AshleyTroian Coachella

IF ASHLEY BENSON TOLD YOU SHE HAD THE WHOLE TV MEGASTAR THING ALL FIGURED OUT SHE'D BE LYING.

Ashley Benson doesn’t try to hide anything. The 24-year-old actress grew up knowing she couldn’t get away with it anyway. Benson’s grandfather, who was a sheriff in her hometown of Anaheim, Calif., once locked her father in jail for stealing a stick of gum. “My dad tells me that story all the time,” says Benson. “Anytime I get pulled over, I feel like I’m going to jail.” In fact, Ashley grew up so straitlaced, the worst trouble she got into as a teenager was getting caught lying to her mom about her whereabouts on a Friday night. Little did she know that growing up under a microscope would prepare her for the biggest challenge of her life: starring as one of the eponymous fetching fabulists on ABC Family’s teen phenomenon and social media juggernaut Pretty Little Liars.

PLL follows a group of girlfriends under attack from a mysterious cyberbully named “A,” who threatens to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets. The cast has become this generation’s Spice Girls. There’s the brainy one, Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), the sporty one, Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), the artsy one, Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), and last but not least, Benson’s Hanna Marin, the unrepentant shopaholic of the group, who also provides much of the show’s comic relief.

But the show and its fans ain’t no joke. Since debuting in 2010, PLL has become the most tweeted about series in history. Its season-four finale last March brought in a record-setting 1.9 million tweets. “Ashley and the rest of the cast recently went to New York for a press tour,” says I. Marlene King, creator of PLL. “When we got off at the airport, there were paparazzi and fans waiting in the baggage claim. It was like watching the Beatles arrive.”

The attention isn’t entirely new to Benson, who spent her teenage years on the set of Days of Our Lives. But Benson is not a captive of her show’s popularity. She broke from the Disney mold last year, starring alongside Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and James Franco as hardcore party girl Britt in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. “Ashley made that choice to do something very edgy to really explore that side of herself and kills the screen with her presence,” says King. “Ashley will become a big movie star.”

Despite the fact that she’s got fans with Instagram handles like “My_World_Is_Ash_Benzo,” and fans who leave comments like, “You’re my life!” on a photo of her home office, Benson swears by her normalcy. Then again, “normal” is a relative concept. For Ashley Benson, that means a life of dodging crazed fans, Internet rumors, and possible escaped convicts.

Troian Bellisario Seventeen Magazine

Troian Bellisario may be a star on a show that revolves around secrets, but the Pretty Little Liars actress is all about honesty in real life.

The 28-year-old celeb opened up during a candid interview for the February 2014 issue of Seventeen, revealing she suffered an eating disorder and self-harm issues as a teenager. During an exclusive chat with E! News' Alicia Quarles Tuesday night, Bellisario explained why she opted share her personal struggles.

"I knew that going into an article that was going to be the cover of Seventeen they were going to ask me, 'What was your life like when you were 17?' So I had to make the choice of do I just completely lie and say my life was great and totally perfect?

"And is that really gonna help the men and women out there who watch my show who are 17? Is that gonna help? Or is gonna be better for me to be honest and do something a little bit scarier and try to talk a little bit about that? I kinda made a choice and now I'm going with it," the cover star told us

Bellisario also shared that her prior self-image issues and desire for everything to be perfect is why she connects so well to her onscreen character.

"The character, Spencer, is a perfectionist and you see how incredibly flawed she is. That's kinda why I think everybody really loves Spencer, that she's always trying to be perfect and she is always failing. And that really was my experience as an adolescent, as a 17-year-old ," she told E! News. "I felt like I just wanted to put on this perfect front to the world and I was just feeling so different inside, and I think that's why I really relate to Spencer and I think that's why the fans really relate to her and that's why they kinda relate to me coming out and talking about this."

Troian Bellisario

Troian Bellisario, daughter of producers Donald P. Bellisario and Deborah Pratt, made her film debut at the age of 3 in Last Rites (1988). She made several TV and movie appearances in her teens (most of the TV appearances were in shows produced by her father) before attending the University of Southern California.

She rose to worldwide prominence as Spencer in the hit TV series, Pretty Little Liars(2010).

Ashley Benson

Ashley Benson
Ashley Victoria Benson was born on December 18, 1989. She has been dancing competitively since she was 2 with hip hop, jazz, ballet, tap and lyrical. She has been singing since she was about 5 and she hopes to pursue that along with her acting. Ashley started modeling at the age of 5 for dance catalogs. Ashley was then pursued by The Ford Modeling Agency at the age of 8. She worked steadily in print and is still with the Agency. At the age of 10, she wanted to pursue acting. Ashley went on to do 35 commercials, and then on to theatrical roles. Acting was now Ashley's passion. Ashley put all her focus into acting which left little time for modeling and dancing, anymore. Ashley's most recent role is "Hanna Marin" on ABC Family's  Pretty Little Liars. Ashley also had a cameo in 'Lil Romeo' and Solange Knowles's music video for the song "True Love". She did a photo shoot with Britney Spears for Vogue Magazine. She is in NLT's music video "That Girl".