lost your number.’”

At the time, Bell expressed his frustration in now-deleted tweets, which resulted in some fans harassing Peck and O’Brien on social media. “When you’re not invited to the wedding the message is clear,” Bell, 35, wrote. “True colors have come out today. Ties are officially cut. I’ll miss you brotha.”

Peck also commented on Bell’s actions following the tweets during the podcast. “He goes on this press tour about how heartbroken he is and creating this narrative that just wasn’t true,” he said on BFFs, “I don’t care about me. I signed up to be a public person. It is what it is. But here’s my wife, who is like getting torn down on the internet. She’s private. She just got married. Can’t she just enjoy this?”

And the podcast guest recalled how he confronted Bell at the 2017 MTV Music Awards shortly after his wedding. “I go up to him — and this might be the most Sopranos thing I have ever done. I looked at him, and I go, ‘Go apologize to my wife right now,’” Peck said. “He made a beeline for my wife, and I see him do a whole five-minute performance of an apology. It was one of the few times in my life where I went blind and my emotions put me in that place.”

Much like the characters they played, Peck and Bell are totally different people. And while their friendship didn’t go beyond the set of Drake & Josh, the Happy People Are Annoying author is grateful for his time on the show. “But here’s the thing: you cant pick your hits. Drake & Josh is something I’ll be synonymous with forever, and I’m proud of it,” he said. “I want to like the guy that my name is attached to forever, but unfortunately, it just sort of worked out the way that it did.”