During a recent interview with the ‘Wrestling With Will’ podcast, Danielle Fishel (Topanga of Boy Meets World & Girl Meets World) commented on being a huge fan of pro wrestling, being a presenter for the AEW Dynamite awards, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On becoming a wrestling fan through Boy Meets World: “Doing those episodes was my first real experience with professional wrestling. I’m about the same age as Topanga was throughout the course of the show and so I think I was around 16 when we did that Sweet 16 episode that we filmed in the ring. And I remember going to the show… it was filmed during an actual [WWF] event… I remember being there and just feeling what it felt like to be at a wrestling event and being so overwhelmed… but also feeling like a real part of the community. It was my first experience with one of my favorite things about wrestling, which is the chants that the audience knows and the things that they yell and it’s that real community feeling. I remember thinking How do they know what to say?”
On how PWG reignited her love for wrestling: “I fell out entirely for many, many years. I would know stuff that was going on, I would hear about it, I would watch occasionally but did not maintain a strict fandom for all those years. When my husband, Jensen, and I started dating in 2017… he was going to PWG shows, which he’d been going to since their inception, and we didn’t live terribly far from Reseda (where PWG took place) and he said to me one day, “You want to go to this wrestling show with me?” and in my head, having no idea what I was in for, I was picturing like a Raw or a WrestleMania… and then we got there and it was this tiny little room and it was a thousand degrees… and I had a very similar feeling to the way I felt when we shot that Boy Meets World episode and I felt like it was my first time being a part of something like that. It was so cool. It totally revived the things I loved about wrestling. It felt new, it felt different, and I obsessed again with all the chants… you become a part of this community. Right there, PWG is what revived my love for wrestling.”
On what she likes to watch now: “In 2017 and 2018, when we’d get word that somebody was moving up from PWG into NXT, and now AEW, I would then pay attention to where they went and what they were doing there. I’m a much bigger fan of AEW than I am currently of WWE. I think the things that AEW is doing are more interesting. I just find the relationships and the storylines and the characters to be more engaging.”
On being a presenter for the AEW Dynamite Awards: “I was very honored that they asked [Jensen and I] to do that. We’re presenting Breakout Male and Female… You know what’s funny? I don’t know the winners. They gave us the cards and all of the names were on the cards and we had to do it one by one as if they all won. So they’re taking it very seriously. I honestly do not know who won.”
On if she would ever step into the ring: “It’s something Jensen and I have talked about. I love athletics… I am naturally athletic and when I put my mind to something and I train for something, I can really get into it. So there have been a few times where I thought man, what if I just like trained and became a wrestler? What if just had a second career, just a brand new career of just being a wrestler? Then I thought oh my gosh, my body would hate me. Like… I’m gonna be 40 this year. I don’t know if that’s the time to decide I’m gonna start wrestling. But would it be fun to be like a manager? Yes. I would love to do something like that. I would do it in a heartbeat.”
