Ashley Tisdale has been performing since she was a toddler, but her best movies and TV shows reflect her ability to make a role her own. She got her start in commercials and print ad campaigns as a child before beginning to act on stage and screen. She has small roles in cult classics like Donnie Darko, but her best roles reflect her more mainstream success.

Tisdale is a gifted performer, excelling in singing, dance, and acting, which is why appearing in musicals, which make up a healthy amount of her best projects, is a natural fit for her. She even appeared in the touring casts of Les Misérables and Annie as a child before getting her big break thanks to multiple roles on the Disney Channel.

2012 marked the year that Ashley Tisdale began to pursue more adult roles. She moved from the Disney Channel to the CW in the years prior, and that helped audiences see Tisdale as a stronger actor. Children who grow up in the industry can have a hard time finding more adult roles as they age, but Tisdale steps into the roles effortlessly with a pair of TV shows in 2012 that end up among her best.

Sons of Anarchy follows the members of a motorcycle club and examines their relationships to one another and those outside of the club. It follows themes of brotherhood and loyalty most clearly.

Tisdale did not actually have to audition for the role. A fan of the show, as she explained to Collider in 2012, she would have likely been excited to play any role, but showrunner Kurt Sutter actually asked Tisdale’s father, who built both Tisdale’s house and did work on Sutter’s, if she would be interested in the role. :

I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s completely out of my comfort zone. I think that’s the key. I used to want to make sure that every step was thought out. With every project I did, I had to make sure I was comfortable. But, when you’re growing, even as a person, you have to just get out there. The only way to grow is to challenge yourself.

Raising Hope has both a dark and quirky premise. Jimmy (Lucas Neff) is a twenty-something who ends up with custody of a toddler after it’s revealed he fathered Hope during a one-night-stand. That one night just happened to be with a convicted serial killer, which is how he ends up with custody to begin with.

. In the episode, she plays a member of an improv troupe whois hired to pretend to be main character Jimmy’s girlfriend. She and her improv troupe help Jimmy impress the girl of his dreams, allowing him to enter into the relationship he really wants.

Tisdale has not done many of them in her career, but her timing here makes it clear she could have.

Hellcats is Tisdale’s first big role after finishing her time on the Disney Channel.

The series followed a collegiate cheerleading team with Michalka’s character only trying out for the team in a bid to get an athletic scholarship as she could no longer afford her tuition. Michalka and Tisdale’s characters are the odd couple of the series, paired up as roommates who clash, but who ultimately become friends despite their differences.

Here, Tisdale plays a young woman from a conservative Christian family who wants nothing to do with her after she decides to leave the Christian college she was attending for a more secular institution. She is the cheerleading captain, drawing on Tisdale’s experience with choreography from previous roles.

Tisdale and Michalka had great chemistry and the show was building some great character arcs when it was unfortunately canceled after its first season.

High School Musical 3 was the first of the trilogy to get a big screen theatrical release after the previous movies were Disney Channel originals. While it showed that Disney believed in the movie, it was not the best of the three for Tisdale’s Sharpay.

The movie focused on what it meant for the ensemble characters to be moving on from their high school lives, forcing characters like Zac Efron’s Troy to find a way to choose between his love for basketball and the performing arts. Sharpay’s character, however, was targeted by the new addition to the cast, Tiara Gold (Jemma McKenzie-Brown), who wants to take over Sharpay’s spot as the queen bee in the drama department.

She is still scheming to upstage Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) as someone else schemes to upstage her. It does not allow Sharpay to entirely look forward the way so many of the rest of the characters do, which does not make Tisdale’s arc the most satisfying, though that may be why she was also given a solo movie to follow this one up.

The Suite Life of Zack and Cody continues the Disney Channel’s trend of putting ordinary kids in extraordinary situations. In this case, it was placing the titular twin brothers (Dylan and Cole Sprouse) in a hotel where their mother worked as a lounge singer, and they had a lot of room to get themselves into trouble.

