Jenna Ortega had a special bond with the late Cameron Boyce prior to his death.
“The last time I saw my friend Cameron Boyce, I’d known him since I was like 11 or 12, and we were supposed to kiss,” Ortega, 21, told France’s Canal+ earlier this month about an audition she had with Boyce. “And he knew me since I was 11 or 12. This was a few years later [when he was] 15, [he] came in, we were supposed to be love interests.”
According to Ortega, Boyce “felt weird” about the kissing scene considering their age gap.
“We both just kinda looked at each other and we were like, ‘No, we can’t do this,’” Ortega recalled. “It was so sweet because I was uncomfortable and I was having a hard time in the audition. And then, we wished each other well.”
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She continued, “I remember being really thankful and grateful that he did that.”
Ortega’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice costars Catherine O’Hara and Winona Rider subsequently called Boyce a “gentleman,” to which Ortega concurred.
“Yeah, he was,” she gushed.
Ortega, who rose to fame starring on Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle, further noted that Boyce died not long after that.
“And then he passed away,” Ortega concluded.
News broke in July 2019 that Boyce, a star on Disney Channel’s Jessie and Descendants, had died at the age of 20 following an epileptic seizure.
“It is with a profoundly heavy heart that we report that this morning we lost Cameron,” a spokesperson for Boyce told Us Weekly in a statement at the time. “He passed away in his sleep due to a seizure which was a result of an ongoing medical condition for which he was being treated.”
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The statement concluded, “The world is now undoubtedly without one of its brightest lights, but his spirit will live on through the kindness and compassion of all who knew and loved him.”
Boyce is survived by his parents and his sister. Many of his Disney Channel costars have also been candid about losing their former colleague.
“When I heard about Cameron, I had just woken up early in a London hotel room to the sound of my phone ringing off the hook,” Dove Cameron, who played Mal in the Descendants films, told Seventeen that July. “I was nervous about why I could be getting so many texts and calls, so I only looked at my mother’s text. I knew she would be the gentlest, and the most concise, whatever it was.”
She added, “[My mom] explained what had happened and I immediately phoned Booboo [Stewart, who was also in Descendants], who had already called me twice. We just sobbed without speaking. If there was a word stronger than devastated that could describe the depth of pain that I was feeling, I would use it.”
Every year on Boyce’s birthday, the Descendants stars pay tribute to his legacy via social media. They also attend annual fundraising galas for his eponymous foundation.
