The actor and his ‘Pod Meets World’ co-hosts questioned how they got away with the “intense” and “jarring” scene
Will Friedle is calling his “intense” makeout session with then-girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt in a fan-favorite episode of Boy Meets World “uncomfortable” to watch now.
Friedle and fellow Boy Meets World stars Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong have been taking an intensive look back at the 1998 episode “And Then There Was Shawn.” Over the past week, they’ve devoting a total of four episodes of their rewatch podcast Pod Meets World to dissecting what Fishel called “maybe the best episode in Boy Meets World history.”
A send-up of and homage to teen slasher films of the ’90s like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, “And Then There Was Shawn” featured several of the show’s main characters being killed off in — spoiler alert — what turns out to be an extended dream sequence. But despite all the murder and mayhem, the episode’s freakiest moment may have been Friedle’s character’s bizarrely aggressive makeout sesh with guest star Hewitt, according to the Pod Meets World hosts.
“I don’t remember it going that far,” Friedle said during the trio’s recent recap.
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The scene in question finds the show’s teen cast, who are being stalked by an unseen killer while trapped in detention, forcing Friedle’s Eric to venture alone into their high school’s hallway where he encounters Hewitt’s Jennifer Love Fefferman. “Feffy” convinces him she’s not the killer and Eric immediately starts kissing her, pushing her against the lockers and going to town on her neck as well.
“It was seriously, like, ‘Wow, that’s uncomfortable,’ ” Friedle, now 48, said of rewatching the scene.
The hosts explained that the whole point of the scene was to get Friedle and Hewitt, who were dating at the time, alone together so that Eric could “pounce” on Feffy. But they agreed that even by the episode’s shaky dream logic, the scene didn’t make much sense, and questioned whether Boy Meets World’s young audience would have understood that the actors were a couple in real life.
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“That’s the only part of this episode I’d be like, ‘Guys, really don’t do it,’ ” Strong, 44, said of having Friedle’s character take such liberties with someone he’d only just met. “Like, it’s really not cool. And I don’t know why we all thought it was cool.”
“To assume that our audience would know that you guys were dating?” Strong added. “You couldn’t do that.”
“It was super intense,” Friedle admitted. “And I’ve had people even say to me, like, ‘Oh, when I was a kid, I didn’t realize you guys were together. So, it was just like, what the hell is going on?’ ”
On the Oct. 4 episode of Pod Meets World, director Jeff McCracken joined the cast to discuss “And Then There Was Shawn” and Hewitt’s guest appearance.
“Whose idea was the sexual assault?” Friedle jokingly asked McCracken.
“Will was instrumental in that,” McCracken said, adding that Hewitt “couldn’t have been nicer” and “fit right in” with the rest of the Boy Meets World cast.
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“She knew everybody and, you know, she knew how close I was to everybody,” Friedle recalled. “And she was game, and she was, you know, a great actress and would always throw herself into a project. So, it was fun.”
Still, he reiterated that none of the hosts remembered how intense the makeout scene was. “We watched it again and it was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s jarring,’ ” Friedle said.
“How did none of us say, ‘Should we do this?’ ” Fishel, 43, agreed. “Yeesh!”
