Will Friedle looks back on his past.
Appearing on Monday’s episode Hey dude… The 90s called! podcast, the 47-year-old actor — best known for playing Eric Matthews on the beloved sitcom A boy meets the world — he told how as a kid he bought porn magazines during his solo trips to New York for auditions.
“I tell people my story and they think I’m lying or they think my parents had a serious problem,” he told hosts David Lascher and Christine Taylor about the independence he gained at just 11 years old.
Friedle went on to explain that both of his parents had busy careers as lawyers, so they let him take the bus from their home in Avon, Connecticut, to Manhattan on his own for about three hours.
“I’d get off at the Port Authority and my manager would pick me up — most of the time — and I’d be walking the streets at 11,” he said. “I started smoking very young, so I would go and buy cigarettes.”
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But that’s not all he bought. The enterprising pre-teen also bought porn magazines during his trips to New York.
“Because I knew I could sell them for a lot more money to my friends in Connecticut,” said Taylor and Lascher, both ’90s stars who appeared together on Nickelodeon Hey man.
“So I’d stop at the kiosk and they’d look at me and say, ‘Well, you’re 11 years old, so of course there’s cigarettes and pornography here,'” he added, prompting Lascher to joke, “It’s like dark Home alone 2.”
Will Friedle (left) and Ben Savage in ‘Boy Meets World’.
ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Gett
Friedle admitted that his mother and father now have a far different take on their laissez-faire parenting back then. “I tell my parents these stories now and they are retroactively humiliated that any of this ever happened,” he said.
The former child star still fondly remembers that time that opened his horizons.
“I liked it. [Avon] was a wonderful place to grow up, but I experienced more of real life in the three or four hours I was in New York each week than I ever did in Avon. And it was a great way to see the world,” he explained.
Elsewhere in the podcast interview, Friedle tackled a more serious topic: opening up about his struggles with crippling anxiety and panic attacks. He recalled experiencing his first panic attack while filming the movie in 1999 HE double hockey sticks.
“I’m in the middle of filming and I have my first panic attack. They used the footage, so I can actually watch my first panic attack ever [in the final movie]. But I’m the only one who knows that,” he said.
“I thought I was dying,” he added of how he felt at that moment. “You have to die because there’s no other explanation why your body and mind are suddenly doing this to you.”
He said he “started spiraling” after his first attack, even ending up unable to get out of bed for weeks at one low point. “You’re in your head, you’re not sleeping, which is another trigger for anxiety. So everything just keeps rolling in on itself and it gets worse and worse.”
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Friedle began taking medication that he said caused him to gain about 30 pounds between seasons while starring in A boy meets the world.
The actor also said that everything changed for him after that first panic attack.
“Your whole life is different. Everything is different. The colors are different, the food tastes different, the acting is different. You are a different person human being than you were a nanosecond before you had the panic attack,” he told Taylor and Lascher.
“And you’re different for the rest of your life,” he added, noting that talking to others about his anxiety helped, along with avoiding social media.
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Source: HIS Education