“The Shards’ Star Bella Valdes Returns to Music with “Playing Pretend”: “I’ve Had Teachers Tell Me I’d Never Be Enough”

Bella Valdes has fought for her place on stage throughout her life. In her new single Playing Pretend, the actress sings about what the struggle has cost her.

Valdes, who has just graduated from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is starring in the new FX show The Shards as Cha Cha, will drop Playing Pretend, the first single off her debut EP, in September. The track touches on themes of fantasy, heartbreak, ambition, and sacrifice, and its music video features elements of Flashdance and A Chorus Line.

Choreographer Brooke Valdes, the singer’s sister-in-law, helped shoot the choreography and the video.

Speaking with Where Is The Buzz, Bella Valdes explained that sacrifice is the part of the story usually left out of the press release. When asked about what her quest for stardom has cost her, the artist did not sugarcoat the answer.

“Blood, sweat, and tears. I’ve fought to be onstage my whole life,” Valdes told Where Is The Buzz.

Criticism was coming from both sides, and the artist experienced it at a very young age.

“I’ve had teachers tell me I’d never be enough, and I’ve had kids make fun of me for being ‘too much,'” Valdes said.

Still, she got a lot of support from the people closest to her.

“At the same time, I’ve been lucky enough to have family, friends, and teachers remind me that everything I need is already inside me,” she said.

Nevertheless, there was a price to pay.

“So yes, this life has cost me things, physically, mentally, emotionally, but I wouldn’t change any of it,” Valdes assured.

The obstacles she faced along the way became her driving force.

“Every time I’ve been hurt or knocked down, it’s given me another reason to get better and keep going,” she said.

The combination of the two became the song’s starting point, which began as an idea rather than a specific lyric.

“That tension is really what inspired ‘Playing Pretend.’ The video came from dance, specifically the image of me performing in a chorus line with a sprained ankle,” Valdes explained.

At the time, it was not a metaphor.

“It’s probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. I’m still doing physical therapy,” she said.

Later, it became a metaphor.

“But there was something meaningful to me about dancing through the pain. It became a metaphor for the way I’ve approached my life: sometimes you’re hurting, sometimes you’re exhausted, sometimes you’re being told you can’t do something, and you still get back onstage,” Valdes said.

She stopped taking no for an answer.

“I’ve learned that failure doesn’t mean the dream is over. Sometimes it’s just another step toward becoming the person who can actually achieve it,” she said.

Then she summed up the whole project in a single phrase.

“The world is a stage, and I’m just ‘Playing Pretend,'” she added.

Aleksei Lazic wrote the song, which meant Valdes had to find her own interpretation in another artist’s words.

“Because Aleksei Lazic wrote the song, I came to ‘Playing Pretend’ by finding my own meaning inside his words,” she said.

She remembers the recording day quite well, mostly because of the state she was in.

“I remember the day we recorded it so vividly. I was heartbroken over something happening in my own life, and I sat with Aleksei and my best friend Jellie, his wife, and just poured my heart out to them,” Valdes said.

That conversation became part of the recording.

“It was our first studio session together, and somehow that conversation became part of the recording. They encouraged me to put all of that emotion into the song, and I did. It was cathartic, and I think you can hear that when you listen to it,” she said.

One lyric particularly spoke to her.

“The lyric ‘all this pain I took so lovingly’ really stayed with me because it speaks to something I think a lot of artists understand: the willingness to endure pain because you love what you’re creating,” Valdes said.

From there, she and Brooke Valdes began brainstorming different versions of herself to feature in the video.

“When Brooke and I started developing the video, we went deeper into who I am and all the different versions of myself that exist within that,” she said.

Each version got its own framing.

“There’s the little girl writing in her journal in her bedroom, the party girl, the dancer covered in the grime and grit of the studio, and the woman onstage in that red leotard, carrying all the pressure to be perfect,” Valdes said.

For her, the visual was where she truly owned the song’s content.

“The video became my opportunity to take Aleksei’s lyrics and draw my own story over them,” she said.

And the story she was weaving carried an implicit warning.

“It’s about toxicity, wanting, ambition, and becoming, becoming the woman you’ve imagined yourself to be, sometimes losing yourself along the way, and realizing that even if you gain the world, you still have to hold onto the pieces of yourself you sacrificed to get there,” Valdes said.

By the end, the lyrics no longer belonged to another artist.

“Aleksei gave me the words, but I gave them my story, and by the time we finished, they felt like a confession of my own,” she said.

House pop is the genre associated with euphoria; however, it is not necessarily a happy genre. Valdes agrees, saying that’s the whole idea.

“I’m interpreting something Aleksei wrote, but I could find my own experience inside it, and I could also infer what he was feeling through the lyrics,” she said.

The contrast of the mood and the message of the song interested her.

“There’s something really powerful about putting heartbreak over a beat that feels euphoric. On an acoustic guitar, the sadness might sit right at the surface,” Valdes said.

It is the genre where your heart and your body can fight with each other.

“With house pop, you can be devastated and still want to dance. There’s this tension between what your body is doing and what your heart is going through,” she said.

As a performer, Valdes chose to embrace that contrast.

“That’s what I wanted to lean into as a performer. I didn’t want to strip the sadness away; I wanted to let it exist underneath the glamour, the energy, and the euphoria,” Valdes said.

She believes it’s the song’s most honest part.

“I think that contradiction is what makes the song feel so human. You can be heartbroken, ambitious, messy, hopeful, all at the same time, and still find a reason to get up and move,” she said.

Valdes repeatedly talked about the song’s authorship.

