Shawn Mendes is dismissing longstanding rumours that, early in his career, he was engaged in a feud with Justin Bieber.
According to the theory, the Canadian pop stars eventually buried the hatchet by collaborating on their new single, “Monster”.
However, in a new video interview with GQ, Mendes insisted there was never a hatchet to bury.
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“Justin and I were never enemies,” Mendes, 21, said of Bieber, 26. “We were maybe not friends.”
Mendes admitted he and Bieber weren’t “texting and being like, ‘Yo, how you doing today?’ but we were never enemies, absolutely, and that’s kind of something that people maybe might’ve turned it into at some point.”
Mendes also addressed Bieber’s infamous remark back in 2015, when an interviewer asked him a question, using Mendes as an example, leading Bieber to respond, “Who’s Shawn Mendes?”
According to Mendes, he was never bothered by the apparent diss.
“He said he really genuinely didn’t know who I was, and I believed him,” Mendes explained. “So whatever, maybe he did and he was trying to bug me either way.”
Meanwhile, Mendes revealed it’s only been within the past few months that he and Bieber have grown close, and have been able to bond over their shared experience of becoming successful while still teenagers.
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“Both of us were famous at a young age and I think it’s interesting when people put you up on a pedestal because it messes with your head a bit,” he said.
“We’ve known each other for a few years but for some reason during the pandemic we ended up becoming kind of closer than ever before,” Mendes added.
