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Rider Strong recalls getting “completely screwed” during salary negotiations for Boy Meets World‘s final season in a new book.
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The actor says costar Ben Savage, meanwhile, got a “huge pay increase” for season 7.
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Book Meets World: The Definitive Inside Story of Hit Sitcom Boy Meets Worldis out now.
Rider Strong didn’t even want to beonthe last season of Boy Meets World — so getting “screwed” in salary negotiations really was the cherry on top.
In Book Meets World: The Definitive Inside Story of Hit Sitcom Boy Meets World, which hit shelves Tuesday, Strong reflects on his growing malaise for the ABC show — on which he starred as rebellious teen Shawn Hunter for all seven seasons, from 1993 to 2000. Strong also looks back on how a contract mix-up led to him making a less-than-satisfactory deal for that final year.
In 1999, Strong, alongside costars Ben Savage and Will Friedle — who respectively starred as the “boy” on BMW, Cory Matthews, and Cory’s brother, Eric Matthews — entered salary negotiations for the seventh and final season. Strong admits he initially “misread” his contract, thinking he was already “locked in” for another year after season 6, leading to a call from creator Michael Jacobs asking for a meeting.
“I was already in college, and I didn’t want to do the show anymore,” Strong shares in the book. He claims that despite his hesitations, Jacobs pitched him “hard” in their meeting about why keeping Shawn around was “good for the show,” and that Strong could attend college the following year.
“And I stopped him, and I said, ‘You realize, they’re talking about adding an eighth season.’ He was like, ‘No, we’re not. We’re talking about adding a seventh.'”
That confusion caused Jacobs to call the executives, who “went over it” all with Strong in the room. Strong’s assumption that he was already obligated to season 7 ultimately kept him from walking away early, with Jacobs allegedly telling him, “Okay, so we’re just thinking about adding a year that you already thought was there, so we’re good.”
Strong says he remembers leaving the meeting feeling “confused” and thinking he could have escaped the final season if he had played the meeting better. He also knew “his manager would be happy he signed on for another season,” as he “only paid his reps if he worked.”
“I thought, why is nobody looking out for me and just saying, ‘Rider, if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to?’ There was no sense of that,” Strong, who had recently turned 18 and just begun directly dealing with his team, recalls.
“I had my own relationship with my manager, my own relationship with my agent, which is why I walked into a meeting with Michael by myself and got completely screwed,” Strong says, noting that “if he could go back, it would have ended differently.”
Strong says in his perfect world, he “would have finished the sixth season, which I was contracted to do, and then I would have gotten the hell out of there.”
He adds that Savage, for his part, “held out” on season 7 after getting accepted to Stanford University, and ended up receiving a “huge pay increase.”
According to the book, there were “conversations” around whether Boy Meets Worldcould or would continue without Savage at the center.
“There was a lot of miscommunication. If we had actually talked to each other, we probably should have just said, ‘We’re all equal here, let’s go [negotiate together].’ But there was no sense of that,” Strong claims. “It seemed that Ben getting into Stanford was his biggest negotiating tactic, because the contract ended. They wanted the seventh season, but he was like, ‘Are you going to not allow me to go to college?’ He stuck to his guns, and it worked out.”
Bill Daniels, who played mentor Mr. Feeny, was an established Emmy winner on the series and had been the highest paid actor on set for seasons 1 to 6. For season 7, Savage allegedly “negotiated to be close to, if not equal to” Daniels’ salary, earning “close to six figures per episode.”
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“We were making nowhere near that,” says Friedle, who, per the book, went into studio negotiations with Strong “so that the two of them were making the same salary.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Savage and Jacobs for comment.
Meanwhile, Fishel, who started as a guest star, was making 100 percent less than Strong at the start of her tenure on the show as Topanga Lawrence, Cory’s girlfriend and eventual wife. By the final season, her pay was bumped to $30,000 an episode, which was still 20 percent less than Strong and Friedle.
Book Meets Worldis on shelves now.
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