Now 33, Rider Strong — Cory Matthews’ well-coiffed Boy Meets World sidekick — opens up about growing up in Shawn Hunter’s shadow, the show’s upcoming spinoff, which co-stars came to his recent wedding, and what the hell happened to Mr. Turner.
Shiloh Strong
It's been 20 years since Rider Strong first put on Shawn Hunter's oversized leather jacket and ran his fingers through his thick brown hair on Boy Meets World. Soon after the T.G.I.F. staple premiered in 1993, Strong was plastered on many a preteen wall, courtesy of the centerfolds in the now defunct Teen Beat, Bop, and 16 magazines. After all, with a name like that, he was destined for teen super heartthrobdom… and Twitter mockery.
The 33-year-old actor, director, and self-proclaimed self-proclaimed "sometimes writer," who recently got married, has made a hobby of responding to all the ridiculous Strong-centric jokes hurled at him on Twitter. "When I first joined Twitter, I started doing a self-Twitter search and the amount of people making fun of my name, it was ridiculous! I just started compiling a bunch of them and then at some point, I decided to make fun of somebody making fun of my name or to comment or respond, and it just exploded. Everybody was like, 'That's hysterical,'" Strong told BuzzFeed in a phone interview. He started gathering and responding to tweets every few weeks. "What's weird to me is that actually, people are pretty nice. I mean, obviously, they make fun of my name, but, I mean, it's a ridiculous name. It deserves to be made fun of ... It's hard because I never want to be too snarky, you know? I just don't want to fall into that internet meme thing that starts happening. And I've been lucky that the balance has worked out. I can tease people for making fun of my name, because they kind of started it first. I'm just very aware of how stupid my name is," he said with a laugh. "But I don't get many mean tweets though. People are so nice to me online so I'm hoping that that continues."
The online noise surrounding Boy Meets World has recently reached heights that would surpass the volume of Eric (Will Friedle) screeching for Mr. Feeny (William Daniels) — and that's largely thanks to the upcoming Disney Channel spinoff Girl Meets World, created by the man behind the original series, Michael Jacobs. The series, which will debut in 2014, will center on the now grown-up Cory (Ben Savage) and Topanga (Danielle Fishel), and Riley (Rowan Blanchard), their 12-year-old daughter who's just slightly older than Cory, Topanga, and Shawn were when Boy Meets World started in 1994.
"Will and I had no idea that that was happening," Strong said of the spinoff. "And even Ben and Danielle, it got released to the press before they had made the deal. So they weren't even sure that it was definitely happening and then it got released and then, of course, the internet just exploded with the news. And that sort of brought us all together because we all started instantly calling each other, being like, 'What's going on?' 'What do you know?' So that was when the four of us started having dinners — Ben, Danielle, Will, and I — and we decided to all keep in touch. It was really the Girl Meets World thing that brought us back together."
Touchstone Television / Courtesy Everett Collection
Strong and his new wife Alexandra Barreto got engaged within months of his former co-star Fishel and her new husband Tim Belusko and both couples got married the same weekend, which Strong admits was totally his fault. "I completely screwed that up," he said, noting he forgot Fishel had told him her wedding date. He and his now-wife settled on a summer camp in Oregon that only had one weekend left in October. "We were like, 'Alright, well, let's book it. That's it. Let's just do it,'" Strong said. "And then, literally two days after we sent in the deposit, Alex turned to me and goes, 'That's the same weekend Danielle's getting married, isn't it?' And I was like, 'Oh, fuck!'" Strong called Fishel immediately to apologize. "It just sucked because I would've loved to have been at her wedding and I know she and Tim would've loved to have been at ours ... She spread the net among the Boy Meets World people a lot wider. I mean, obviously, she's working with a lot of them now … I knew I was going to lose Ben. He had to go to her wedding. There was no way. And Will came to mine. I knew that he would come to mine; we see each other like every other week."
Though he's thankful for the friendships Girl Meets World reinvigorated and the "epic" dinner parties he, Savage, Fishel, and Freidle have had, Strong said the spinoff makes him "more nervous than anything, just because it's a legacy in some ways," he said with a chuckle, almost embarrassed to say it. "Not to make it too highfalutin, but there's this sense that we did something kind of magical and that feels obviously very personal and precious. I'm confident now, after having had many conversations with Michael and the writing staff and Ben and Danielle."
Strong and Friedle stopped by the Girl Meets World set when the pilot was shooting, but the actor said he still hasn't seen the episode, or even a script. "What I saw when I visited the set made me feel like the respect for the original show was going to be maintained and that the tone was going to be very similar. If anything, what's weird to me is that it's going to be on Disney Channel because we were an ABC primetime show … They've turned it into the Hannah Montana sort of machine, which is very different tonally ... It's more for teens and kids alone, not with their parents ... I think it's a big step forward for Disney, personally. But really, I'm excited more than anything. I'm as excited as probably most fans of the original show. I just want to see what happens."
