Boy Meets World alum Trina McGee has opened up about her time on the hit ABC sitcom, including her treatment behind the scenes and why she wasn’t in the series finale.
McGee discussed her time on the show on a recent episode of Pod Meets World, the podcast hosted by fellow Boy Meets World alums Danielle Fishel, Will Friedle, and Rider Strong. For three seasons, McGee played Angela, the girlfriend of Strong’s Shawn Hunter, but was absent from the show’s finale as her character left for Europe in the penultimate episode.
“I was told, in kind of a weird, off-handed way by a very important person, that you guys all went to [showrunner] Michael Jacobs, and you said, ‘We don’t want her in the last episode. She’s somehow taking our light,’ was the gist of it,” McGee revealed. “I was told that after I shot what was the show before the last episode, which was called ‘Angela’s Ashes’ when I left.”
She continued, “I was under the impression that y’all got together and did not want me in the last show; for some reason, I was going to take some shine or something to that effect. That was really hurtful to me for a long time.”
Fishel, Friedle, and Strong were all shocked by the revelation and made it clear that those events didn’t happen and had no idea about them until now. “Can we say for the record, Trina, that never happened,” Friedle said. “That’s not competitiveness; that’s sociopathy. This pisses me off. This is next level.”
McGee said that she believed her former co-stars, “I can tell by your reactions,” she said. “I have had that in my head for so long, and I’ve never watched that show. I’ve always felt like, ugh… That hurt me a long time,” she added.
There were other issues on the show that McGee touched upon, including being told to tone down her Blackness. “Coming from Black sitcoms, I always had to have like a Black meter,” McGee quipped, saying that on Boy Meets World, her “Black meter was probably down to a two,” but in one episode, she “slipped up” and reached “about a nine.”
“Michael comes over to me, and his note was, ‘Hey Trina, just turn down the Telma Hopkins about eight notches,’” she said, referencing the Family Matters actress. “I knew exactly what he was talking about and I did… There are so many things you guys are so lucky you didn’t have to think about.”
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