Will Friedle says he is not done trying to reach Ben Savage. More than a year after Savage stopped responding to the former Boy Meets World cast, Friedle said Wednesday that he still has not given up on his old friend and still wants to hear his voice on the other end of the line.

That matters because Friedle is not talking about a closed chapter. He said he still gets the urge to pick up the phone and call Savage, and that if Savage ever comes back into their lives, there will be plenty to talk about. Friedle and Savage played Eric and Cory Matthews from 1993 to 2000 on Boy Meets World, a seven-season run that made them one of TV’s better-known screen pairings.

Friedle’s latest comments arrive after years of public uncertainty around Savage’s relationship with the cast. In 2022, Friedle, Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong launched the Pod Meets World rewatch podcast, and Savage was initially expected to join as a co-host before stepping away from the project. By 2023, the three hosts said Savage had ghosted them without giving a reason. Friedle said then that Savage had disappeared and that there had been no fight, no falling out and no animosity — only silence.

Fishel has been more reflective about the same gap. She said she likes imagining Savage in his new life as a husband and father, adding that she knows he has had a baby girl. She also said it makes her sad that she cannot be part of those milestones, and that she has reached a place of immense understanding and grace about his not wanting to look back at their time on the show. But Friedle’s comments show that the unanswered question remains the same: why did Savage pull away from people who spent years with him on and off set?

That question has only sharpened as Savage moved away from acting and into politics, running unsuccessfully for a seat on the West Hollywood City Council in 2022 and then losing a 2024 race for California’s 30th Congressional District as a Democrat. Earlier this month, William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett also said there were problems among the cast and crew on the Boy Meets World set, a reminder that the sitcom’s legacy has not stayed neatly in the past.

Friedle’s message, though, was simple: he is still waiting. Until Savage picks up the phone, the cast is left with the same silence they described last year, and the same hope that one day he will decide to answer.