‘Boy Meets World’ star Will Friedle reveals severe health battle during ’90s hit: ‘Literally dying’

Former “Boy Meets World” star Will Friedle is revealing that he had a severe mental health struggle while filming the show’s final season.

In Thursday’s episode of his rewatch podcast, “Pod Meets World,” he said it was, “arguably the worst year of my life, just mental health-wise.”

“Boy Meets World” aired from 1993 to 2000 on ABC, following the coming of age of Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) and his friends. Friedle played Cory’s older brother, Eric Matthews. 

Rider Strong and Danielle Fishel, who also starred on the show as Cory’s friends Shawn and Topanga, also co-host the podcast. 

Friedle told them that rewatching the Season 7 premiere “Show Me The Love” was “very difficult” for him. 

“This was a tough watch for me all the way through, starting season 7,” Friedle, 49, said. “And I know it’ll get better, but starting watching this was rough for me. This was a tough year in my life.”

When Fishel, 44, asked him to elaborate, he explained that during the show’s final season, “I was maybe six or eight weeks into anxiety, which I’d never experienced before in my life.” 

“I still wasn’t talking about it. I’d been on medication for maybe a month, which is why I put on so much weight,” he added. “But my life was spiraling at this point. Badly.”

Friedle has opened up about his mental health issues before. During a New York Comic Con cast reunion, he said that he went into voice over work due to “anxiety” after the beloved show wrapped.

“I was planning to do more on-camera work, but then I got hit with these anxiety attacks that prevented me from doing that,” he said in Oct. 2025. “I was so thankful I had voice-over because I could still perform and act,” he said at the time. 

He returned to on-camera work in the show’s spinoff “Girl Meets World,” which aired from 2014 to 2017 and starred a pre-fame Sabrina Carpenter.

On his podcast, Friedle recalled one appointment with the show’s hair stylist when he had “a massive panic attack in the chair, which was happening every 10 minutes in my life at this point. It was just, it was awful.”

Friedle added, “And so I’m still not talking about it [at the time], put a smile on my face, excused myself, and went to the bathroom, and essentially broke down in [the hair stylist’s] bathroom.”

The incident left him “considering climbing out the window” and wondering how he could continue the show. 

Strong, 46, said he had “no idea” that Friedle was experiencing that. 

“You were always Mr. Positive,” he said. 

“I still say it is the best acting I’ve ever done in my life is not letting people know that I was literally dying,” Friedle said. “This was a heavily medicated both by a doctor and self-medicated-with-alcohol-year for me. That’s why I was putting on weight and just trying to get through my life at this point.”