The stars of the Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series have blown up this past year following the first season. Olivia Rodrigo is riding a rollercoaster into pop stardom with her chart-topping album Sour and her co-star Joshua Bassett has been in the limelight as well. The 20-year-old is a singer in his own right, but fans can't and won’t stop connecting him to “drivers license” and Rodrigo's other music. And the actor has shared a major emergency that happened to him in the midst of it all.
It is rumored that Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett once dated and her hit music is all about the heartbreak between them. When Bassett was recently asked about the viral song he has been linked to (especially with the drop of his name in an SNL skit featuring the song), he didn’t get into the controversy, but he did share that two days after the song was released he “started getting very ill.”
The actor shared to GQ Magazine that at first he thought he had food poisoning, but then the pain became “unimaginable” leading up to the day when his own single “Lie Lie Lie” hit streaming platforms. He believes stress was part of why it happened, but apparently he was dealing with septic shock and heart failure. He also said this:
[The doctors] told me that I had a 30% chance of survival. They told me that if I had not checked into the hospital within 12 hours, I would have been found [dead] in my apartment.
Joshua Bassett previously shared the incident with his fans briefly on Instagram with a short video posted in January of himself throwing up a peace sign while in the hospital and heading into surgery:
The High School Musical star shared that due to the life-threatening incident he didn’t pay much attention to all the gossip and just didn’t “have any energy” to focus on anything but “staying alive.” As his single “Lie Lie Lie” went live, many fans thought it was a response to Olivia Rodrigo’s song “drivers license.” Joshua Bassett did name Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, who fans believe is the other woman he started dating shortly after her, in the interview. He said this:
[Everyone] is asking me about Sabrina and Olivia. Why don't we focus on these women for who they are? Let's focus on the art that they're making and how great they are instead of their relationship to a boy.
The High School Musical co-stars currently share the screen every week on the Disney+ series in its second season. When CinemaBlend spoke to Joshua Bassett, the actor shared his excitement for Olivia Rodrigo's latest original song from the show to premiere. The seventh episode in the season is now available, with new episodes coming every Friday.
