Meaghan Martin Says She Still Gets Backlash About Her Character's Bullying of Demi Lovato in Camp Rock

Some Camp Rock fans still haven’t forgiven Meaghan Martin for the way her character treated Demi Lovato’s in the 2008 Disney Channel Original Movie.

The 32-year-old actress joined fellow Disney alumni Sabrina Bryan and Will Friedle on the most recent episode of their podcast Magical Rewind to reminisce about the hit made-for-TV musical in which she played head mean girl Tess Tyler. Martin told the hosts that 16 years after Camp Rock premiered, she still gets backlash from fans on social media.

“Which is the weirdest thing!” Martin said. “I got a message the other day that was, like, pretty cruel in my Instagram DMs that was like, ‘You lied to Demi and you deserve to die.' And I was like, ‘Wow. We can move on.’ ”

Funnily enough, Martin explained that she initially auditioned for Lovato’s role. But, she said, “I knew that I was Tess. Like, I felt it in my bones. I was like, ‘Look, we’ve all read the script. Like, the blonde girl is gonna be Tess.' "

Lovato wasn’t the only young star on the cusp of mega-fame to appear in Camp Rock. With two albums already under their belts as well as a series of commercials for Baby Bottle Pops, Nick, Joe and Kevin Jonas all had roles in the film. But Martin remembered being unimpressed when she heard that the Jonas Brothers would be in the movie. “I remember being really nonplussed by it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Who, the Baby Bottle Pop guys?’ ”

As Bryan and Friedle noted, Camp Rock was part of the Disney Channel’s attempt to capitalize on the success of 2006’s High School Musical. But Martin said she was “a bit sassy” about the hit TV movie. “I was a big musical theater nerd, and I was like, ‘Ugh, what is this? Disney Channel thinks they can do musicals?’ ” Martin recalled, adding that she was “eating my words soon after that.”

Martin also compared working on the film to going to “Disney Channel high school.”

“Working as teens, that becomes your peer group,” she told Bryan and Friedle. “It becomes like, that is your high school classmates, and we all went to summer camp together.”

Of course, Bryan wanted to know about on-set romances. “There was a lot,” Martin said. “It's the high school thing, like you're gonna date the people you go to high school with, right?”

“I don't think Demi and Joe [Jonas] were together then,” she continued. “I think they got together later than that, because it was right before we started Camp Rock 2 that they got together and then broke up.”

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But both Bryan and Martin remembered lots of shenanigans going on when they both appeared in the third and final season of Disney Channel Games in 2008. The Battle of the Network Stars-esque reality competition series saw Disney Channel stars competing against one another in various games for charity at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando. On their downtime, though, the young stars seemed to have the run of Disney World’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.

Bryan remembered watching along with some of the older stars as romance bloomed among the younger teen actors. “We were older, so we were, I mean, obviously not going to be taking part in anything,” the Cheetah Girls star recalled. “But it was like watching younger kids and you're just going, ‘Oh wow, look at that dynamic across the pool …' ”

“It started at Camp Rock,” Bryan added. “Because I feel like High School Musical — It didn't seem like that, obviously you know besides Zac [Efron] and Vanessa [Hudgens]. But other than that, it didn't — It all seemed very friendly. And then Camp Rock crew comes in town, and we’re like … whooo!”

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“Honestly, I don't remember much, but I do remember the hot tub being a site to — It was the under the bleachers equivalent for us,” Martin recalled.

For her part, though, Martin said that while she has been married to British actor Oli Higginson since 2016, she “had an aggressive rule as a teenager that I would not date other actors,” and never dated any of her fellow Disney Channel stars.