Why Hollywood Stopped Casting Gibby From iCarly
You know him as Gibby from "iCarly" but to those who know him in real life, he's Noah Munck. In 2007, Munck became a child TV star, and his role on "iCarly" launched him into fame very early on in his career. Munck went from making a few guest appearances across a smattering of shows on different networks to being a Nickelodeon regular. He starred on "iCarly" for five years until the show ended in 2012, and from there he went on to pick up a number of smaller roles on other Nickelodeon shows.
Then Munck dropped off the face of the Earth — or at least, that's what most of us think. As the years dragged on, Munck picked up fewer and fewer roles in TV shows and movies, and even though he's technically been acting all this time, to a casual observer it looks like his career is winding down. Hollywood stopped casting Munck, but behind the scenes, the situation isn't nearly as dire as it might seem.
Nickelodeon fame surrounded him
Noah Munck's acting career began the very same year that he landed his role on "iCarly." In 2007, Munck, who was just 11 years old at the time, made guest appearances on The CW series "All of Us" and the Comedy Central show "American Body Shop." That same year he made his first appearance as Gibby on "iCarly," and that show quickly began to dominate his schedule.
From 2007 to 2012, Munck starred in 57 episodes of "iCarly" over the course of six seasons, and with that much work on his plate, he barely had any time to take on non-Nickelodeon projects. He made a few appearances in other shows and movies like "Four Christmases" and "Bad Teacher," but Munck's fans primarily associated him with Nickelodeon. Aside from "iCarly," he also appeared in Nickelodeon projects such as "Victorious" and the TV movie "Nicky Deuce."
That association set Munck up for a difficult transition when "iCarly" ended. Plenty of other child stars have been associated with specific networks and shows, and not everyone manages to make a clean break to start a new chapter in their career. Munck is one of those who just never fully managed to separate himself from the roles he played on Nickelodeon.
He had a failed spinoff
Immediately after the end of "iCarly," there was a moment where it looked like Noah Munck was going to double down on his Nickelodeon fame. Though Munck had a strained relationship with the character Gibby — more on that later — he still decided to try and make a spinoff series become a reality. The "Gibby" TV show would have followed his character from "iCarly" getting into a new onslaught of shenanigans as he mentors a group of middle schoolers.
The show would have aired in 2013, but it never managed to take off. Munck, alongside actors Kara Royster and Kalama Epstein, filmed a pilot episode that never saw the light of day, and for years fans were so curious about what happened in the pilot that they even started a Change.org petition to get Nickelodeon to release the episode. That never happened, partly because barely more than a thousand people signed the petition. The episode didn't stay in the dark forever, though. Eventually, it leaked online, and now it floats around Reddit threads and YouTube channels where fans can take a peek at what they missed.
He had some other key roles
The end of "iCarly" marked the end of Noah Munck's time in the spotlight, but it wasn't necessarily the end of his acting career. Following the show's finale, Munck actually had several other roles, and for a moment it looked like he might be able to pull himself out of the Nickelodeon universe and into new territory.
In the years after "iCarly," Munck landed a handful of movie roles. He made an appearance in Courtney Cox's 2014 movie "Just Before I Go" right before playing Ben Rodgers in "Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn" that same year. Three years later, Munck played T-Bone in a romantic comedy called "Vikes," and that was his last film appearance. Unfortunately for Munck, all three of those movies had one thing in common: They weren't very successful. "Just Before I Go" and "Tom Sawyer" both suffered from brutally bad reviews, and "Vikes" actually did have a breakaway star — but it was Sydney Sweeney, not Munck. In the end, the work that Munck picked up after his Nickelodeon years were over failed to push him toward a new phase in his career.
He had a strained relationship with his most known role
Noah Munck was only 11 years old when he started acting on "iCarly." Like any other child actor, he had to balance his work life with the regular parts of growing up, including going to school and making friends. Unlike some other actors, though, Munck found himself on a hit show with lots of fans who came to know him as Gibby rather than as the actor playing Gibby. That's something he struggled to deal with for years after the show ended.
