Naya Rivera Reveals Her Advice To The ‘Step Up: High Water’ Cast

Naya Rivera is on a show focusing on teens with performing arts dreams — but this isn’t a “Glee” reboot. The actress is playing an administrator on “Step Up: High Water,” and she’s not just leading the kids onscreen.

“This is their first sort of like really big thing, and me coming off ‘Glee’ and Neo being the huge success that he is, every now and then we’ll try to give them some advice we learned along the way,” Rivera told International Business Times in September. “But we don’t claim to know it all.”

What’s her best advice? Work hard.

“Most of the advice that I give is about work ethic,” the actress, 31, added. “My time that I spent on ‘Glee’ is very similar to what a lot of the other characters have to do in terms of the dance rehearsal and the pre-recording and then also the learning the lines and acting part. It’s a grind, but it definitely always pays off and I just try to tell everyone that you’ve gotta work hard and you’ve gotta pay your dues and then at the end you can look back and be like, ‘Yeah I did that.’”

It seems her life is reflecting art. Her character in “Step Up: High Water,” which hit YouTube Red Wednesday, is also counseling the young dancers. “We’ve been joking she’s like a cooler, female Mr. Feeny [from ‘Boy Meets World] at this point when she’s helping with people’s real life problems,” Rivera revealed.

She might be the one they look up to, but Rivera’s Collette Jones still has her fair share of drama. In the premiere of “Step Up: High Water” fans will see her character, who is a former backup dancer, is running the day-to-day operations of an Atlanta performing arts school when the celebrity founder Sage Odom (Neo) decides he wants to be more involved.

“As the storyline progresses you find out that she’s sort of more than meets the eye, and she’s got this sordid past,” Rivera teased. “She really spends most of this season trying to organize Sage Odom and East-O [R. Maros Taylor]. And so through that, things don’t really work out that well for her at a certain point. It’s been really fun!”

Performing arts isn’t the only “Glee” connection on the “Step Up” TV show. “So [executive producer] Adam Shankman, I’ve been really good friends with [him] since I met him on the set of ‘Glee’ when he was directing … We kept in touch, and we’ve been friends ever since. It was sort of out of the blue. He texted me, ‘Do you have a summer job?’ And I was like, ‘No, do you have one for me?’”

While there are certainly connections to be made, “Step Up: High Water” is very different from the Fox comedy, which wrapped up after six seasons in 2015. For Rivera, though she has a few dance numbers, her role doesn’t require quite as much intense work. “This is like a cake walk compared to what I had to do on ‘Glee,’” she said.

However, the material is also a lot heavier, following kids who are mostly underprivileged. While dancing is a priority for them all, avoiding gang violence and navigating being homeless are much bigger problems.

Though the story is not connected to the “Step Up” films, Rivera says the elements that made fans love the movies are still in place. “It’s all-new, but obviously, it’s still keeping with the things that made people fall in love with the movies in the first place. The dancing is amazing, and the storyline for this one is really interesting. It’s definitely grittier. We have some great issues that we tackle.”

The first four episodes of “Step Up: High Water” are available for free on YouTube. The remaining installments of the 10-episode season will be available to YouTube Red subscribers.