Danielle Fishel became one of the best known faces on the small screen in the 90s as Topanga, one of the protagonists of the Disney series “Me and the World”. The actress played the crush of the protagonist, Cory (Ben Savage) in the series that ran until 2000. When she started Fishel she was only 12 years old, and despite already having some experience thanks to ‘Forced Parents’ or’ Harry and the Hendersons’, Nothing could prepare him for the hell that series creator Michael Jacobs put him through on his first day..
The actress opened the podcast “Pod Meets World” which she shares with Rider Strong (Shawn) and Will Friedle (Eric). Fishel says she wasn’t the first choice for the role of Topanga, but when the chosen one left, she was called. She didn’t have much room to react because they told her on Friday night and she was supposed to be on set Monday. After rehearsals, everyone met with Michael Jacobs to get some notes: “Michael started the annotations by saying ‘Danielle, I’ll give you all your annotations at once at the end and now I’ll give the other annotations, because if I make everyone wait while I tell you all the annotations I have for you, come and stay here for hours and no one will be able to go home. Wait for the end ‘. At that moment my eyes filled with tears because I was in front of everyone, all the producers, the writers, the cast and all eyes were looking at me “.
Threat of dismissal on the first day
She says the creator called her mom to be there and recalls that the main problem she had was that she spoke very fast and that if she didn’t correct it, he would basically threaten to fire her: “He told me: ‘All I know is that if you don’t go back to doing things completely differently tomorrow, you won’t even be here.'”. Remember that the actress was a 12-year-old girl at the time. She and her mother spent all night practicing and the next day she tried again. At the end of the day, Jacobs said: “Let’s give Danielle a round of applause, you did exactly what I asked you to do. Thanks and congratulations, you were wonderful”. She says she didn’t threaten her again, but that incident had already marked what his experience of her would be like on the show because “every week try to get Michael’s approval”. Emphasize that this power dynamic was not “fury” because in the end the goal was not to be better, but to please Michael Jacobs.
Fishel received support from his fellow series and podcast partners, as well as from that week’s host, director David Trainer, who went on to say he ended up “hating” his work on the series: “I’ve worked with Michael on many programs. This story is horrible. There are a lot of wonderful things in it, but there is also a lot of hate. This is one. Listening to this, are you sweating? I’m so pissed off. It’s enough to make me cum. I want to leave this podcast. I don’t want to be associated with anything that guy is associated with. That’s not how things are done. I’m glad the show was a success, but it sucks. Everyone who has worked with Michael has understood, implicitly or explicitly, that whenever Michael went to one side of the ship, everyone went to the other to prevent him from sinking. Work was, and that’s why I came to hate it, doing your job but also keeping us from sinking.”.
‘Me and the World’ had a continuation years later, ‘Riley and the World’, centered around the daughter of Cory and Topanga. Danielle Fishel is back together with Ben Savage and Michael Jacobs was the creator again. It aired between 2014 and 2017.
Source: E Cartelera
