Danielle Fishel says she stopped wanting to be hugged on the set of Girl Meets World and began drawing a line around what she was comfortable with at work. She described the change on Tuesday’s episode of I Choose Me With Jennie Garth, where she said she started asking herself why she was hugging so many people all the time.
The timing matters because Fishel used the podcast to revisit a shift that happened while she was already a star and producer on the series. She said the habit of ending production days with hugs had become so routine that it could take twenty minutes to leave the set, with hugs going to camera guys, craft service, writers and other people before everyone went home.
Fishel said she comes from a very huggy family and that her roots in Malta made that feel normal for a long time. But on Girl Meets World, she said the workday could stretch late and still be followed by an 8 a.m. read the next morning after wrapping barely twelve hours earlier. In that setting, the physical ritual at the end of the day stopped feeling harmless and started to feel like another obligation.
What made the boundary harder was the expectation she said producers carried over from Boy Meets World. Fishel said she had a real go-with-the-flow attitude in the 1990s, when people felt they could tell her to do whatever they wanted and she would never push back. By the time of Girl Meets World, she said, she was an adult with thoughts and opinions of her own and was not shy about sharing them, even when that meant questioning decisions she had never actually made for herself.
That is the tension inside her account: a child star returning to a familiar set, but no longer willing to be treated like the same person she had been years earlier. Fishel said she compared the expectation to whether her father would hug everyone as the president of the company he works at. Her point was plain. A workplace is still a workplace, even when it is built around nostalgia and old habits.
Girl Meets World was the Boy Meets World sequel series centered on Topanga and Corey Matthews’ tween daughter, Riley, and Fishel said her earlier experience shaped how people saw her on the later show. What remains unanswered is how the rest of the set responded once she started setting that boundary. Fishel’s account shows where she drew the line. It does not say whether the line changed the room.
