Will Friedle wasn’t afraid to meet the world as a preteen in the ’80s — and even found a way to turn a profit.
“At 11 years old, my dad would pick me up at school at the bus station in Farmington, Connecticut, and I would take the bus to New York [City] three hours down to Port Authority,” Friedle, 47, recalled during the Monday, January 15, episode of the “Hey Dude … The 90s Called!” podcast. “The stories are awful. I started smoking at a very young age so I would go and buy my cigarettes and a couple porn magazines, because I knew I could sell them for my friends back [home]. I could jack up the price. So I’d go to the kiosk and they’d say to me, ‘Well, you’re 11, so of course, here are cigarettes and porn.’”
Friedle noted that while his manager would usually pick him up from the bus station, he would often “walk the streets” solo on his way to auditions as a kid. In 1993 at age 16, he booked the role of Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World and left the East Coast for California.
“I tell people my story, and they think I’m lying or they think my parents had a serious problem,” he said, noting that his parents are “retroactively mortified” to learn what he was up to as a child. Despite their chagrin, Friedle insisted that he “experienced more in the three or four hours” he spent in NYC a week than he “ever did” while back home in his Connecticut small town.
“It was a great way to see the world,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Friedle has gotten candid about the reality of his adolescence. He launched his “Pod Meets World” podcast alongside former Boy Meets World costars Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong in June 2022, and the trio often lament the ups and downs of growing up in the spotlight as they recap the show’s seven seasons.
While speaking with Us Weekly in August 2022, Friedle revealed one aspect of his job as a child actor he’d prefer not to revisit: being intimate on screen.
“Rider and I talk about one of the things is the constant kissing. We were kissing girls every week, and it was kind of creepy the way it kept happening,” he exclusively told Us. “And there was never a story … it’s not like the actresses had wonderful story lines. It was just, like, you are there to kiss us that week. It was really kind of gross.”
Friedle has also looked back on his own behavior while on the set of BMW, which ran from 1993 to 2000. In 2020, he apologized to Trina McGee, who portrayed Angela on the ABC series, for a controversial remark in which he referred to her as “Aunt Jemima” during the show’s finale season.
“He apologized to me 22 years ago and again days ago in a three-page letter. We talked more on it and he acknowledged that he really wasn’t educated enough in his early twenties to know he was truly offending me,” McGee, 54, wrote via Instagram in April 2020. “THIS SHOULD AND COULD BE A TEACHING MOMENT FOR ALL. For all people of all races or different backgrounds. He has conveyed to me how much this has changed his perception of comedy. And humanity.”
