Danielle Fishel is opening up about unsettling experiences being sexualized as a teenage star of Boy Meets World.
While discussing how she became “an object of desire at such a young age,” the actress, now 42, recalled a “creepy” interaction with a show executive in which she says he told her he had hung a calendar photo of her on his wall. She was 16 years old at the time.
“I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar,” she told her Pod Meets World co-hosts and former BMW costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle. “I had a male executive — I did a calendar [shoot] at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
Though she felt initial shock after the admission, Fishel explained that her “immediate thought after that was: ‘Yes, because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers.’”
“As a kid, I always wanted to be older. I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be seen as an adult,” she continued. “So getting adult male attention as a teenage girl felt like — I didn’t think of it as being creepy or weird.”
She explained, “I felt like it was 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.”
Strong, 43, agreed that Fishel — who starred in all seven seasons of Boy Meets World from 1993 to 2000, as well as the 2014 spinoff Girl Meets World — was “very mature” and “very advanced” as a teenager. Friedle, 46, noted that he viewed her as “confident” even back then.
“I’ve always been able to hold a conversation with an adult. I can look you in the eye. I’ve always been those things,” Fishel said. “But in a romantic, male-gaze sense, I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old. And I was, even directly to me.”
Upon reflection, she realizes that being objectified affected her relationships later in life. “I didn’t really process how it affected me as a teenager — or how it affected me in my 20s or even in my 30s — up until the last few years,” she said. “And then I was really able to look back on it and connect the dots.”
Boy Meets World can be streamed in full on Disney+.
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