Boy Meets World’s Danielle Fishel recalls her and Will Friedle’s weight gain turning into a “funny” storyline, while Full House star Candace Cameron Bure recalls an “awkward” episode addressing her weight change.
In the era of the “very particular episode,” each Complete house and The boy meets the world addressed weight adjustments with their younger stars. Candace Cameron Bure entered Danielle Fishel and Robust Knight in their Pod meets the world podcast to remember how each person present approached the subject.
“I used to always be the chubby-cheeked girl,” said Bure, who played DJ Tanner on ABC’s TGIF. Complete house from 1987 to 1995, before reprising the role as an adult in the Netflix sequel Most complete house from 2016 to 2020.
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The actress added that “a lot of people liked who I was,” saying she will now acknowledge that she was “just a regular, normal woman” while on the show.
And yet, Bure said that when people meet her in person, this sense of who she was on TV leads them to always say, “You’re so much thinner in person.”
“You’re like, ‘Is this what everyone sees?’” Bure marveled. “Do they only see my chubby cheeks?”
This led to a dialogue about how her weight was written in the present tense. After she lost 45 pounds between seasons, Bure stated that she was asked by producers if she would mind if it was written in the present tense.
This led to a sort of “very private episodes” about DJ struggling with body image issues. In the episode, she and her friend Kimmy (Andrea Barber) was invited to a pool party.
“I didn’t want to put on a bathing suit,” Bure recalled of her character in the episode that went viral in recent times. “So[DJ]made a weight loss plan to try to lose a few pounds each week so[she]wouldn’t feel really bad about[herself]in a bathing suit, and then she gave up on the gym.”
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She claimed that the show even put DJ on a stationary bike in her new intro for that season to “promote” her weight loss, which, “looking back, I don’t think was dangerous. I mean, I really put a lot of hard work and energy into losing 20 pounds.”
Although Bure and her parents were talked into it before the episode was even written, with everyone on board, Bure still said, “When you’re in it and doing it, it feels a little weird.”
Fishel, who also faced an inordinate amount of public scrutiny over her physique as a teenager on TV, then shared that neither she nor Will Friedle — who was not present in this episode of the podcast — was consulted by the show’s production team before his weight was included in the program.
“They called me into work to let me know they were going to do it,” she recalled. “It wasn’t exactly how they asked. They just said, ‘We just want you to know… you guys have clearly gained a little bit of weight. So we’re going to write an episode about it.’”
She stated that they then instructed her and Friedle: “Here’s what it’s going to be, and it’s going to be really funny.”
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“I remember the hardest part for me was that meeting,” Fishel said, while Bure said her “jaw was on the floor” just hearing the story now.
“Will was very, very like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m completely high quality with this!’ Just instantly,” she continued. “I know now that he was very insecure, and it was very hurtful and painful for him.”
As for her personal response, “it was more like, ‘Oh, wow.’ No one had told me anything about it. I was aware that I might gain weight, but I was still a size 4.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow. These people think I’ve gained enough weight (that) we have to write an entire episode about my weight gain, and now, I have to say I’m okay with it because they didn’t even present me with another alternative.
While Bure was fine with her weight loss being included in her Complete house story, she famously took a firm stance on another of those growing pains that all women go through, vetoing an episode about her period.
“As a teenager, you feel this insecurity, whether you’re on TV or not,” she famously said. “Those ages were a little bit weirder for me. I just always want to go back — I just want to hug 15-year-old Candace and be like, ‘Okay, don’t listen to anybody.’”