LOS ANGELES — When Milo Manheim posted two words on Instagram on Wednesday night, “Love you Carlaboo,” the people who had spent the better part of a decade watching him and Carla Jeffery build a franchise together understood immediately what they meant. Jeffery, who played cheerleader Bree in Disney’s Zombies series across three live-action films and an animated spinoff, died on September 1. She was 33. A cause of death has not been disclosed.
Her manager announced the news via Instagram on September 3, two days after her death. The announcement was brief; the responses from her Zombies co-stars were not.
Chandler Kinney, who played Willa in the franchise, described Jeffery as “a sparkly gal” who “made every day better and brighter with your infectious positivity.” Trevor Tordjman, who played Bucky Buchanan, wrote that she would be missed and said he would never forget her energy. Milo Manheim, who played Zed across all three live-action Zombies films, kept it shorter than the others and was not less precise for it.
Bree was not a supporting character. In a franchise built around the collision of zombies, werewolves, and cheerleaders navigating a high school that barely tolerated any of them, Bree occupied a specific and irreplaceable role: the loyalist, the heart of the squad, the character audiences trusted to hold the emotional center of every scene she was in. Jeffery brought something to that role that the Zombies franchise depended on, and her consistency across three films and an animated series is one of the reasons that consistency held.
The franchise began in 2018 as a Disney Channel TV movie that nobody predicted would become a cultural fixture. It did. The first film spawned a sequel in 2020, a third in 2022, and an animated continuation titled Zombies: The Re-Animated Series, for which Jeffery reprised her voice role. The Zombies films occupied a specific place in Disney Channel’s late-2010s catalog: music-forward, dance-heavy, more racially diverse in their principal casts than most of what had come before, and built around the kind of earnest genre-blending that Disney Channel has always been better at than it gets credit for.
Jeffery’s career extended well beyond Seabrook. She appeared in Disney Channel and Nickelodeon productions including iCarly, Good Luck Charlie, and Shake It Up, the kind of guest-starring infrastructure that marks a working young actor with range and demand across competing networks. She also accumulated ten episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a credit that sits in a sharply different register and suggests that the performers who cast her saw something in her that was not limited to the cheerleader in the squad jacket.
Her brother, Carlon Jeffery, confirmed the death in a statement that offered a different frame than the franchise tributes. “Truly a light that shines bright,” he wrote, calling her “the best sister a brother could ask for.”
No cause of death has been shared. The announcement from her manager confirmed the date and the fact of her death; no medical explanation accompanied it, and no statement from her family has elaborated on the circumstances. NBC News reported on the death following the announcement. That silence is its own thing to sit with when the person who died was 33.
The week of Jeffery’s death has already required considerable grief to process across the industry. Records published this week confirmed Tim Curry died of coronary artery disease on August 25, eight days before the cause was made public. In August, Dolly Parton died at 80 in Nashville. Jeffery’s death belongs to a different category: younger, less expected, with fewer years of work behind it, but it lands in the same sustained stretch of loss.
The children who grew up watching Zombies are not, mostly, children anymore. The franchise launched eight years ago; its first audience is now in its twenties. What that gap means, between the cheerful, negotiable world of those films and the fact of Jeffery’s death at 33, is not a dramatic irony that can be resolved. It is simply the condition of loving something that was made by a real person.
Carla Jeffery died on September 1, 2026. She was 33. A cause of death has not been released. What she left is three Zombies films, an animated series, a decade of television credits across two major children’s networks, ten appearances in a comedy that has no interest in making anything easy, and a co-star who marked her passing with two words that will make sense to anyone who spent time on set with her.
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