NEED TO KNOW
Melissa Joan Hart is opening up about her teen years spent on set for Clarissa Explains It All — and how she wanted to “hang with the cool guys” by drinking beers, but was rebuffed by the older members of the crew.
Speaking to guest host Elisa Donovan on Tori Spelling’s misSPELLING podcast, 49-year-old Hart explained that the show was filmed In Orlando at Universal Studios, saying her work as a child actress created an interesting dichotomy. “I’m on one hand in this preppy junior high where I don’t fit in. And then on the other hand, I’m in Orlando on a soundstage where I’m number one on the call sheet and if I ask for pretzels, they get me pretzels.”
Hart played the titular character on the Nickelodeon show, which ran for five seasons from 1991 to 1994. The crew on the show, the actress explained, “protected me.”
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“Like that crew … it was a lot of guys and they were a little bit older than me. They were all in like their early twenties. And so I had crushes on all of them, but they took good care of me,” she said.
Hart then went on to explain how her experience on Clarissa Explains It All differed from the 2024 Quiet on Set documentary, which explored the sometimes toxic culture of children’s television shows on the network that other young actors and others endured in the 1990s and 2000s.
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“When that whole Nickelodeon thing came out recently, this is gonna be a little — not salacious, but — when that Nickelodeon thing came out recently about kind of the horrors that happened on some shows at Nickelodeon, that was not my experience,” Hart said. “Because I was protected by my crew. My guys. And I have pictures where, you know, they’re all having drinks around me and I’m like in a bathing suit because I’ve been rolling around in the sprinklers at an apartment complex and they’re all drinking beers or whatever, but I’d be like, ‘I want a beer. I want a beer. I want a beer.’ And at this point, I’m like 16, 17. ‘I want a beer. Give me a beer.’ They’d be like, ‘No. We’re not giving you a beer, because we’ll get fired tomorrow.’ ”
She continued: “And thank God for them. Like, thank God for them not letting me because I didn’t really wanna drink. I just wanted to hang with the cool guys. I was like, ‘I just wanna hold it. Can I just hold it? Like, it’s disgusting, but I just wanna hold the beer because I just feel cool because I wanna hang with you guys.’ But they were like, ‘No. We don’t wanna get fired. Stop it. Let’s go roll in the sprinklers. We’ll see you later.’ “
