'Boy Meets World' star Danielle Fishel reveals she had a crush on costar Rider Strong that she kept secret for nearly 30 years

• Danielle Fishel revealed to Rider Strong on their podcast that she had a crush on him when they were young.
• She said that the pair had "a very nice, deep friendship" at the time she developed feelings.

Danielle Fishel confessed to her former "Boy Meets World" costar Rider Strong that she used to have a crush on him during Thursday's episode of their rewatch podcast "Pod Meets World."

At around the 14:40 mark of the Q&A episode, Fishel addressed a fan question asking if there were any crushes or romances behind the scenes of the show. "I'll go first, I had a crush on Rider," she said.

Strong, who cohosts the podcast with Fishel and Will Friedle, gasped at the revelation. "That's not true, you've never told me that," he said, expressing shock that Fishel waited nearly 30 years to tell him.

"I think it started maybe later in season one and definitely through season two," Fishel said. The actors would have been about 12 or 13 at the time.

Fishel said she thinks she was attracted to him as a young adult because he was "so smart."

"You know one of my favorite things about Rider, and it still stands to this day, Rider is very effusive," she continued. "He will tell you how he feels and he's very free with his compliments, but he doesn't throw them out willy-nilly. When Rider compliments you it is thoughtful, it has meaning, and you can tell... it's coming from a very real place."

While Fishel thought that Strong was probably "annoyed" by her being a "typical LA girl" when they first started working together, she said she and Strong eventually formed "a very nice, deep friendship" filled with "meaningful conversations" that attracted her to him as a young adult.

The sitcom director also recalled a time during an acting class when Strong gave her a "very real compliment" about her talent that sent her into her feels. "Oh my God, I love you," she remembered thinking.

She also said she found a diary she kept for a few months while working on "Boy Meets World" that was "embarrassing" because she would add a post-script note naming the boys she loved. Fishel said that Strong's name was often on that list.

Fishel married her current husband Jensen Karp in 2018. They have two sons, Adler, 3, and Keaton, who will be 1 on August 29. Strong has a 6-year-old son named Indigo with his wife Alexandra Barreto, whom he married in October 2013.

Despite her attraction to Strong, he's not the costar Fishel eventually went on a date with. Fishel previously admitted that she and her former on-screen love Ben Savage went out once during the show's tenure to see if their characters' iconic romance could transfer to a real-life relationship.

"And then we went out to dinner, and we were like, 'No!,'" she previously told People.

On Thursday's episode of the podcast, Fishel elaborated on why she knew very quickly that a romance with Savage wouldn't work.

"It was very quickly into the restaurant meal that we realized this is a hard boundary to jump," she said. "It was very obvious that, no, what we had was just this very fun, non-romantic something I would consider more than a friendship."

She clarified that acting as someone's romantic partner for about seven years on a TV show and kissing them so often on screen forces people to build "shared history" that feels more than platonic but is "not at all romantic."

Fishel described her bond with Savage as an "undefinable type of relationship."

New episodes of "Pod Meets World" are available weekly.