For TV viewers of a certain age, there's no more universal a cultural touchstone than
Boy Meets World.
Before, during, and after the show's 1993-2000 run, its large cast experienced a fair amount
of upheaval in their personal and professional lives.
These are the secrets hidden by the Boy Meets World cast.
Rider Strong's hated haircut
The early nineties were a golden age for the hormone-charged, pubescent masses to obsess
over swoon-worthy, non-threatening celebrity teen boys.
Rider Strong sent many a tween heart aflutter with his portrayal of Shawn Hunter and the
shaggy bowl haircut that brought his character to life.
But it turns out that the former teen heartthrob had a hard time adjusting to the attention,
and the grooming.
When Cosmopolitan asked him in 2013 what it felt like to be a teen heartthrob, he admitted:
"I was never super-comfortable with it to be honest.
I'm not a shy person, but I'm not the guy who wants to get his picture taken and want
to be front and center…It would just be weird to go somewhere and have groups of girls
scream and hyperventilate in front of you."
To make matters worse, Strong also wasn't a big fan of one of the main reasons he was
so beloved by screaming girls.
He revealed:
"I hated my hair.
I came to the audition with that hairstyle, got the part, and the director Michael Jacobs
never let me cut it from there on out…I wanted to cut my hair so bad, but the only
time I got to was when we found out the show was going to be canceled."
Yeesh.
That means Strong had to keep that very nineties haircut until 2000, long after it went out
of style.
Danielle Fishel's broken heart
Danielle Fishel, a.k.a. Topanga Lawrence, has done all right for herself in the romance
department.
Her first marriage, to her college math tutor, may have ended in divorce, but then she married
again in November 2018, to comedy writer Jensen Karp.
And back in the late nineties, she dated a guy who was at the time considered one of
the planet's most desirable men: pop star Lance Bass.
In her 2014 memoir, Normally, This Would Be Cause for Concern, Fishel explained that she
met the blond-tipped boy band singer at a live TGIF special.
The two later hit the town for a date at a taping of a Céline Dion Christmas special,
and the rest was history.
Well, not quite.
They ended up dating for a year and a half, and even attended Fishel's high school prom
together, but things ultimately didn't work out.
Fishel later realized why when Bass came out to her, and the rest of the world, as a gay
man.
William Daniels' hesitation
When Boy Meets World debuted in 1993, the best known actor in the cast was William Daniels,
who portrayed the prickly but lovable Mr. Feeny.
An accomplished performer, he first appeared on Broadway in the fifties, before transitioning
over to television, where he won an Emmy for his work on the medical drama St. Elsewhere.
And perhaps most impressively, he voiced the talking car K.I.T.T. on the action series
Knight Rider.
Daniels' showbiz experience apparently imbued him with a dignity bordering on arrogance,
as he revealed in his 2017 memoir, There I Go Again.
He initially had little interest in playing Mr. Feeny, stating,
"At a meeting with the show's author and executive producer, Michael Jacobs…I told him I didn't
want to play a high school teacher who's made to look foolish for the sake of some cheap
laughs."
After Jacobs promised that he would never have him play an idiot, Daniels signed on.
But when he attended the show's first table read, he hated his character's story so much
that he quit the show.
After a hasty rewrite of that first script, Daniels then thankfully un-quit.
Will Friedle's anxiety
Every sitcom needs a happy dumb guy, and for Boy Meets World that character was Cory's
older brother Eric Matthews.
Will Friedle played the role with exuberant relish, and he later parlayed his TGIF stint
into a nice career that's consisted of romantic comedies, guest spots on other sitcoms, and
voicing characters like Batman in Batman Beyond and Nightwing in numerous animated Batman
projects.
In fact, his post-Boy Meets World career has overwhelmingly consisted of voice acting gigs,
ever since he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder that precluded live-action performances.
At a Boy Meets World panel at the 2018 New York Comic Con, Friedle revealed,
"I was planning to do more on-camera work, but then I got hit with these anxiety attacks
that prevented me from doing that.
I was so thankful I had voice-over because I could still perform and act."
Friedle's face and body haven't been completely absent from screens in recent years, as he
reprised the role of Eric for a few episodes of the Boy Meets World spinoff Girl Meets
World.
Wedding blues
Cory and Topanga were #CoupleGoals years before social media was even a thing.
The central storyline of Boy Meets World was, of course, the slowly developing relationship
between the two.
It evolved from junior high classmates who didn't like each other, to friends, to boyfriend
and girlfriend, to finally, husband and wife.
"When you know, you know," as the old saying goes.
And Cory and Topanga knew so clearly that they got hitched before they were even old
enough to buy beer.
Even though the couple were clearly and always destined to be together, ABC initially objected
to the producers' plans for the characters to marry at such a young age, as revealed
by Rider Strong in a 2011 Vanity Fair interview.
Even Strong himself had his doubts: When asked if Cory and Topanga would've gotten divorced
by that point, he declared that they probably would.
But then he backtracked and quickly added,
"No, no because the whole conceit of the show was that they were meant for each other."
Indeed, had Cory and Topanga not stayed together and lived happily ever after, there never
would've been the Disney Channel sequel series Girl Meets World, in which they're still together
and raising two kids of their own.
"I love working with you."
"Thank you.
Likewise."
