Make Page Six a Preferred Source “Boy Meets World” star Rider Strong felt he got “completely screwed” during salary negotiations for the show’s final season — while co-star Ben Savage secured a “huge pay increase.”
In “Book Meets World: The Definitive Inside Story of the Hit Sitcom ‘Boy Meets World,'” released Tuesday, Strong recalled how a misunderstanding about his contract left him with a disappointing salary deal for the show’s seventh and final season.
Strong, 46, who played Shawn Hunter throughout the sitcom’s 1993-2000 run, had hoped to leave the series to focus on college. However, he mistakenly believed he was already contractually obligated to return for a seventh season, according to Entertainment Weekly.
“I was already in college, and I didn’t want to do the show anymore,” Strong wrote, recalling a meeting with creator Michael Jacobs, who pitched him “hard” on staying with the series.
But Strong, believing the producers were trying to convince him to sign on for an additional eighth season, interrupted Jacobs.
“I stopped him, and I said, ‘You realize they’re talking about adding an eighth season,'” Strong recalled. “[Jacobs] was like, ‘No, we’re not. We’re talking about adding a seventh.'”
Strong said Jacobs then contacted the show’s executives, who explained the situation to him.
Rather than using the opportunity to negotiate a better deal — or walk away from the series altogether — Strong inadvertently revealed that he had already assumed he would be returning for Season 7.
According to Strong, Jacobs told him, “Okay, so we’re just thinking about adding a year that you already thought was there, so we’re good.”
The actor recalled leaving the meeting “confused,” later realizing that he could have walked away from the series after Season 6, when his existing contract expired.
“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 wrote.
“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 continued in the book.
Strong also suggested that his representatives had a financial incentive to keep him on the show, noting that his manager would have been “happy he signed on for another season” because his team only got paid when he worked.
Looking back, Strong said he “would have finished the sixth season, which [he] was contracted to do, and then [he] would have gotten the hell out of there.”
Meanwhile, Savage, 46, who played Cory Matthews, took a different approach to negotiations after being accepted to Stanford University.
According to Strong, Savage used his college plans as leverage and ultimately secured a “huge pay increase” for the show’s final season.
“They wanted the seventh season, but [Savage] was like, ‘Are you going to not allow me to go to college?’ He stuck to his guns, and it worked out,” Strong recalled.
Savage reportedly negotiated a salary “close to, if not equal to” that of William Daniels, who played Mr. Feeny and was earning “close to six figures per episode.”
Will Friedle, who portrayed Eric Matthews, wrote in the book that he and Strong were “making nowhere near that” amount, despite negotiating together to secure equal salaries.
Their co-star Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga Lawrence, received a raise to $30,000 per episode for Season 7 — still 20 percent less than Strong and Friedle, according to the book.
Strong suggested that a lack of communication among the cast members contributed to the salary disparities.
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“There was a lot of miscommunication. If we had actually talked to each other, we probably would have just said, ‘We’re all equal here. Let’s go [negotiate together].’ But there was no sense of that,” he wrote.
Page Six has reached out to representatives for Savage for comment but did not immediately hear back.
In recent years, Strong, Friedle and Fishel, who host the popular “Boy Meets World” rewatch podcast “Pod Meets World,” have been candid about their falling-out with Savage, whom Friedle said had “disappeared” from their lives.
“I wish I knew why to this day,” Friedle, 50, told Variety in 2023. “We didn’t have a fight. There was no falling out. There was no animosity. He just woke up one day and decided ‘I don’t want this person in my life anymore.'”
At the time, Friedle revealed that the two had not spoken in three years.
More recently, Friedle admitted in June that he hasn’t “given up” on his “friend,” saying, “I know I’m shouting into the void, but I’m going to keep doing it. … I’m hoping that he comes back into our lives at some point, and when he does, we’re going to have a lot to talk about.”
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