NEED TO KNOW
Melissa Joan Hart is opening up about landing her role on Clarissa Explains It All — and how she has a pair of overalls to thank for the job.
Speaking to guest host Elisa Donovan on Tori Spelling’s misSPELLING podcast, 49-year-old Hart explained that the auditioning process was “pretty tedious,” adding: “I I know I auditioned like three times, and at the same time, I’m auditioning for Blossom, for the role of Six.”
She continued: “So I think I went three times to each audition … when I got a callback for something — there’s the audition, the callback, and like a second callback — I would always wear the same thing. Because it was like, was good luck.”
The producer, Hart added, liked her outfit — but even more, how she wore it.
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“And I had like a pink t-shirt on and these like acid-washed overalls. And turns out the producer really liked pink and blue, so it was, like, pink and blue,” she continued. “But apparently, he watched the two auditions side-by-side, and my strap fell off at the same point. And like, I lifted it back up in like three different places in the audition … the strap fell off and I lifted it back up. And it was years later that he asked me, he goes, ‘You planned that, didn’t you?’ He thought I was like, so brilliant. He thought I was so well planned, at 12 years old.”
Hart added: “And at 12 years old, he’s like, ‘She did that. Look what she did.’ And I was like, no. I probably moved in the same way or did some kind of gesture that made it fall.”
Donovan, best known for playing Amber in 1995’s Clueless (and the TV series adaptation), also starred alongside Joan Hart on Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Hart played Sabrina Spellman in the 1996-2003 show and Clarissa on the Nickelodeon show, which ran for five seasons from 1991 to 1994.
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Speaking to PEOPLE at 90s Con in Daytona Beach, Fla. in 2024, Hart — who shares sons Mason, Braydon and Tucker with husband Mark Wilkerson — recalled her time on the show and getting to play the iconic Clarissa Darling.
“That was a really special time,” Hart shared. “It was a lot of hard work… I had a lot of monologues, [the] scenes were long and we had to do them all as a live show even though it wasn’t a live show. It was really complicated to get it right.”
“I had so much fun, and I knew she was a special character,” Hart admitted, adding that she thought the series — which delved into everything from dating to how to deal with annoying little brothers — overall was “wonderful.”
She previously told PEOPLE in May that she “definitely jived more” with the character of Clarissa than her teenage witch persona Sabrina, as she had grown up in tandem with the character during the series.
