Daniella Monet, the Victorious punchline now leading Hollywood Arts

Daniella Monet

Photo: NickRewind / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 1, 1989 West Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Nancy Drew, iParty with Victorious, A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!

In the first episode of Netflix’s Hollywood Arts, Trina Vega walks back into the performing arts school that spent four seasons laughing at her, and this time she stands at the front of the classroom. For Daniella Monet the joke goes deeper. The character Victorious built as the sister with no talent, loud, vain and permanently off-key, is now the lead of the franchise’s revival, and the woman who plays her is also one of the producers deciding who gets cast, what the sets look like and how the teenagers on them are treated.

The daughter of a father of Chilean descent with Croatian roots and an Italian-American mother, she grew up in West Hills, on the Los Angeles side of the San Fernando Valley, and was working as a child, with a guest spot on the police drama Pacific Blue before she turned ten.

Network sitcoms followed, with recurring parts on NBC’s American Dreams and ABC’s 8 Simple Rules and then a main role opposite Jason Alexander in the CBS family comedy Listen Up. It lasted one season, but its creator, Jeff Martin, partly modelled her character on his daughter Samantha, who was the same age and is now the co-showrunner of Hollywood Arts. Around the same time Monet played Inga Veinshtein in Andrew Fleming’s Nancy Drew, and appeared in three episodes of Zoey 101, her first job inside the Nickelodeon comedy factory run by Dan Schneider.

Victorious changed the scale of everything. Built around Victoria Justice as the gifted Tori Vega, it gave Monet the older sister whose ambition was never matched by any visible ability. The ensemble included Ariana Grande, Elizabeth Gillies, Leon Thomas III, Matt Bennett and Avan Jogia, and the series ran four seasons, collecting two Emmy nominations for outstanding children’s program before it ended without a proper finale. Trina was where the writers went for the cheapest laughs, and Monet’s full-body commitment to the physical comedy made the punchline the most recognisable thing on screen.

Nickelodeon kept her busy as a utility player: Bertha in the Fred sequels, a part she took over from Jennette McCurdy, Tootie in A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!, and host of the game show Paradise Run. Freeform’s Baby Daddy gave her a recurring adult role, and in 2018 she was one of the cheerleaders in Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” video.

The cheerful version of that history cracked in 2022. In a Business Insider investigation into Schneider’s sets, published weeks after Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, Monet said some of the costumes she wore on Victorious were “not age appropriate” and that she “wouldn’t even wear some of that today as an adult.” She described a scene in which Trina eats a pickle while applying lip gloss, a moment she said she raised with Nickelodeon as too sexual; the episode aired with it intact. “Do I wish certain things, like, didn’t have to be so sexualized? Yeah. A hundred percent,” she said. Her account was harder to file away because of where she put the blame. Schneider, who left Nickelodeon in 2018 and later apologised for some of his conduct on set while suing the makers of the docuseries Quiet on Set for defamation, was not her only target; she also pointed at male-dominated writers’ rooms and at the network’s standards department, which had signed off on every scene.

By then she had stepped back from acting. She and Andrew Gardner, her partner of six years when they got engaged in 2017, had a son, Gio, in September 2019 and a daughter, Ivry, in February 2021, and married in December 2022. Her working energy went into Kinder Beauty, a subscription box of vegan cosmetics she co-founded with the actress Evanna Lynch and the animal-rights campaigner Andrew Bernstein. It launched in 2019 and booked $4.8 million in sales in 2021, according to Business Insider. Monet, who is vegan, traced the idea to a makeup chair on set, where she realised how few of the products going on her face were free of animal testing.

The return was deliberately modest. After five years away she went to Hallmark, on Lacey Chabert’s advice, with supporting parts in Holiday Crashers and Sisterhood, Inc. In March 2024, while she was shooting the first of them in Vancouver, Jake Farrow called. He had written and produced Victorious, voicing Robbie’s puppet Rex Powers, and wanted to build a show around Trina. On Zach Sang’s podcast in July 2026 she was blunt about the plan behind all of it: “I don’t want to be super famous,” she said, calling herself “your Hallmark girly” and adding that she wanted her children to be able to watch whatever she made.

As an executive producer, her terms were specific. Before the project was announced in February 2025 she called each member of the original main cast for their blessing; Grande, she has said, told her this was her chance to make a show that felt the way Nickelodeon had felt for them. She rehired the original’s assistant art director as production designer and watched self-tapes herself while more than 5,700 actors auditioned for the five student leads, filtering first for whether they were funny. Farrow, who worked across several of Schneider’s series, has said that on the original he learned “how not to do it”; Schneider has no involvement. The show began at Nickelodeon and moved to Netflix in October 2025 with a 26-episode order, a sale Deadline tied to the shake-up after the Skydance-Paramount merger.

Not everyone was won over. What’s On Netflix called Hollywood Arts a “disappointing lifeless nostalgia grab” and wrote that Monet’s comedy is “incredibly broad, mostly relegated to waving her arms around”, while singling out newcomers Peyton Jackson and Emmy Liu-Wang. The complaint lands on the very quality fans have defended for a decade: Trina was never subtle, and the new series asks a sight gag to carry a lead role and a mentor’s arc.

The first twelve episodes of Hollywood Arts premiered on Netflix on October 15, 2026, with the rest of the order still to come and a later window on Nickelodeon and Paramount+. Six weeks after that premiere Monet has the lead in a Hallmark Christmas film of her own: in The Christmas Eve Feast, opposite Kevin McGarry, she plays Silvy Gianetti, a New York chef who goes home to Boston’s North End to cook her family’s Christmas Eve dinner. It premieres on November 27. Both are the family viewing she said she wanted to make; only one depends on whether the sister written as the joke can hold the room.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice, Daniella Monet, Hollywood Arts, Victorious

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