“I think that’s what makes ‘Playing Pretend’ so interesting. It’s not my song. I’m interpreting something Aleksei wrote, but I found so much of myself in it,” Valdes told Where Is The Buzz.

Knowing Aleksei personally gave her another angle for reading it.

“And because I know him, I could also read between the lines and imagine what he was feeling when he wrote it,” she said.

For her, the genre adds something you can’t get in an acoustic arrangement.

“There’s something about putting heartbreak over a beat that feels euphoric that really works for me. On an acoustic guitar, I think the sadness would sit right at the surface,” Valdes said.

The song thus becomes dual.

“With house pop, you can be completely heartbroken and still want to dance. That contrast feels very true to me. I love that the song can feel fun and glamorous while underneath it, there’s pain, wanting, and ambition,” she said.

Both Flashdance and A Chorus Line feature the struggle of auditioning for the whole life, and neither tries to hide the fact that people get rejected. When asked what would Valdes have left from those films, she said she couldn’t think of anything.

“I don’t know if there’s anything I’d leave in 1983,” she said.

In fact, she wants more of what those times have required from people.

I’m fascinated with how much passion people showed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. I want to feel that I’m carrying that passion, feeling that people were literally dancing for their lives, Valdes said.

She described the atmosphere those dancers lived in.

“Dancers were in hot rooms, sweating through their leotards, giving everything they had for a chance to dance,” she said.

The dancers today have other tools; however, she doesn’t dismiss them.

“Now we have TikTok and social media, where you can present your dancing from your bedroom. I love that we have that access, but I wanted ‘Playing Pretend’ to bring back some of that grit,” Valdes said.

She wanted to see the dancers’ work on screen.

“I wanted the sweat, the rehearsal room exhaustion, the feeling of fighting for something,” she said.

She also wanted to preserve the purity of the dancer’s idea.

“At the same time, I wanted to keep that ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ innocence, the little girl in her room dreaming about who she could become,” Valdes said.

The video became the merger of those two concepts.

“For me, the video is really about putting those two worlds together: the innocence of the dream and the brutal work it takes to actually live it,” she said.

Collaborating with someone who is also your family member might cause conflicts, but Valdes doesn’t think they do.

“Honestly, Brooke and I work together so well because we don’t really fight,” she said.

However, Brooke Valdes still makes space for the collaboration.

“She’s a mother of two and my brother’s wife, and she still makes time to indulge my fantasies and push me to dream bigger and give more of myself,” Valdes said.

Most of what ends up in the video originated in her collaborator’s imagination.

“She has this incredible gift for seeing videos as visions in her head, and so much of ‘Playing Pretend’ literally came from her brain. I always joke that we share a few brain cells,” she said.

The only thing to negotiate is the budget.

“The only thing we really have to negotiate is the budget, because everything is self-produced. Sometimes we have to scale down a vision, but creatively, I trust her completely,” Valdes said.

The trust goes beyond production logistics.

“She knows me, she understands the world I’m trying to build, and she always pushes me to give it more,” she said.

The video’s arc, from the dream in the bedroom to the stage, reflects Valdes’s life this year. However, she hasn’t caught up with it yet.

“I think I’m still somewhere in between. There are moments when I look around and think, wait, this is actually my life,” she said.

Her current activities reflect what she has written in her childhood diary.

“I’m making music, making videos, dancing, acting, and creating things the little girl in my bedroom used to write about in her journal,” Valdes said.

There are doubts, though.

“But there are still moments where I feel like I’m pretending, like I’m trying to convince myself I actually belong here,” she said.

This gap is why the song is placed here.

“I think that’s why ‘Playing Pretend’ feels so personal. The little girl dreaming about becoming a star is literally me, and now I’m slowly becoming the woman she imagined,” Valdes said.

Her ambitions did not become smaller.

“But I also crave the biggest, wildest life possible. I have dreams of being one of the greats and leaving a real legacy, so I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I’ve ‘arrived’ or if I’ll ever really settle,” she said.

What has changed is the verb.

“Maybe that’s the difference now: I’m not just dreaming about that life anymore. I’m building it,” Valdes said.

The Shards is scheduled to premiere on FX on August 5th, with new episodes premiering on Wednesdays and streaming on Hulu. To play the part of Cha Cha in The Shards requires the skill of both a dancer and an actor, and Valdes is grateful to her training for providing her with such skills.

“That opening scene with Tony, for sure lol,” she said, laughing.

The scene she kept going back to needed almost no translation.

“But all jokes aside, her main scene, which I like to call ‘Tony Jr.,’ always felt really intuitive in my body. I could express it all through my eyes,” Valdes said.

The character’s thought process is typical for a dancer.

“Cha Cha is so connected to movement, rhythm, sexuality, and confidence that I immediately understood her through her thought process,” she said.

The character has appeared in other projects of Valdes, who played in American Psycho and Law & Order: SVU, and has also starred in a short film called Shuga Mango that premiered on August 7th at the Greenpoint Film Festival.

When asked what Valdes says to the industry that wants her to pick a lane, she didn’t hesitate.

“I’m a multihyphenate. I genuinely can’t commit to just one thing because I love too many forms of storytelling,” she said.

She is inspired by the artists that keep moving forward.

“I’m inspired by artists who are constantly evolving and discovering new sides of themselves, and that’s what I want for my own career,” Valdes said.

She doesn’t want to switch one discipline for another.

“I don’t want to choose between acting, music, dance, or any other part of my creativity. I want to build a life where all of those things can exist together,” she said.

For her, this refusal is the essence of the matter.

“I think the most interesting artists are the ones who refuse to stay in one box,” Valdes told Where Is The Buzz.