Will Friedle Reveals He Almost Didn't Land Role of Eric on 'Boy Meets World' After Missing Audition

Will Friedle is known for playing one of the most beloved characters on Boy Meets World, but according to the actor, he almost wasn't cast in the role.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Friedle, 45, admitted that he nearly missed out on portraying Eric Matthews on the beloved sitcom due to an illness.

"When they were casting for the show originally, it was called The Untitled Ben Savage Project," Friedle explained to the outlet at 90s Con in Hartford, Connecticut last weekend. "And they were casting for an older brother and I got sick and couldn't go."

According to Friedle, the show's producers ended up casting another actor in the role of Eric. That unidentified actor then went on to film the pilot episode alongside Ben Savage, who played Eric's younger brother, and the star of the show, Cory Matthews.

"The actor was fine. There was nothing wrong with him. He was a fine actor, but he wasn't tall enough," Friedle explained to ET. "He was the same size as Ben, and they knew Ben was going to grow and they wanted an older brother so they recast."

As fans know, Friedle eventually landed the gig — and the rest is history.

"But I always tell people, if that actor was five inches taller, I'm not sitting here right now," Friedle said. "You never know how life is going to work. You just never know."

Boy Meets World premiered in 1993 on ABC and ran for seven seasons until 2000. Though the role of Eric launched him into fame, Friedle refrained from on-camera acting for years afterward due to an anxiety disorder, which first surfaced in his early twenties.

As a result, he primarily focused on voice-over work, providing the voices to Ron Stoppable in Disney's Kim Possible, Terry McGinnis/Batman in Warner Bros.' Batman Beyond and Lion-O in Cartoon Network's ThunderCats.

"What brought me to voice-over was anxiety," Friedle explained in 2018, per Entertainment Weekly. "I was planning to do more on-camera work, but then I got hit with these anxiety attacks that prevented me from doing that. I was so thankful I had voice-over because I could still perform and act... Voice-over is great."

While Friedle's resume is mostly filled with voice-over gigs, he did return to on-camera acting in 2015 to reprise his role as Eric in the Boy Meets World reboot, Girl Meets World.

"Lately I've pulled out of that because of Girl Meets World," Friedle previously said. "[Creator] Michael [Jacobs] was like, 'Come back if you want to come back.' So I've been slowly starting that again, and it's been fun."

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Friedle's anecdote about almost missing out on playing Eric wasn't the only interesting Boy Meets World story to come out of 90s Con.

While on a panel with his castmates Rider Strong (Shawn Hunter), Trina McGee (Angela Moore) and Danielle Fishel (Topanga Lawrence), it was revealed that Topanga's name was actually inspired by a location in California.

"There was a woman who created the character of Topanga — she was in the writers' room — and I think she wanted the character to be a flower child. And she picked the name Topanga because in the San Fernando Valley, where the show was filmed, there is an area called Topanga Canyon, and that canyon was kind of a known hippie hangout in the '60s and even still is a kind of flower child-y area," Fishel, 40, explained, before revealing another story that Boy Meets World co-creator Michael Jacobs tells.

"He was in the car on the freeway when the writers called and that he needed a name for this character, and he was at the Topanga Canyon offramp on the freeway," Fishel shared. "So the joke he made is that had they called him two minutes later, she could have been named De Soto. It's really funny, but I don't know that that's the true story, so there's both!"