Danielle FishelTopanga Lawrence’s first day was almost the last. During a recent episode of podcast knows the worldhosts Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle, joined director David Trainer to remember “boy meets world.”
After Fishel first auditioned for the part on the ABC sitcom, he never received a callback. However, when the original actor didn’t work out, Trainer asked Fishel to read the role again.
Fishel received the call on a Friday night that she got the part and had to be on set on Monday as Topanga. At 12, she was very fast-talking, something he worked hard on all day during rehearsals, until it was time for the producer to talk to the show’s creator, Michael Jacobs.
“I had never been a part of his marathon note session. This was the first because it was my first week,” Fishel said. “Michael starts with the notes saying, ‘Danielle, I’m going to give you all your notes at once, at the end and I’m going to give everyone else their notes now, because if I had everyone sit here all the notes I had For you, we’d all be here for hours and no one could ever come home. So you’re just going to wait until the end. From that moment on, my eyes filled with tears because now I am in front of everyone: all the producers, all the writers, the entire cast, and all eyes are on me for a second.”
After Jacobs was done with all of the others’ notes, he called Fishel’s mother from the audience to join the two at a table on set.
“He went through every one of my lines and what I wanted and what I wasn’t doing right and how slow I needed to speak,” he recalled, noting that now, nearly 30 years later, he is breaking out in a sweat as he talks about it. “What I know specifically that she said to herself is, ‘All I know is if you don’t come back tomorrow doing this completely differently, you won’t be here either,’ referring to the girl she had replaced.”
Ben Savage, Rider Strong, Danielle Fishel in ‘Boy Meets World’.
©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Afterward, Fishel and his mother went over each line until the middle of the night.
After the story, Trainer chimed in: “I worked for Michael for years on various shows. This is a hate story,” he says. “There are many wonderful things about him, but there are hateful things. This is one. To listen to this, are you sweating? I am really angry. It’s enough for him to want to log out of this podcast. I don’t want to be associated with anything that guy is associated with. That’s not how you do things. I’m glad it became a hit, but this is disgusting.”
He continued: “Everyone who worked with Michael understood, implicitly or explicitly, whenever Michael lurched to one side of the boat, they all went to the other side to keep him from sinking… The job was, and so he hated it. Ultimately, it was doing your job, but also preventing flooding and drowning.”
While Fishel really wanted to “get it right,” she admitted she wasn’t focused on perfecting the role, but rather making Jacobs happy. “That’s the problem for me, that’s what I remember feeling. That’s what I don’t think is healthy,” Strong said, as Friedle agreed.
Fishel recalled that the next day, Jacobs stood up and said, “Let’s give Danielle a round of applause, you did exactly what I asked. Thanks thanks. Congratulations, it was wonderful.”
“He complimented me on a few specific things and then started taking notes. There were no more threats of dismissal, I had done the work and I had shown him that I was worthy,” she said. “It’s totally established that you go after that every week. You’re chasing the dragon of Michael’s approval.”
Friedle noted, “He arranged it so that, by now, when he gives you a standing ovation, it’s like the sun is shining on you. It had nothing to do with your performance. It was just, make Michael feel good.’”