Danielle Fishel revealed to Rider Strong on their podcast that she used to have a crush on him.
She described the pair as having a “very nice, deep friendship” at the time she developed feelings for them.
Fishel also explained why she and Ben Savage knew they couldn’t date in real life.
During Thursday’s episode of their rewatch podcast “Pod Meets World,” Danielle Fishel admitted to her former “Boy Meets World” co-star Rider Strong that she used to have a crush on him.
Fishel responded to a fan question about crushes or romances behind the scenes of the show around the 14:40 mark of the Q&A episode. “I’ll go first because I had a crush on Rider,” she explained.
The revelation stunned Strong, who co-hosts the podcast with Fishel and Will Friedle. “That’s not true; you’ve never told me that,” he said, surprised that Fishel had waited nearly 30 years to tell him.
“I think it started later in season one and definitely continued through season two,” Fishel explained. At the time, the actors would have been about 12 or 13 years old.
Fishel believes she was drawn to him as a young adult because he was “so smart.”
“You know, one of my favourite things about Rider, and it still stands to this day,” she continued. “He’ll tell you how he feels and is generous with his compliments, but he doesn’t throw them around at random. Rider’s compliments are thoughtful, meaningful, and you can tell… they come from a very real place.”
While Fishel believes Strong was probably “annoyed” by her being a “typical LA girl” when they first started working together, she claims Strong and she eventually formed a “very nice, deep friendship” filled with “meaningful conversations” that drew her to him as a young adult.
The sitcom director also recalled a time in acting class when Strong gave her a “very real compliment” on her talent, which made her cry. She remembered thinking, “Oh my God, I love you.”
She also revealed that she discovered a “embarrassing” diary she kept for a few months while working on “Boy Meets World,” in which she would add a post-script note naming the boys she adored. According to Fishel, Strong’s name was frequently on that list.
In 2018, Fishel married her current husband, Jensen Karp. They have two sons, Adler, three, and Keaton, one, who will turn one on August 29. Strong and his wife Alexandra Barreto have a 6-year-old son named Indigo, whom he married in October 2013.
Despite her attraction to Strong, he is not the coworker with whom Fishel eventually went on a date. Fishel previously admitted that she and her former on-screen love Ben Savage went out once during the show’s run to see if their iconic on-screen romance could translate into a real-life relationship.
“And then we went out to dinner and said, ‘No!,'” she previously told People.
Fishel elaborated on why she knew right away that a romance with Savage wouldn’t work on Thursday’s episode of the podcast.
“We realised very quickly into the restaurant meal that this is a difficult boundary to cross,” she explained. “It was very clear that, no, what we had was just this very fun, non-romantic thing that I would consider more than a friendship.”
She clarified that playing someone’s romantic partner on a TV show for about seven years and kissing them so frequently on screen forces people to form a “shared history” that feels more than platonic but is “not at all romantic.”
Fishel called her relationship with Savage a “undefinable type of relationship.”
