Danielle Fishel said on Tuesday that she stopped wanting to be hugged on the Girl Meets World set while she was establishing adult boundaries as a producer and star. She described the change during an appearance on I Choose Me with Jennie Garth, where she revisited how her on-set habits shifted from her Boy Meets World years.
Twenty Minutes After Wrap
Fishel said the routine could add twenty minutes to the end of a production day because she would hug the camera guys, craft service, writers, and other people before leaving. She said the next day’s read was usually at 8 a.m., which meant she was seeing the same people again after barely twelve hours.
“And I at some point I was like, why am I hugging so many people all the time? I’m just hugging everyone,” she said. “And now it’s going to take twenty minutes to get out of here because you gotta hug the camera guys, and you gotta hug craft service, and you gotta hug the writers, and you gotta, you know, hug all these people,” Fishel added.
Boy Meets World in the 1990s
Fishel said she came from a very huggy family and said her family is from Malta. She also said she had a real go-with-the-flow attitude on Boy Meets World in the 1990s, when producers felt like they could tell her to do whatever they wanted and she would never push back.
On Girl Meets World, she said she had become a new person, an adult and a grownup with thoughts and opinions of her own. She said she was not incredibly shy about sharing those opinions, and that made her start questioning a lot of decisions on the set, including the hugging routine she had once accepted without thinking twice.
Girl Meets World Boundaries
“Why am I hugging so many people all the time?” Fishel recalled asking herself while filming. She said the habit stopped feeling automatic once she was working as both a producer and a star, because the old expectation that she would simply go along with everything no longer fit the way she wanted to work.
Girl Meets World centered on Topanga and Corey Matthews’ tween daughter, Riley, but Fishel’s account shifts the focus to the set itself: a workplace where daily closeness had become routine until she started drawing a line around it. The production team’s response to that line was not addressed, and that omission leaves the practical takeaway where it belongs — with Fishel setting the boundary, not pretending she had none.
