NEED TO KNOW
- The stars of Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh made a joint appearance in a panel discussion at Nostalgia Con at the Anaheim Convention Center on June 8, 2025
- Stars Drake Bell and Josh Peck were joined by actors Nancy Sullivan (who played the role of Bell’s mother and Peck’s stepmother) and Jonathan Goldstein (who played Josh’s father and Drake’s stepfather on the show)
The Drake & Josh family has reunited.
For the first time in more than a decade, the cast of the hit Nickelodeon series made a joint appearance in a panel discussion at Nostalgia Con at the Anaheim Convention Center on June 8, 2025.
Drake & Josh followed teenage stepbrothers Drake Parker (played by Drake Bell) and Josh Nichols (played by Josh Peck) as they lived together despite their opposite personalities. The series aired from 2004 to 2007 on Nickelodeon.
Joining Bell and Peck at the panel discussion were Nancy Sullivan (who played the role of Bell’s mother and Peck’s stepmother) and Jonathan Goldstein (who played Josh’s father and Drake’s stepfather on the show).
The stars of the show have publicly detailed their strained relationship since the show ended, with Bell publicly criticizing Peck for not inviting him to his 2017 wedding to Paige O’Brien.
But the two have made amends more recently, speaking about their relationship on the March 24 episode of Peck’s Good Guys podcast, which he hosts with Ben Soffer. The podcast marked the first time the pair had reunited since the 2024 Quiet on Set documentary premiered; in the documentary, Bell shared publicly for the first time that he had been abused by Brian Peck (no relation to Josh) who had worked with him as a dialogue coach on The Amanda Show.
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On the podcast, Peck said he had no idea any of the abuse was going on and thought Bell was withdrawing simply because he didn’t like him anymore. “Until you sort of shared with me what was happening, I was just looking at it through the prism of a 14-year-old’s brain going like, ‘He doesn’t want much to do with me.’ ” Watching the documentary now, “so much was revealed” to him for the first time, Peck said.
At Nostalgia Con, the former co-stars spoke about how the show first came to be, saying Nickelodeon was in the market for a “buddy comedy” at the time.
Peck explained that Sullivan and Bell were cast members of Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show (starring Amanda Bynes) “from the beginning.”
“I came in during the second season, and I think [when] Drake and I first met, I was very intimidated by how cool he was, and I was sort of the new kid. But after a while, we just sort of hit this stride and we did this sketch on The Amanda Show called Tony Pajamas, where I played his sidekick,” Peck said. “And then basically, thankfully, Nickelodeon was looking for a buddy comedy, so we were those buddies. And then it was just natural that Nancy would be our mom. Of course. She was so great.”
Peck added that the two were doing a sketch in which they were “fighting over a shrimp” when they were first approached about starring in their own show.
“And in the script it just said, ‘A shrimp falls from the sky. Drake and Josh fight over it’ And there’s no dialogue, there’s no anything …there was a lot of improvising and we were just doing our thing and one of the writers leaned over to the executive producer and said, ‘Hey, that buddy comedy that Nickelodeon’s looking for, look at the monitor. There’s your buddies right there.’ “
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