Bonnie Morgan, known for her role as Samara in “The Ring,” opened up about her experience getting hired to play Topanga Lawrence on “Boy Meets World” and how she felt when she was eventually let go.
Morgan said she had three callbacks and that the script changed slightly each time she auditioned. She felt a connection to the role because her mother grew kombucha mushrooms in their kitchen and the name Topanga was out of her parents’ love history.
Morgan said she was told by her agent that the creator of the show, Michael Jacobs, loved her for the part. However, there was apparently a “power struggle” and she was “stuck in the middle of it.”
After surviving the power struggle, Morgan arrived on set for her first day and called it “the weirdest the day of my life.” She remembered “all the adults were short with me” and described the table read as “fun” but said things went downhill after that.
Ben Savage “poked at” Morgan and made faces to try to break her, which worked. She couldn’t get his name, the opening line, and director David Trainer told her to “Get it together.” Morgan pulled it together in sheer fear, but Savage kept trying to crack her up.
At one point, Morgan had a line that Trainer wanted her to say “sweeter.” She said it sweeter, but he wanted her to say it “Like you’re saying happy birthday.” Morgan did as she was told and Trainer said, “Good, that’s better.”
Despite how the day went, Morgan was excited to come back the following Monday and went home feeling things would get better. She was even working on ideas for how she could incorporate her contortion skills into a scene they would be filming.
The next morning, Morgan explained, she woke up ready to celebrate her new job when the phone rang during breakfast. Her father answered the phone.
“He just said, ‘What? You’re kidding. They fired you. You’re fired,'” Morgan recalled.
The director said that Morgan couldn’t take direction, but her agent fought back and found out that Trainer didn’t think Morgan was pretty enough. Morgan described feeling “shattered” when she heard the news, saying, “I don’t know a lot of adults that could take that one.”
When the show eventually aired, the only time Morgan watched was when the pilot premiered. The role eventually went to Danielle Fishel, who played the character until the end of the original series in 2000 and again in the 2014 Disney Channel reboot series “Girl Meets World.”
Fishel recently spoke on the podcast about being sexualized at a young age while starring on the show. She acknowledged that while she was always confident in speaking with adults, “in a romantic, male gaze sense, I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old.”
Fishel said she had people tell her they had her 18th birthday on their calendar and that a male executive had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.