Melissa Joan Hart’s ‘Sabrina’ Exit: A Maxim Photo Shoot Caused It
Actress Melissa Joan Hart’s Surprising Revelations
Actress Melissa Joan Hart made a few surprising revelations during a recent podcast appearance, recalling a short-lived “romance” with another actor and the day she got dropped from “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” over a Maxim photo shoot.
Hart joined “Boy Meets World” alumni Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle on Monday’s episode of “Pod Meets World” — and she and Friedle recounted a very short relationship when they were both young teens.
Friedle, who played oldest brother Eric Matthews on the popular ABC sitcom, brought it up around the 17:30 mark, saying, “I was with you for, like, your 14th birthday or 15th. Remember we went to some place where it [had] those big tanks you could drive or shoot the tennis balls at?”
“Oh my gosh!” the “Clarissa Explains It All” star exclaimed. “Probably the only time I ever had fun in Orlando, I never really got to do anything.”
“Yeah, and so we went out for that, and we were, like, making googly eyes at each other. And by the end of the night, we were ‘dating,’” Friedle joked.
Hart said that after that day, the pair had exchanged numbers and a few phone calls “on a landline,” but that not much else had ever come of it.
“It was a whirlwind romance,” Friedle agreed — but neither could remember if they had ever even kissed.
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One of Hart’s Worst Days
Later in the show, Hart described one of her worst days — part of which was forever captured in a photo of her and pop singer Britney Spears at the premiere of her 1999 film “Drive Me Crazy.”
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
In the photo, Hart said it was obvious she’d been “crying all evening” after deciding to break up with her boyfriend.
Things went from bad to worse when, after the photo was taken, she jumped in a limo to film a scene for “Scary Movie” — only to learn en route that she had been fired from the movie. She turned back and headed to her premiere and an afterparty at Planet Hollywood.
But when she arrived at the party, her lawyer informed her that she’d been dropped from “Sabrina” — because of a photo shoot she’d done for Maxim.
“My lawyer shows up and goes, ‘You did a photo shoot for Maxim magazine?’ I’m like: ‘Yes, I did.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you’re being sued and fired from your show, so don’t talk to the press, don’t do anything,’” she recalled.
As it turned out, the photos were not the problem — rather, Archie Comics took issue with a blurb teasing her appearance in the magazine: “Sabrina, Your Favorite Witch Without a Stitch.”
But because she didn’t actually appear nude in the photos and had been promoting her movie rather than her television show — not to mention the fact that she had no control over what Maxim chose to print on the cover — after a few weeks she was eventually able to iron out the situation and return to her role.
“The silver lining here is that for weeks, the top news [was] ‘Can Melissa be sexy’?’ ‘Why is she being fired from her TV show?’ and all this drama. But it made for ‘Drive Me Crazy’ to come out and be a huge success. It was insane,” she said.
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