In a 2017 episode of the OYC Podcast, Munck was asked if he'd ever considered coming back to Nickelodeon for an "iCarly" reunion. He didn't have an enthusiastic response, and even though he joked about spending time weightlifting to prepare for playing Gibby again, he said he wasn't sure he'd ever be open to coming back to the role. "I have a weird relationship with it right now, still ... I appreciate it, but I also have, like, a hate for it." Munck said that he frequently felt that the show was punching down at him and the character, and that ended up being draining as the years went on.
He wanted to break away from his iCarly image
Nowadays you don't see Noah Munck on TV or at the movies, but there was a time when he still had a genuine interest in acting. When "iCarly" came to an end, Munck was just 16 years old, and for several years following the finale he kept popping up in other Nickelodeon productions like "Nicky Deuce" and "Sam & Cat." But by 2014, he was really ready to take things in a new direction.
"Now I would like to progress into something that's completely different than iCarly," Munck said in a 2014 interview with The Chimes. "I would love to show people that I can do something, act serious, in a way that's dramatic." He went on to say that he didn't feel pressured to separate himself from Gibby and the "iCarly" years, but that he wanted to find ways to evolve as an actor. He said he admired intense dramas like "Drive," "The Shawshank Redemption," and a handful of Quentin Tarantino films. At the time, Munck hoped he'd be able to end up playing a character in movies like those.
He's written some screenplays
Acting wasn't the only creative endeavor that Noah Munck attempted in the years following "iCarly." With more free time in his schedule, Munck was able to stretch out and start exploring other avenues. For a while, those other avenues included screenwriting.
Munck told The Chimes in 2014, "Right now I'm writing short films with my friends that are also really talented writers that I met along the way." He wasn't just limiting himself to short films, though. Munck was also writing his own version of an '80s action flick, and though we haven't seen that in production yet, there's always a chance it still comes to fruition. In 2019, Munck released the short "Time for Dessert," and for a while, he was writing bizarre comedy sketches for a new audience on YouTube. Munck clearly has a creative drive that has carried him beyond acting, but though his writing projects have been few and far between, he's been steadily releasing his own music for years.
He started making music
In 2014, Noah Munck told The Chimes about one other passion project of his that had begun to take up more and more of his time after "iCarly" ended. "I taught myself over these past few years from when I was 16, I'm 18 now, how to produce music," Munck said, adding, "like the ins and outs of using software and musical theory I guess, in a way." He mentioned that he'd always been a fan of electronic and dubstep-style music, and after learning his way around some recording software, he was perfectly positioned to start experimenting with music of his own.
Ever since then, Munck has been releasing his own electronic music, though he doesn't really publicize any of his projects. In fact, if you don't know what you're looking for, it can be easy to overlook Munck's singles and EPs or to hear them without even realizing he's the one behind the beats. Munck has released some tracks under the moniker NoxiK, including a handful of songs on Soundcloud and a short EP on Spotify. In the past several years, he's left that name behind, instead releasing his work under the name Sadworldbeats, which has some overlap with his YouTube channel.
He's done some activist work
As "iCarly" was coming to a close, Noah Munck was busy getting himself involved in plenty of other creative endeavors, but he also found time to do work that had nothing at all to do with show business. Even though he was just 16 when the show wrapped up, Munck was spending a surprising amount of his time doing philanthropy work.
Munck got involved with Camp del Corazon after filming an episode of "ER," where he played a kid with heart disease attending a special summer camp that could provide him with fun activities in a safe environment. Camp del Corazon is a real organization, and Munck was so moved by his experience filming there that he decided to help out by visiting the camp in the summers to hang out with the other kids, as well as going to galas to support its fundraising efforts.
That wasn't Munck's only philanthropic effort. For a while, he traveled to Haiti on a yearly basis to help build homes and aid in the recovery efforts after the 2010 earthquake. He also tried to help kids in the East African country Malawi by partnering with Global Mission. No matter where Munck decided to focus his efforts, he always made sure that other kids were benefiting the most from his work.
