Danielle Fishel admittedly felt “so uncomfortable” when Boy Meets World featured a story line dedicated to her character Topanga’s weight.
“When I started the show at 12, I did weigh 94 pounds, and now I’m 19 and I weigh you know, 115 or whatever it is, and I have put on that weight,” Fishel, 45, said on the Thursday, May 7, episode of her “Pod Meets World” podcast, detailing her mindset at the time to read scripts poking fun at her character’s apparent weight gain. “It is my responsibility and as an actor, my body is part of my instrument.”
Fishel was particularly aware of her body while filming the season 7 episode titled, “She’s Having My Baby Back Ribs,” where Topanga goes on a diet after struggling to button her pants. Topanga’s husband, Cory Matthews (Ben Savage), in turn, thought his college student wife was actually pregnant.
“I’m sure there was a part of me that understood why parts of it were funny then too, so I’m like, ‘It is funny, so why am I taking it so personally?’” she recalled. “I remember doing the wardrobe fitting for these jeans and they were a size either 26 or 27, which is a 2 or a 4. … I knew no matter how I feel about my own body, because I was definitely like, ‘I’m huge, I’m fat, I’m disgusting.’”
She continued, “I knew that, factually, a size four is something most American women would think of as being borderline emaciated, and yet we’re gonna do an entire episode around the fact that this size four woman has to be this concerned about her weight and her body, and that made me angry.”
As Fishel filmed the scene where her pants wouldn’t close, she became increasingly “aware [of] what” the show was telling women audience members about their own body shapes.
“[I was] not happy at all,” the actress stated.
Fishel’s podcast cohost Will Friedle further noted that the story arc began when the two actors were “pulled into an office” with show execs. (Friedle’s character, Eric Matthews, also went on a diet in the same episode.)
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“We both, to protect ourselves, instantly went the laughing fun route, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna be OK, this is going to be so great,’” Friedle, 49, said on Thursday’s episode. “The alternative would have been misery. It’s, like, ‘Let’s find the jokes [and] let’s hit the jokes’ because it’s all we had.”
In rewatching the episode, Friedle also noticed how many people touched Topanga’s stomach in the episode. The handsy scenes soon felt “uncomfortable” for both him and Fishel.
“I never put it together. I hate people touching my stomach … even people I’m very close to [like] my husband,” Fishel said of her spouse, Jensen Karp. “If Jensen puts his arm around my waist and I feel like it’s resting anywhere near my stomach, doesn’t matter how thin I am, I am like, ‘Get your hand off my stomach.’ I wonder if it goes back to this episode.”
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