Maitland Ward, who joined Boy Meets World as a main cast member in Season 6, claims producers told her repeatedly Danielle Fishel would hat her because she was “the new girl,” “tall,” and “sexy.”
Even before Maitland Ward met Danielle Fishel on Boy Meets World, she claims producers were preparing her for the worst. The former sitcom star opened about how she was told to prepare for joining the show in Season 6, and how different that experience turned out.
“A lot of people said Danielle would hate me because I was the girl coming in,” Ward recalled in a new interview with E! News. She joined the show as part of the main cast, portraying Rachel McGuire, a college friend of the younger cast.
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Fishel Female Feud
According to Ward, it was female lead Fishel who was supposedly going to be the most difficult for her to work with. She said that producers told her repeatedly things like, “Oh yeah, she’s gonna hate you because you’re the new girl and you’re tall and like, the sexy girl or whatever.”
“But she didn’t. She was very nice to me when I came in,” Ward explained, adding, “It’s weird that people would like, set that up.”
She noted that while she doesn’t think it was a “diabolical” thing on the part of anyone, she thinks it was more of an “offhand comment” reflective of the generalization that “girls wouldn’t get along with other girls, or girls would be against each other.”
Instead, Ward felt that Fishel “definitely didn’t seem to hate me,” when they met, as she wrote in her memoir, My Escape from Hollywood: Unapologetic, Unfiltered and Unashamed. Ward abandoned traditional Hollywood for a career in adult entertainment.
“In fact, we connected over things you wouldn’t expect, like our love of Chihuahuas and pet rats,” she continued in her book, which was released September 6. “Still, no matter how well we got along, there would always be a part of me that distrusted her and her motives toward me, and it all stemmed from [creator] Michael [Jacobs’] first warnings.”
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’90s Female Stereotypes
As part of the “college years” era of Boy Meets World, Ward said that it felt as if the female characters on the show, which included Trina McGee — who’s also opened up about her own challenging experiences with the show — where further stereotyped into archetypes.
She felt that she was presented as “the provocative one,” while McGee was “the grown-up,” and Fishel was “the golden child.” The actress added that in hindsight, she can see that “sexy one” label impacting how her role was written.
“I was so much part of the sexual butt of the joke and a lot of them, at the time, I had no thoughts of like, it was anything fetishy or sexual but looking back now, I’m like, ‘Wow, that if I did that naked, I could sell that on OnlyFans.’ You know?” she told E! News.
She did add that despite what she wrote about creator Michael Jacobs in her memoir purportedly pushing this narrative of beef between her and Fishel, there are no hard feelings anymore. In fact, she said that Jacobs reached out to her after the book published.
“I give him so many props for calling me and we just spoke for like an hour and a half. We really hashed a lot of stuff out. He’s very supportive,” she noted, adding that their relationship today is “wonderful.”
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