'Boy Meets World' Star Danielle Fishel Recalls 'Creepy' Experiences With Older Men On Set

Danielle Fishel was just 12 years old when she was cast as Topanga Lawrence in the ABC sitcom "Boy Meets World."

The actors have remained incredibly close friends in the decades since "Boy Meets World" ended. Just last year, Fishel, Strong, and Friedle launched their rewatch podcast, "Pod Meets World," where they speak openly about their memories and personal experiences on the show with special guests.

Fishel also revealed that her agent and father forced her to boycott a table read because of a huge pay disparity between her and her costars.

She later exposed a dark side of child fame when she recounted being catfished by a grown man who pretended to be a young girl in order to establish a regular correspondence with her. The man ended up showing up at Fishel's school and telling people that he was there to pick her up.

And in Thursday’s episode of the podcast, Fishel detailed some more harrowing experiences from her childhood as a result of her "Boy Meets World" stardom.

The gang were joined by Bruh Meets World hosts Ceej and TJ, who asked the cast what it was like to be “an object of desire at such a young age,” and how it impacted their “dating life and sexuality.”

Now 42, Fishel admitted that she’d only recently processed how being sexualized as a child had affected her growing up, before going on to recall some of the “creepy” experiences she’d had with older men while on set.

As a child, Fishel didn’t realize that what was being said to her was inappropriate, but in hindsight, she now knows that it was “absolutely wrong.”

“As a kid, I always wanted to be older,” she began. “I wanted to be an adult, I wanted to be seen as an adult, so getting adult male attention as a teenage girl … I didn’t think of it as being creepy or weird.”

Fishel went on, “It felt like validation that I was mature and I was an adult and I was capable. And that they were seeing me the way I was, not for the number on a page. And in hindsight, that is absolutely wrong.”

Fishel added, “Even directly to me, I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar. I had a male executive, I did a calendar at 16, and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom. And at the time, my first thought was a little bit like … oh … but the immediate thought after that was, 'Yes, because we are peers and this is how you relate to peers.'”

Reflecting on the long-term impact that childhood fame had on her, Fishel said that it made her bad at setting boundaries because she was worried that people would think that she thought she was “too good for them” if she held “expectations” of how she should be treated and spoken to.

“I didn’t want anyone to think that I thought I was better than them or that they were not good enough for me,” she explained, before revealing that she didn’t start to work on this issue until her late 30s.

In 2014, Fishel reprised her role of Topanga for a "Boy Meets World" sequel series, "Girl Meets World," which starred 13-year-old Rowan Blanchard as Topanga and Cory’s daughter, Riley, and 15-year-old Sabrina Carpenter as Riley’s best friend, Maya.

Strong and Friedle also had cameo appearances in "Girl Meets World" over its three seasons, and the cast members were asked how they used their own experiences as child actors to support their young costars.

“It’s such a fine line to walk because we’ve all talked about how sets operate in ways that most normal workplaces would never,” Fishel said, explaining that generally actors are very “touchy-feely,” hug all the time, and would even give each other piggyback rides to set.

Friedle then confessed that his occasional experiences on "Girl Meets World" “threw” him because he had enough distance to be able to recognize “inappropriate” behavior.

“And, like, in my mind, yeah, because they’re my age, so for me it’d be a normal conversation,” he went on. “But in retrospect, that man was 45 having that conversation, or 30-something; that’s messed up.”

Strong and Friedle also had negative memories of the attention that came with their fame as teenagers. Strong bluntly said, “I hated it; I think I’ve been pretty open about that. When I was reduced to that 'teen idol' thing, it just made me so uncomfortable. I’ve been a serial monogamist my entire life, and I think that part of that was in response to feeling overwhelmed by the exposure.”

And Friedle admitted that being unpopular with girls at school made him question the authenticity of women who wanted to date him once he was famous.

“I had a very interesting relationship with it because I came from my town — where I was not popular, I could not get a date, girls did not like me — to being on a show where stars wanted to date me,” he shared. “It was really weird. When I finished the first season of 'Boy Meets World,' I went home and couldn’t get a date for my prom.”

“It was a weird juxtaposition to me because it put me on guard,” Friedle added. “Like: 'Why all of a sudden now are these beautiful women paying attention to me and they want to date me, where the girls I grew up with don’t want to have anything to do with me? It must be because I’m on TV,' which then felt fake.”

Friedle also explained that before he met his now-wife, he spent most of his life being more comfortable when alone, and would go years without dating.

In other episodes of the podcast, Strong and Friedle have recalled their “creepy” and “horribly uncomfortable” intimate scenes as young actors, and repeatedly voiced their wish that they’d had an intimacy coordinator on set at the time.

Both stars often had to make out with background actors as part of their characters’ heartthrob personas, with Friedle previously pointing out that eventually both he and Strong had a new person to kiss every week.

He also acknowledged the “power disparity” between him and Strong and the background actors, explaining, “Because we’re regulars on the show, so we have a job and we know we’re going to have a job, and it puts the [guest] actor in a position of saying, ‘I’m not gonna say I don’t want you to put your tongue down my throat.’”

In January, Friedle recounted adult men on the crew trying to make him seem “more sexual” during a makeout scene in Season 2. He said, “It creeped me out a little bit in retrospect. I know we’re not trying to dismantle everything we’ve done and all that kind of stuff, but it was a moment of being surrounded by a bunch of older people telling us how to make this scene look more sexual.”