Rider Strong and Will Friedle say “Boy Meets World” creator ‘screamed’ at them in a restaurant about sequel series

Ryan ColemanFri, August 14, 2026 at 2:30 AM UTC

0

Will Friedle and Rider Strong in 2022Credit: Tommaso Boddi/GettyKey Points -

Will Friedle and Rider Strong are looking back on a tense moment they shared with Boy Meets World co-creator Michael Jacobs.

Strong says Jacobs invited him and Friedle out to lunch after they found out the Girl Meets World sequel series was already in development without them.

“He talked and talked and talked, and yelled and yelled and yelled,” Strong recalled. “In the middle of a restaurant!” Friedle added.

Rider Strong and Will Friedle were already hurt to find out in 2014 that a Boy Meets Worldsequel series was in development without their knowledge or participation. Then came the yelling.

Thursday saw Strong, Friedle, and their Boy Meets World costar Danielle Fishel finally pivot their popular rewatch podcast, Pod Meets World, to focus on that spinoff: Girl Meets World.

“Should we just paint the picture of where we were in 2014, when we heard about the reboot?” Fishel began. “You guys have told the story — you heard about it in the press, and then [co-creator Michael Jacobs] took you to a lunch or a dinner?” Friedle clarified it was a lunch, held while the show was already being cast. He and Strong weren’t happy about that fact, but their unhappiness made Jacobs even angrier.

Fishel was well aware, reminding them, “And then Michael screamed at you in the lunch room about doing the show.”

Rider Strong, Will Friedle, and the cast of ‘Girl Meets World’Credit: Disney Channel/Ron Tom

Strong recalled being out with friends when he “got a text saying ‘congrats on Girl Meets World’ from another friend. I was like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ Then he’s like, ‘I thought you knew or you were involved.’” The actor “probably reached out to Will right away” with a text asking “‘what the hell is going on?’” But Friedle was in the dark too.”

Strong had just made the decision to propose to his now wife, Alexandra Barreto, and was looking forward to “going in this new direction and getting married. My life is going and I’m moving on from Boy Meets World. I’m a real man! I’ve grown up!” It was both “ironic” and “very disheartening” that just days later, he’d be out to lunch with Friedle and Jacobs at Jacobs’ invitation, getting what Friedle called “the Michael Jacobs run-around.”

“I don’t even know why we agreed to go, because at that point, neither of us wanted to do the show,” Strong explained, but Friedle reasoned that the pair “wanted to hear, how do we not even get the common courtesy of, ‘Hey, this is happening?’”

Advertisement

Though Friedle went in assuming that Jacobs, who “can sell anything to anyone,” expected that he and Strong “would be apologizing to him for even wondering why we didn’t know about.” It turned out worse than that. “He talked and talked and talked and yelled and yelled and yelled,” Strong recalled. “At one point it was like, ‘Didn’t I let you go to college?’ Was the thing he was screaming at me.”

“In the middle of a restaurant!” Friedle exclaimed. “It was a lot,” Strong laughed.

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Jacobs for comment.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

Both Strong, who played the bad boy with a heart of gold Shawn Hunter, and Friedle, who played the irreverent Eric Matthews across the entire Boy Meets World season run, ended up appearing on Girl Meets World. Unlike Fishel, who starred on all three of the spinoff’s seasons with Boy Meets World star Ben Savage, Strong and Friedle only conceded to a handful — and only after their demands were met.

“Our producer at the time told us that we could do anything we wanted on the show. So I said, ‘I want to write,’ and he said, ‘You can’t do that.’ So then we finally made a deal that if I acted in three episodes, I could write one,” Friedle explained in a separate interview last month. Strong “ended up directing a lot. I ended up directing like 18 episodes. So it ended up being a great job as a director, but I had no interest in appearing as Shawn Hunter again and doing the show again. But it was a trade-off.”

You can listen to the full discussion on Pod Meets World above.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”