<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Pretty Little Liars is on Seventeen&amp;#039;s list of must-see TV shows and if you&amp;#039;re like us \u2013 you&amp;#039;re counting down the minutes until the show returns on January 3rd at 7:58 p.m. ET. So, we were beyond ecstatic to catch up with Troian Bellisario, who plays the seemingly perfect Spencer Hastings on the hit show and is on the cover of Seventeen&amp;#039;s February issue. Here, Troian gets personal about what her fellow cast mates are really like, her own high school clique, and the run-ins with fame and the paparazzi she had way before her PLL fame. 17: Sum up what fans of the show should expect when Pretty Little Liars returns. Troian Bellisario: Everything that you&amp;#039;d ever want to happen and everything that you&amp;#039;d never expect to happen will happen. It&amp;#039;s so much fun and there are so many good twists. And it&amp;#039;s really cool. The mystery is always there, but they&amp;#039;re starting to settle into the characters and see these really great relationships develop and change. I&amp;#039;m very, very excited for people to see what we&amp;#039;re doing. 17: Now that you&amp;#039;ve been playing Spencer for a bit \u2013 tell us how you relate to her. Are you anything like Spencer? TB: I relate to Spencer a lot because I grew up in a very wealthy family around a very wealthy group of people. My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That&amp;#039;s just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a &amp;#039;B&amp;#039; because a &amp;#039;B&amp;#039; was not good enough. And it wasn&amp;#039;t really my parents. My parents told me to &amp;#039;put down the books, go outside, you look like death.&amp;#039; They were always very supportive of me. But I think it was the school I went to and the world I was born into. And, I think Spencer is kind of in that. She&amp;#039;s in this beautiful, golden cage where everybody just says &amp;#039;you have everything so you have no excuse to trip up.&amp;#039; 17: Who&amp;#039;s least like their character? TB: Shay [Mitchell], in terms of being sweet and sensitive \u2013 she&amp;#039;s like Emily. But Shay comes to set in the morning, it&amp;#039;ll be seven in the morning, she&amp;#039;ll come in heels, skinny jeans, the most gorgeous, glamorous top and her hair is like a Pantene Pro-V ad. Then she&amp;#039;ll come film her scene wearing these dirty converse and jeans as Emily \u2013 which is like what I arrived in. And I&amp;#039;m like &amp;#039;Who are you?&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s so funny to see her kick off her sneakers at the end of the day and go home in heels. 17: Can you relate to your own high school experience? Did you have an Ali in your group? TB: When I was in seventh grade, there was this girl that was a lot like Ali. She terrified me. You were terrified of her and you were also in love with her in that you wanted to be her. She was a woman already and we were just girls. So you looked up to her in a way that it was like &amp;#039;How do you do that?&amp;#039; How did she know exactly what to say to boys? How exactly to handle a parent to get us to stay up late? She knew how to manipulate people in a way that children normally don&amp;#039;t. And she used that against us. If you betrayed her you felt like you betrayed your sister. It was a very interesting power dynamic. Fortunately, I grew away from that and I matured and we stayed really good friends. I think that&amp;#039;s why I was a guys&amp;#039; girl. 17: What was it like being one of the guys? TB: I grew up with brothers. Girls terrified me. If a boy was mad at you, he hit you or he&amp;#039;d yell at you. I&amp;#039;m thinking about my brothers. Boys didn&amp;#039;t go around just hitting me. But it was easy. With girls all of a sudden she&amp;#039;ll tell you &amp;#039;That skirt looks ugly on you.&amp;#039; And you&amp;#039;re like &amp;#039;Oh you&amp;#039;re mad at me! I have to figure out what I&amp;#039;ve done.&amp;#039; I had one really good girl friend all through high school. It&amp;#039;s funny, being on a show that&amp;#039;s so girl heavy I&amp;#039;m enjoying having girl friends for the first time. It&amp;#039;s really cool. 17: Are you friends with anyone else from young Hollywood? TB: Well, I&amp;#039;m really fortunate. I was born here and I was raised here in Los Angeles. And when I was five years old, my best friends were Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen because we lived across the street from each other. As I got older, I had a bunch of friends that were various teen stars. I&amp;#039;ve always known people in the spotlight and people who just grew up in LA and had nothing to do with the industry. It&amp;#039;s not a glamorous thing to me. It&amp;#039;s just a different type of business. I&amp;#039;ve seen friends go down the path of drugs or letting the spotlight go to their heads. I&amp;#039;ve witnessed that. It&amp;#039;s not a very good option if you want to have a long career like I do and do a lot of different things.&amp;#039; 17: What was it like being friends with Mary Kate and Ashley as child stars? TB: I just knew them as the girls across the street. And I remember the first time I was playing with them and something happened and I realized these aren&amp;#039;t normal kids. They&amp;#039;re treated differently. But, I grew up on a set. My dad is a successful television producer, director and writer and my mom&amp;#039;s a director, and writer. Even when I was young I wanted to be an actress. I knew the actors and the paparazzi. It was just kind of always in my landscape. It was never directed at me, but it was always somewhere so I could see how it operated and I could see it from afar and go &amp;#039;Wow, that&amp;#039;s not really glamorous, it&amp;#039;s kind of exhausting not having any privacy.&amp;#039; So it was never something I pursued. The first time I saw the billboard for Pretty Little Liars I almost got into a car accident! Which celebrity do you wish you were friends with? Do you relate to Troian? Tell us all in the comments section below! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/interviews/a13186/troian-bellisario-interview/>