Bella Thorne Gets Her License After Conquering Her Fear of Driving Caused by Her Dad’s Road-Related Death
Getting a driver’s license is a typical rite of passage for many teens. Bella Thorne is not your typical teen.
We’re not saying this because the former Shake It Up and Big Love actress has a moderate amount of fame (8.2 million Instagram followers is nothing to sniff at), but because her father died in a motorcycle accident in 2007, leaving her fearful of getting behind the wheel. She put that behind her though on Wednesday when she picked up her license in Los Angeles.
“The DMV life! finally!!!!” Thorne, who voices a character in the new movie Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, wrote, holding up a photo of her paperwork. She added, “FINALLY THANK GOODNESS!!!!”
As recently as August, Thorne had “a fear of driving,” she told Entertainment Tonight. At that point, she didn’t even have a permit. Her mother was her personal chauffeur.
“I’m best friends with my mom, so she kind of just takes me everywhere,” she told the news show. “She was like, ‘Bella, get a car and once you get a car you’ll like want to drive and want to drive your car.’ So I get a car [but] I’m perfectly content watching her drive it.”
In November, she told Seventeen mag that she wasn’t getting her license because, “I’m not mature enough to accept the responsibility of perhaps taking someone else’s life.”
The teen used her young adult novels as an outlet to share her sadness over her father’s death when she was just 9. The main character in Autumn Falls, Autumn, has also lost her father in a roadside accident.
“There’s only one thing that’s written exactly how it happened and it’s when her father dies in the book,” Thorne said on The View in December 2014. “Autumn doesn’t cry. But that’s not really how it is. It was shock. I was in a state of shock for two weeks when my father died.”
The death of Thorne’s father is still something that can break her apart in an instant.
“There are times where I’m completely normal even to this day and I’m just like, 'Oh, that light post looks nice. I wonder if Daddy would like that light post.’ And then, all of a sudden, I realize I’m crying,” she told Yahoo in November 2014.
Thorne recently made headlines for alluding to a Hollywood “mean girl” that she stays away from “at all costs” because she dislikes for flaunting her money. Now that she’s driving, she can head to her car and drive off when she doesn’t want to see her instead of having to wait for her mom to pick her up.