Joe Jonas is known as a promise ring-wearing, squeaky-clean Disney creation. But he reveals in a New York Magazine essay this week that, behind the scenes, he smoked weed with other teen stars, fell down drunk and was constantly fending off groupies.
“The first time I smoked weed was with Demi [Lovato] and Miley [Cyrus]. I must have been 17 or 18. They kept saying, ‘Try it! Try it!’ so I gave it a shot,” the “Pom Poms” singer reveals. “I was caught drinking when I was 16 or 17, and I thought the world was going to collapse. But I was in another country, and it was legal there. My 21st birthday, I fell down a flight of stairs. I was unconscious that time, and my whole team was scared to death that somebody was going to get a picture.”
While Joe and his brothers Kevin, 26, and Nick, 21, famously wore promise rings, touting they were waiting for sex until marriage, the middle brother admits he lost his virginity at age 20. He talks about his first serious romance with “Twilight” star Ashley Greene, whom he started dating at 20, but doesn’t specifically credit her with deflowering him.
“I did other stuff before then, but I was sexually active at 20,” he told New York magazine. “I’m glad I waited for the right person, because you look back and you go, ‘That girl was batshit crazy. I’m glad I didn’t go there.’ ”
Joe, 24, also talks about dating Lovato while she battled drug abuse.
“I really got to know her and got to see the ins and outs of what she was struggling with, like drug abuse. I felt like I needed to take care of her, but at the same time I was living a lie, because I wasn’t happy but felt like I had to stay in it for her, because she needed help. I couldn’t express any of that, of course, because I had a brand to protect.”
He admits he hooked up with fans and was regularly hit on by over-enthusiastic groupies.
“There were the moments when I’d walk into my hotel room only to find a girl I didn’t know standing there,” he says.
Joe talks about the Jonas Brothers forming on the tails of his younger brother Nick’s record deal nearly a decade ago and how things heated up when they snagged their own Disney series, “Jonas.”
“But the thing about the show was that some of the writing on it was terrible. It just ended up being some weird slapstick humor that only a10-year-old would laugh at,” he told New York magazine. “They took out the kissing scene that Nick had. I had to shave every day because they wanted me to pretend like I was 16 when I was 20 (when the show was done, I cut my hair off and grew as much of a beard as I could).”
The sibling trio announced they were breaking up in October,which Joe says was in the works for a while.
“The whole situation was breaking us up as a family, and we ultimately felt like we were holding each other back,” he says.
Joe points to Nick as “having a louder voice than me and Kevin when it came to music and major decisions.” He also says he was pushing for sexier music videos but was shot down by Kevin, who is married.
Now that the brothers have disbanded, Joe is working on an edgier solo album.
“Now that I’m 24 and have control of my life, I’m going back to the drawing board,” he says. “I’ve been through a shit-ton of stuff.”