Tisdale played the supporting role of the “candy counter girl,” and her role expanded as she and hotel heiress London Tipton (Brenda Song) became friends and classmates. Maddie was hardworking, smart, and from a big family.

She would go on to book High School Musical after appearing in the series and become a producer on other projects under the Disney umbrella. The role allowed her comedic skills to shine as well.

Young And Hungry was one of the first roles that Emily Osment had after Disney’s Hannah Montana ended. It provided the child actor with a more adult role as an aspiring chef who becomes the personal chef of a man she eventually falls in love with. The series, even with its romantic angle, is a sitcom that places its characters in some ridiculous situations.

Tisdale was not a main cast member, but guest starred on the series as Logan Rawlings. Logan runs a media company and is initially introduced as someone penning a “30 Under 30” list who is attracted to Osment’s Gabi.

Logan is really awesome, and I was obviously nervous just because I’ve never played this type of character, but I hopefully pulled it off, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

, with her company Blondie Girl Productions involved in getting the show on the air.

High School Musical 2 is the only one of the movie trilogy not to be set during the school year. It takes place over the summer as most of the main characters have secured jobs at a local country club. There, Tisdale’s Sharpay and her brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) are members, not staff, and Sharpay offers to help Troy (Zac Efron) gain connections for his future - whether it's in basketball or theater. She also plans to perform alongside him in the end-of-summer talent show, of course.

While this movie is often remembered as the campiest of the trilogy, it’s so clear that the cast was free to really let loose with their ideas about the characters. From Grabeel and Corbin Bleu’s impressive baseball song-and-dance number to Tisdale’s cheeky behavior as a Sharpay free from the rules of drama club, the movie is incredibly fun.

Phineas and Ferb is one of the most popular Disney Channel animated series of all time. Not only did it run on the network for several years, but it got several extended specials, movies, and a 2025 revival series. The original series follows the titular brothers as they try to make their summer vacation the best ever, having different adventures everyday without knowing that their pet platypus is actually a secret agent and avoiding their big sister “busting them.”

Tisdale voices that big sister. Candace is played as a typical teenager. She wants more freedom than she has, gossips with her friends, and has a huge crush on one of the boys she knows. Her own storylines often get pushed aside as she focuses the majority of her energy on getting her brothers in trouble for their antics, but she is never able to get them in trouble.

(To be fair to some of Tisdale’s other work, not all of her projects have had their critical reviews compiled by Rotten Tomatoes.) The movie marks just one of many voice-over projects in Tisdale’s career. She has actually been voicing animated characters since she was a child, but Candace is certainly one of her best-known.

The movie takes place at some point during the events of the Phineas and Ferb television series, and it’s one of the only times in the franchise that Candace is the true main character. While the series follows the adventures of the two brothers, this time, the two brothers are on a mission to save Candace, who is abducted by aliens and taken to a distant planet.

Candace is often the kind of character who can be relegated to simply yelling at her brothers and pining for her crush. Here, Candace gets her own story.

It’s a great way to showcase both Tisdale and Candace in the animated franchise.

Without this movie, there wouldn’t be the other two High School Musical movies, the Disney+ series that took inspiration from them, or the concert tour that helped launch the cast into the pop culture stratosphere. Though the second and third movies might have had bigger budgets and fewer continuity errors, it’s still really the best of the bunch and the first time Tisdale got to play the iconic Sharpay Evans.

The movie follows Troy and Gabriella (Efron and Hudgens) as they form a connection and decide to audition for the school’s musical together. Tisdale is their chief antagonist as Sharpay. She holds the power in the school’s drama program, however small that power in the grand scheme of the school may be, and she has no intention of relinquishing it to anyone else.

Tisdale is perfection as a drama club mean girl. At the time, it was a very different role for her. Sharpay is not an outright villain here, but a kid with a dream who comes across as one. Disney’s audience would have known her as good-girl Maddie on The Suite Life. Most of her other work had been in one-off appearances. Not only did High School Musical become Tisdale’s true break into the industry, but it is also some of her best work.