He was absent from the iCarly revival
In 2017, Noah Munck might have been a bit ambivalent about ever returning to "iCarly," but just a handful of years later he had to make a decision. Paramount+ announced that an "iCarly" revival show would be coming to the streaming platform in 2020, and fans immediately wondered which original cast members would come back for the new series. Munck decided to sit this one out. He didn't come back for the "iCarly" reunion episode that debuted ahead of the new series premiere, and he stayed away through to its upsetting cancellation.
We know what Munck's been up to since the "iCarly" finale aired, but his character Gibby is more of a mystery. After the main show ended, Gibby made a single appearance in "Sam & Cat" before disappearing, and the rest of the "iCarly" cast doesn't even know what became of him. Ahead of the revival's premiere, both Jerry Trainor and Nathan Kress, who play Spencer and Freddie, said that they have no idea what Gibby is up to in the new show's timeline. Unlike Jennette McCurdy's character Sam, the revival didn't address Gibby's current status, so fans will just have to make up their own headcanons.
He's semi-active on YouTube
In recent years Noah Munck has been focused on his own creations, and whether he's producing music, writing screenplays, or making videos, he's fully committed to developing projects that he enjoys. Munck launched his YouTube channel Sadworld in late 2016 with a video titled "just a regular guy," and any "iCarly" fans who tuned in were probably shocked by what they saw.
All the Sadworld videos are bizarre experiments in absurdist comedy that combine dry jokes with disorienting editing and music choices. In other words, they're as far from "iCarly" as Munck could have possibly gotten. Shortly after the channel's debut, Munck told Polygon, "Everything I'm doing now feels more like it's coming from a real place than just trying to do something just because I wasn't doing anything." He also said that being the only person working on the channel gave him a welcome opportunity to control every aspect of his work.
Munck has continued uploading strange comedy sketches and the occasional music video on his channel all these years. In 2023 he launched a spin-off channel called NoahGaming where he talks about games and delivers brief reviews in a style that's right in line with his main channel.
The Goldbergs kept him busy for years
The popular story about Noah Munck is that he all but vanished after the end of "iCarly," but that doesn't exactly line up with reality. You don't see him popping up in new shows or movies very often, but he's actually been acting this entire time. Munck has been a part of the ABC comedy "The Goldbergs" since the show's second season started in 2014.
"The Goldbergs" is set in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania in the 1980s, and it stars Jeff Garlin, Hayley Orrantia, Troy Gentile, Sean Giambrone, and Wendy McLendon-Covey as members of the titular family. Munck plays Robert "Naked Rob" Smith, a friend of Barry Goldberg (Gentile) who has a penchant for stripping down. At this point, Munck's run on "The Goldbergs" is actually much more extensive than his time on "iCarly." Munck has been a recurring guest star for the past eight seasons of the show, and he's appeared in 103 episodes – nearly twice as many episodes as his "iCarly" days. The show officially concluded at the end of its 10th season in early 2023, and it's possible that we'll see Munck showing up in other projects now that his acting schedule has been completely cleared.
He's just a normal guy
As we've seen, there are multiple reasons why Noah Munck faded from the limelight after his time on "iCarly." As an actor, he was weighed down by his years on Nickelodeon, and his first projects after leaving the network weren't all that successful. As a creative, Munck started getting interested in other areas, and he's spent his time exploring music and screenwriting while keeping just a toe in the acting industry.
Together it all amounts to one thing: Munck is mostly a regular person. He isn't at all interested in holding on to his days as a child star, and though he did have some aspirations as an actor, like the rest of us, his interests seem to have changed as he's gotten older. Today Munck barely finds himself in front of a camera, and when he does, it's on his own terms. In a YouTube video posted in November 2023, Munck joked, "A lot of you were asking where the hell I've been. Drop it. It's none of your f****** business."
Even as a younger actor, Munck may have seen this coming. "I'm an introvert at heart," he said in a 2014 interview. "I don't love the attention, so I more want to hang out with my small group of friends and just be, like, not a big deal. I've always wanted to not be the big deal." Munck may not be a "big deal" today, but he's still creating and working in his own way.