'Boy Meets World' star says his 'life was spiraling' during show’s final season

As “Boy Meets World” was coming to an end, series star Will Friedle’s life was beginning to fall apart.

Friedle played Eric Matthews, older brother to Corey Matthews (Ben Savage), on the show for all seven seasons, from 1993 to 2000.

On the “Boy Meets World” rewatch podcast, “Pod Meets World,” Friedle said revisiting the final season of the show was difficult because it brought back memories of "arguably the worst year of my life, just mental health-wise."

"This was a tough watch for me all the way through, starting season 7," Friedle told his former co-stars and current podcast hosts Rider Strong and Danielle Fishel. "And I know it'll get better, but starting watching this was rough for me. This was a tough year in my life."

Friedle explained what he was going through at the time, recalling, "Starting the show, season 7, I was maybe six or eight weeks into anxiety, which I'd never experienced before in my life. I still wasn't talking about it. I’d been on medication for maybe a month, which is why I put on so much weight. But my life was spiraling at this point. Badly."

One example he gave was an appointment with the show’s hairstylist when he said he "had a massive panic attack in the chair, which was happening every 10 minutes in my life at this point. It was just, it was awful. And so I'm still not talking about it [at the time], put a smile on my face, excused myself, and went to the bathroom, and essentially broke down in [the hair stylist's] bathroom."

Strong admitted he had “no idea” his friend and co-star was struggling, adding, “You were always Mr. Positive.”

Friedle joked that “it is the best acting I've ever done in my life is not letting people know that I was literally dying.”

He added that "this was a heavily medicated both by a doctor and self-medicated-with-alcohol-year for me. That’s why I was putting on weight and just trying to get through my life at this point."

Back in October 2018, Friedle told fans at a cast reunion at New York Comic Con that he purposefully shifted his focus to voiceover roles to cope with his anxiety.

"What brought me to voice-over was anxiety," he said at the time, 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.”