During recording Sabrina the teenage witchBeth Broderick remembers having close encounters with a number of live animals — including an alligator that nearly bit her!
Beginning in 1996, Broderick starred in the series for seven seasons alongside Caroline Rhea and Melissa Joan Hart. She and Rhea played the unearthly aunts Hilda and Zelda to Spellman Hart’s teenage witch Sabrina.
In a recent exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Broderick, 65, recounted appearing in one scene with an “alligator on a leash.”
“And people didn’t think the alligator moved enough and didn’t look real enough,” she recalled. “It was very real, so they started poking it and it got mad and thrashed around and missed me by an inch and bit the couch and wouldn’t let go.”
She added, “I was like okay, that could be my leg. Okay, let’s not poke alligators anymore.”
As weird as the moment was, Broderick said the cast “had crazy stuff like that happen all the time on the show.”
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Melissa Joan Hart (as Sabrina Spellman), with her aunts, Caroline Rhea (as Hilda) and Beth Broderick (as Zelda) in 1997.
Bob D’Amico/Disney General Entertainment via Getty
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In another incident, a lion on set walked through an electric fence and broke free — “he just walked through it and didn’t care,” Broderick said.
But it was another moment — involving a tuxedo-clad chicken! — which Broderick said was her favorite story ever since Sabrina.
“One day I was walking from my trailer to the set and I heard a crazy commotion in costume design, I looked in and our customer Diane is trying to measure a chicken for a tuxedo, and that chicken wouldn’t wear a tuxedo,” she said. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. And I just thought, who else goes to work and sees that?”
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“I mean, it’s kind of a unique experience,” she added. “And he ended up wearing that tuxedo, he did. But I don’t think he liked it.”
As Broderick explained, such moments were inevitable on a show about magic — in large part because the crew didn’t rely on modern technology like CGI.
“It was a wild show. You had to shoot everything in real time and practical effects and stuff. It was a real experience that you can never forget,” she said. “That was the show, you made magic out of a mole hill… you made magic out of thin air.”
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Source: HIS Education