Miranda Cosgrove – iCarly And Beyond

Miranda Cosgrove (right) and her pals in iCarly: iGo to Japan
She comes across as happy, bubbly and carefree, but for a girl not yet 16, Miranda Cosgrove has a lot on her plate — and she’s already thinking about going for seconds. Once the younger sister on Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh, Cosgrove got her own show last year, iCarly, and this month it looks like it’s going far: to the Land of the Rising Sun, in fact. The series’ first full-length movie, iCarly: iGo to Japan, finds the gang nominated to win a prestigious web award, but only if they can get to Japan to compete for it. Along the way, they face a battery of harrowing experiences, from getting stuck on a plane full of possums to being forced to parachute into Japan, but they remain determined to make their mark.

Cosgrove is succeeding in making her own impression on the world, but for her, unfortunately, there was no actual trip to Japan in the cards for this project. “When I first read the script,” she explains, “I was like, ‘Oh, my God! We’re going to Japan!’ And then I found out that we weren’t going, and I was totally bummed. That would have been so cool!”

“Cool” is a word that Cosgrove, like a lot of kids her age, uses liberally — she sprinkles it in her vocabulary like shredded carrot on a salad — but it’s a quality that cottons to her, even as she deprecates herself with embarrassing stories like the time she met the members of Good Charlotte on the set of iGo to Japan. (the band performs a song in the movie.) “I was actually with one of my girlfriends at a restaurant,” she says. “I saw Joel Madden with — it was a while ago — I think Hilary Duff, maybe? … My friend and I kept walking by the table, and it was funny, because when I met him again, when he was on the show, he actually remembered. He was like, ‘Didn’t I see you at a restaurant when you were, like, walking by my table?’ I was kind of embarrassed. It was really funny.”

Like a growing number of teen television stars, Cosgrove has musical ambitions of her own. After singing a handful of numbers on this summer’s iCarly CD, she’s currently at work on a full-length solo album. “I’m finishing up the CD, and then I’m going to be filming iCarly for a while. … Hopefully afterwards, right when I’m finishing, my CD’s going to be coming out, so hopefully I’ll get to go on tour.”

Touring will be a new game for Cosgrove, so she doesn’t expect to be hitting the big arenas right away. All the same, she’s already looking forward to hitting certain venues. “I’ll probably be starting off with small places like the Roxy,” she says, once again intoning her favorite word: “I like that place … it’s cool.”

iCarly: iGo to Japan premieres on Nickelodeon Nov. 8.