“I Was Literally Dying”: “Boy Meets World” Star Will Friedle Just Spoke Candidly About His Mental Health Struggles During Season 7 Of The Show, And It’s Seriously Emotional

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“The best acting I’ve ever done in my life is not letting people know that I was literally dying.”

Boy Meets World star Will Friedle has spoken candidly about his debilitating mental health struggles during the final season of the show that catapulted him to global fame in the ‘90s.

For context, Will was 17 years old when he landed the role of Eric Matthews, the older brother of the titular “boy” Cory Matthews, in the ABC sitcom back in 1993.

The series ran for seven seasons, and after it concluded in 2000, it was widely reported that Will had agoraphobia after tabloids picked up on how rarely he was seen in public.

Now, Will has opened up about what was actually going on behind the scenes, revealing that he was struggling with anxiety that was so severe it left him bed-bound and self-medicating with alcohol.

On Thursday’s episode of his podcast Pod Meets World, which Will cohosts alongside his fellow Boy Meets World alumni and best friends Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong, the 49-year-old star reflected on how hard it was to watch himself in Season 7 of the show, because it was the “worst year” of his life. For reference, this is the year that Will turned 23 years old.

The trio have been rewatching the series and discussing it on the pod since its launch in 2022, and Thursday marked the first episode of the final season. Will began: “Watching the first episode of Season 7 was very difficult for me; this is the peak anxiety, low part of my life… this was a tough watch for me all the way through.”

“When I started the show, Season 7, I was maybe six or eight weeks into anxiety, which I never experienced before in my life, so I still wasn’t talking about it,” he went on. “I had just been on medication for maybe a month, which is why I put on so much weight, but my life was spiraling at this point. I mean, badly.”

He then recalled going to a wig fitting for the episode at hairstylist Laurie Heaps's house, with producer Karen MacKain also present. He shared: “They were just talking, having a conversation, and I had a massive panic attack in the chair, which was just was happening every 10 minutes in my life at this point.”

“It was awful, still not talked about it, so I put a smile on my face, excused myself, went to the bathroom, and essentially broke down in Laurie's bathroom,” Will continued. “And I was literally considering climbing out the window. I was like: ‘I can't do this, I can't go back to the show, if I can't be in front of these two people that I know and love, I can't be in front of an audience, I can't do this.’ So, this was a horrific time.”

Rider then acknowledged how “crazy” it is that he didn’t notice how much Will was struggling despite them spending so much time together backstage, saying: “You were always Mr. Positive.” To this, Will confessed: “The best acting I’ve ever done in my life is not letting people know that I was literally dying.”

And when Rider remembered taking several trips with Will to Lake Arrowhead in California, Will shared: “There were drives to Arrowhead where I had to pull over every 15 minutes because I was freaking out. I was like: ‘I shouldn’t be in the car, I shouldn’t be driving,’ this is arguably the worst year of my life, mental health wise.”

Will added that he was “heavily medicated, both by a doctor, and self-medicated with alcohol,” by the time that filming for Season 7 started, and when asked how he spent the summer between filming for Season 6 and Season 7, Will recalled shooting the 1999 movie H.E. Double Hockey Sticks in Canada, where he had a panic attack in the middle of a scene — and how this ended up making the final cut.

“I was bedridden for three weeks,” Will explained. “I was in the middle of a scene with Gabrielle Union, the world flipped, and my life had never been the same since. In the middle of a take, my whole life changed. It was the only time I ever had a Sopranos-style panic attack where I made it to my trailer, the whole trailer spinning, and I passed out.”

“I called the doctor to the to the set, the doctor’s like: ‘I think you're having a panic attack,’ I went: ‘No, it's not that, that's obviously something horrible,’ he gave me four 1mg Ativans for the next three weeks of shooting, and I was just struggling with my life,” Will recalled, before becoming audibly emotional. “God, it’s so strange to talk about this.”

“We finished the movie, and I'm curled up in the seat on the plane to go home, and I was so in the middle of a panic attack that I almost jumped up and started screaming to open the door of the plane,” he shared. “So, I just kept my eyes shut and curled into a ball on the seat, because I wanted to just get home.”

“It was a very bad time, then bedridden, and then medicated, and then, you know, putting on all the weight and all that stuff, then like: ‘Oh my god, I have to go back to work,’” Will continued. “So, yeah, summer of ’99 I will always remember.”

He added that while watching the first episode of Season 7 “brought back a lot of stuff,” he hoped it wouldn’t continue for the whole season. Will added: “This is arguably the worst time in my life right here, and that’s the thing about being on a television show: it’s all filmed. I get to look back at this and go: ‘Oh god, dying inside.’”

Will went on to add that his number one tip for people who are living with anxiety is to talk about it, detailing: “The more I was holding it in, the worse it was getting. I did this whole season without anybody really knowing, and it wasn’t until years later that I started talking about it.”

The trio then remembered how Will “disappeared” in the three or four years after Boy Meets World ended, with Danielle saying: “That’s when it got started that you had agoraphobia,” and Will quipped in response: “Yeah, it made the papers that I was agoraphobic… Which I didn’t read, because I wouldn’t go outside to get the paper!”

Thankfully, Will is in a much better place now with regard to his mental health, and has learned how to live with and manage his anxiety over the years.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.

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