Vanessa Hudgens is a woman in love. And she’s dishing on her modern fairy tale with her boyfriend, baseball player Cole Tucker.
In an appearance on The View to promote her new films tick, tick… Boom! and The Princess Switch 3, the 32-year-old actress opened up about her relationship with Cole. She gushed:
“It is literally the ultimate modern day love story.”
She recounted how she and Cole first crossed paths – virtually! – and connected during quarantine:
“We met over Zoom, over a Zoom meditation group!
It’s so funny because I did it with my girlfriend Alexander Shipp. Joe Jonas put together this group, it’s beautiful and I loved it and so they put me on a group chat. Everyone got sent the new link for the next Zoom and everyone’s sending gifs of themselves – Joe Jonas, Wilmer Valderrama… I send a gif of myself and someone sends a gif of a baseball player sliding into a base and lifting his head and going (imitates someone looking around). I thought it was a joke and so I responded in all caps, “HOT.”
And then I saw him on Zoom and it didn’t click that he was the baseball player! And I was sitting next to Alex and I was hitting her, I was like, ‘Who is that?’ And she was like, ‘I don’t know!’
Meanwhile later I find out that he was watching me see him and he’s like, ‘Either I have something on my face or I don’t know what [is going on],’ because every time he talked I was talking over him. But I was on mute so he had no idea, oh the mystery!”
Vanessa stated that she definitely did go after what she wanted, but stands by this one thing:
“He did slide into my DMs first!”
She also spoke about how much Jonathan Larsen’s stories and life means to her, and how important representation is for her:
“Representation is everything. I look at my group of friends and how much Rent has inspired them, how they saw a piece of themselves in these characters when they’ve never seen that before and it kinda revolutionized their lives. My friends are everything to me, my community is everything to me.
I look at my community and I look at Jonathan’s and they’re so similar, I have friends who are struggling artists who are trying to figure out how to pursue their dreams and pay the bills and I have people who haven’t been accepted their whole lives because of their family not accepting them for being gay. I just look at Jonathan’s stories and I look at my friends stories and they all mesh together.
It’s beautiful so see that representation.”
And here’s what Vanessa said when asked if there’s a chance for a High School Musical reunion to play out on screen:
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s such a special thing that we all hold so near and dear to our hearts, and it’s such a specific moment in time that I feel like I don’t want to mess with that! Let’s just let it live.
And, I mean, it was literally half my life ago!”