Matthew Lawrence's on-and-off romance
There's a particular type of role Matthew Lawrence has portrayed a number of times:
the new character who arrives to save an aging TV show that's declining in popularity.
He was the toddler Danny Carrington on Dynasty, then he was the abandoned child Matthew on
Gimme a Break!
Many years later, he showed up as Jack, Shawn's formerly estranged half-brother, on Boy Meets
World.
It turns out that the actor's own personal life has been equally dramatic.
In 2006, Lawrence first met Dancing with the Stars' Cheryl Burke.
At the time, one of the show's celebrity contestants was Joey Lawrence, who TV fans know is Matthew's
older brother.
The younger Lawrence and Burke wound up dating for about a year, only to split up.
When another Lawrence brother, Andy, was ambushed by TMZ, he revealed that Burke liked to drink
and party more than her man did.
But just like Cory and Topanga, these two were apparently meant to be, as they got back
together in 2017.
Lawrence proposed the following year in an elaborate ceremony that began with a love
letter set out for Burke to read after a shower.
When she looked up from reading, Lawrence was down on one knee.
"It just feels right."
"Yeah."
"Older, wiser.
A lot older."
Ethan Suplee loses it
Ethan Suplee is a familiar face and a versatile actor who has popped up in some high-profile
movies and TV shows since the nineties.
You might recognize him as the guy who couldn't figure out a magic eye poster in Mallrats,
or for his starring turn as the dim but sweet Randy on My Name is Earl.
And of course, there was also his recurring role on Boy Meets World as Frankie, a school
bully who eventually became pals with Cory and the gang.
Frankie, like a lot of Suplee's roles, is a heavyset guy, but in 2009, the actor shed
a lot of weight.
He revealed his fitness regimen on a 2016 episode of Entertainment Weekly's What to
Watch podcast.
As he described,
"I started obsessively riding bicycles.
I actually did get properly thin at one point, I was nine percent body fat."
But when Suplee started to go for roles with his new, leaner frame, he just couldn't land
them.
He explained,
"I found that people were like, 'Who are you?
We don't know you.
You're this new person.'
So a couple years ago I made the decision: I'm not going to kill myself to be thin when
nobody knows me as a thin person.
And so I just kind of relaxed on my diet."
Blake Sennett's dramatic band breakup
It happens often enough to have become a cliche: child actors often become washed up and out
of work when they become teenagers or adults.
However, that wasn't what happened to The Wizard's Jenny Lewis or Boy Meets World's
Blake Sennett, who played the bully Joey "The Rat" Epstein on 16 episodes.
Instead, these two teamed up to form Rilo Kiley, one of the most acclaimed indie rock
bands of the 2000s.
Alas, the group disbanded in 2011, and that breakup was about as civil and harmonious
as a couple of teen characters from Boy Meets World calling it quits.
In a 2011 interview with Consequence of Sound, Sennett likened Rilo Kiley to a corpse that
was, quote, "laying on his back in a morgue with a tag on his toe."
A few months later, he told Spinner that the band was decidedly finished, noting,
"I just felt like there was a lot of deception, disloyalties, greed, and things I don't really
want to submit myself to."
Topanga vs. Danny Tanner
Have you heard the one about a former teen star best known for a nineties family-friendly
sitcom accidentally upsetting the star of another nineties family-friendly sitcom over
a remark about drugs?
It's obviously a situation that almost everyone can relate to.
In 2013, Danielle Fishel shared a headline-making anecdote from her TGIF days about the time
she was on a private jet to Disney World along with her family and the guy who played Danny
Tanner on Full House.
As she relayed to Maxim,
"We were trying to take a nap, and all of a sudden Bob Saget walks down the aisle, rips
open our curtain, and shouts, 'Do you guys have any coke?!'
Then he looks my dad in the eye, laughs, and closes the curtain."
For his part, Saget didn't appreciate what he thought were disparaging remarks, so he
offered his own crude response to Maxim.
"What show was she on?
Big Chest, Small Wonder?
That’s the real size of her, by the way.
She's kind of like Bilbo Baggins, very tiny."
Saget went on to clarify that his cocaine comment was made in jest and that he was,
quote, "always making jokes."
Meanwhile, Fishel called Maxim out for not publishing her story-capping remark, tweeting,
"Maybe you should have printed what I said at the end 'we knew he was joking.
It was funny.'
He didn't pick up on that."
William Daniels' difficult childhood
By and large, Boy Meets World was a gentle sitcom about middle-class, well-loved kids
with kind, doting parents and teachers guiding them as they navigated the typical problems
of young life.
Unfortunately, that's far from the experience that William Daniels had back when he was
just a boy meeting the world.
The veteran actor opened up about his years as a child actor in his memoir There I Go
Again.
He recalled a time when he was pushed by his mother to sing, dance, and act on numerous
radio shows, and he had to work late into the night and over weekends.
He revealed,
"When I started writing this book, I started seeing a psychologist…who suggested that
I was an abused child.
I was shocked to hear such a description, that I had been robbed of a normal childhood,
forced to perform and put into situations that I had no control over."
Daniels also noted that he found it "hurtful" that his mother never paid him a compliment
for all that hard work.
It's poetic and fitting, then, that his most famous role as an actor eventually became
Mr. Feeney, a character who became known for supporting and loving his students as they
grew up.
"I love you all.
Class dismissed."
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