Ashley Parker Angel Opens Up About Being Kicked Out at 16 Before O-Town

If you were conscious in the early 2000s, you knew O-Town. Full stop. Posters on the wall, Making the Band on repeat, “All or Nothing” permanently stuck in your head. 

Ashley Parker Angel was one of the guys at the center of it. He went from TRL-era pop fame and 10 million records sold to a full-on Broadway run in Wicked, logging over 2,000 performances. Now he’s part of Boy Band Confidential, a new documentary where he and 25 other boy band members finally unpack what was really going on behind the scenes.

On You Wish, he sits down with Holly Madison and gets into all of it. Here are the highlights, adapted from the episode.

Were your parents on board with you wanting to perform?

“No, they were not actually. I was raised very strict Jehovah’s Witness. And in that religion, if you get baptized, you can then get excommunicated…it happened to me when I was around 16, 17. Part of it was also that I wanted to be on stage. And they were like, ‘No, you can’t do that. You got to live your life for God.’ And I was like, I don’t feel like this resonates with me. And so I got disfellowshipped and basically all my family stopped talking to me…

…I got kicked out of my house at 16. I had to move in with a friend down the street. And part of the reason why I got kicked out is I was doing Grease the musical at the local community college…it was a very challenging thing to lose my family at that age. And I felt like it actually set me up for overcoming challenges and obstacles later in life. Because when you lose the support of your family and friends and nobody’s talking to you, you really have to become independent. You kind of gain this resilience.”

Wait—Making the Band was literally your first audition?

“That was my first audition. I had to borrow the money for the plane ticket. And Vegas, where I live now, is actually very special to me because Vegas is where I flew to audition for Making the Band…

…Making the Band was really an experiment. You didn’t have shows like The Voice. You didn’t have American Idol. Nobody even knew if it would even be successful or not…Making the Band was the first reality TV show picked up by a major network because the major networks weren’t doing that at the time. Like you had Real World on MTV, but reality TV was not like a thing yet.”

What happened when the cameras followed you home?

“There was a trip home. The cameras came and followed every guy back to their hometown. And there was a conversation with my dad who is an elder in the church and he sat at the kitchen table with my mom. It was like, ‘I don’t support anything that you’re doing. Don’t talk to me about it.’ But that aired and he became such a villain because of that and it kind of followed him for years…

…On a lot of levels, my dad would always say, ‘I don’t want you to go into entertainment because there’s a lot of sharks. There’s a lot of people that will try to manipulate you, take advantage of you.’ He was on the extreme side of like, ‘They’re all pedophiles.’ And then you like live life and you’re like, maybe dad was actually kind of right about a lot of those things. It came from a place of protection, but because reality TV is just this little bite-sized part of your personality, they didn’t really get to fully explain all of that. So that caused a rift between me and my family because he was portrayed like that on TV and then it just made it harder for me to have that relationship with my parents.”

What was actually going on with Lou Pearlman behind the scenes?

“Lou Pearlman was such a con man. And it’s such a bittersweet thing because Lou clearly had a talent for putting bands together, but he promised a lot of things to a lot of people. I think he was grooming people. And I mean, I definitely felt like I was subject to that as well. Fortunately, we had some good people that came and said, ‘Hey, look, here’s the deal about Lou. Be very careful.’ Earlier bands didn’t have that…

…He was like a Bernie Madoff level con man. He embezzled $300 million…he had all these fake companies that didn’t exist…Yet all these businesses existed on paper…he actually called me from jail…he left me a voice recording. And I always wanted to have one final conversation with him that I never got to have because then he passed away behind bars…I just wanted to ask him why.”

Did you have any control over your own career during the MTV years?

“I was always auditioning for projects. I booked a movie opposite Channing Tatum and it would have been a great thing for my acting career. And MTV was like, unofficially, we’re not going to pick up your TV show because you’re trying to make it in music and we want to show you kind of down and out after O-Town trying to make it again. So if you’re starring in a movie, we don’t get to tell that story. And so I passed on it. And looking back, my agent was just like, ‘You never should be doing that.’ Like, you should say yes to every opportunity.”

What would you tell a teenager who got an offer to join a group?

“Do everything you can to have an identity outside of that. I think it comes down to identity. I think so much of what we experience in life is how we process things through the filter of our identity. And if who you are is this famous person and you’re getting all this attention and accolades and you’re so identified with it, the minute that goes away, that’s when you see these people crash and burn…entertainment is a wave that goes up and goes down and goes up and goes down. And hopefully, if you do it for the long term, you’ll catch another wave up. But inevitably, you’re going to go through these peaks and valleys and ups and downs and even almost miniature periods of retirement.”

Listen to the full episode on You Wish with Holly Madison, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Read Next

• Supermodel Miranda Kerr Says Lasting Beauty Starts With Inner Peace, Not Perfection
• The Secret Behind ‘You ARE the Father’ Is That Maury Didn’t Know Either
• Jennie Garth Opens Up About ‘90210’ Fame, Anxiety, and Choosing Herself