Boy Meets World 's Danielle Fishel Still Isn't Sure Where She Ends and Topanga Begins

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Natalie Finn
Sat, April 29, 2023 at 6:00 AM PDT·6 min read

You could do a lot worse than getting to play Topanga Lawrence during your formative years.

Though Danielle Fishel admittedly had some catching up to do when it came to matching the maturity of the 11-year-old when Boy Meets World premiered in 1993.

"When Topanga was first created I felt she was very different from me," the actress, who played her throughout her teens and again in her 30s, told E! News in an exclusive interview. "She talked slower, she was very sure of herself. She had a lot of strong feminist beliefs that young Danielle had never even thought about."

But eventually, Fishel continued, "we started to become more one in the same, and I don't know where the line starts to blur."

To this day, she added, "I don't know how much of who Danielle is, is because of the way Topanga was, or vice versa. I describe Topanga as just being on the other side of my heart—at any given point in time, I can click into it. She is I and I am she. "

And she's not mad about it—not least because the 41-year-old knows actors can spend their whole careers hoping to play a part that means something to people, and she won the brass ring almost right out of the gate.

"It will always be a defining aspect of who I am," Fishel said. "And that character was such a cool person—how could you possibly get any luckier?"

So let's just say, she's a damsel, but not the distressed kind.

Besides, Fishel wouldn't be doing her podcast Pod Meets World if she were over it.

"We're watching it for what feels like the first time," she said of unpacking the '90s TGIF staple through the prism of adulthood with co-hosts Rider Strong and Will Friedle, "and it's really made us appreciate it all so much more."

And speaking of fruit from the Topanga tree, it was while playing the grown-up mom version on the 2014-to-2017 Disney Channel sequel series Girl Meets World that Fishel first stepped behind the camera to direct—an experience that only made her want more "Action!" in her life.

These days, however, she also makes sure work doesn't take her away for too long from her sons Adler, 3, and Keaton, 20 months, with writer-comedian husband Jensen Karp. So, when the couple were approached about collaborating on a project for Karp to write and Fishel direct, she recalled, "Jensen and I looked at each other and we were like, 'Yeah, let's take this challenge on together.'"

The result is the Tubi original Classmates, a witty YA comedy-meets-crime-caper about two college freshmen who decide what's the harm in swapping identities after a computer error scrambles their registration info.