The Voice

There was no hiding the fact that Christina Aguilera didn’t recognize Tony Lucca, her former Mickey Mouse Club costar, when he auditioned for her on the Season 2 premiere of The Voice on February 5.

Can you blame her? It’s been nearly two decades since the two shared the screen, and we imagine there’s a lot of distracting light beams and “pa choo!” noises in the audition venue.

Despite her failure to initially recognize Tony, she did take an opportunity to go backstage and wax poetic with him about the good old days. Tony dished to OK Magazine about what got left on the cutting room floor:

“She went down memory lane,” Tony says. “I think there’s a lot of nervous energy in that environment … it’s hard to just be natural and really dig into catching up.”

What, with all those cameras around? You’ve obviously never been a cast member on The Real World, Tony. Though he didn’t end up on Team Christina, Tony was impressed with the fact that she remembered that he introduced the cast to the music of Brian McKnight.

“To me, I wish that had made the cut,” he confessed. “Even more so than the Britney [Spears] had a crush on you [part].”

What we didn’t realize is that Tony, 36, had been on the show for a while before Christina, Justin Timberlake, and Britney joined the cast. In fact, he was nearly a high school graduate when producers brought in the new crop of middle school talents.

“They asked the producers where we shopped and they’d come into work the next day dressed like little mini-mes,” he laughs.

Though he was the original heartthrob from the Mouseketeers, it wasn’t until a little boy band with some clear-skinned, curly-haired teens hit the scene that any cast members achieved real fame outside the show.

“For the record, I was never formally invited to join *NSYNC,” Tony recalls. “There was one moment … that I writhed with jealousy. They did a KISS FM Wango Tango at Dodgers Stadium in L.A. and JC had invited me to come hang out backstage … we got to go backstage and it’s like a festival of tour buses and Lenny Kravitz was there … I go out and walk through the stadium, was like, 'Wow, there’s 50,000 people here.'"

"I come backstage and JC is like, 'You’re not gonna believe this! You’re not gonna believe whose trailer I just hung out in! Lenny Kravitz! He asked me to come into his trailer and we jammed guitars! I was like, 'Oh, no you didn’t.' But I was like, 'Wow, dude, that’s cool.'”

For the record, we would have been pretty jealous, too.

Check out the full interview below, courtesy of OK Magazine!