Melissa Joan Hart won’t soon forget the 24 hours surrounding the New York premiere of Drive Me Crazy, her 1999 rom-com. While recording a recent episode of the Pod Meets World podcast, Hart was shown a photo from the event. “If you look at my eyes [in the photo], I’d been crying all evening,” she responded.
Let her explain. That same day, said Hart, she broke up with her boyfriend at the time, learned she had been fired from Scary Movie, and was threatened with losing her leading role on Sabrina the Teenage Witch over a racy Maxim magazine cover. “My lawyer shows up and goes, ‘You did a photo shoot for Maxim magazine?’” Hart recalled. “I’m like: ‘Yes, I did.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you’re being sued and fired from your show, so don’t talk to the press, don’t do anything.’”
Hart then received a “phone call on my cell phone from my mother, my producer, who was like, ‘What did you do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, whatever my publicist told me to do at the photo shoot. Like, I did a photo shoot for Maxim! It’s Maxim, of course you’re gonna be in your underwear.’”
The main source of tension, Hart explained, was the October issue’s cover line, which read: “Sabrina: Your Favorite Witch Without a Stitch!” The actor said she was accused of violating her Archie Comics contract, which mandated that Hart “would never play the character [Sabrina] naked.” But they “had no ground to stand on,” as Hart “had no control over what they wrote on the cover,” she said on the podcast, noting that she also wrote an apology letter. Her time as Sabrina on the hit series would continue through the show’s end in 2003.
Stars of other ’90s and early-aughts teen shows have similarly fraught stories about scandalous photo shoots. While starring on the faith-based series 7th Heaven in 2000, Jessica Biel posed for a risqué cover of Gear, a now defunct men’s magazine. The pictures were taken when Biel was only 17 years old, but published after she turned 18. In its cover story, the publication asked Biel if the photos would get her fired from 7th Heaven. Biel replied, “I hope so.” And on a 2018 episode of the Awards Chatter podcast, Biel said she did indeed face ramifications on set.
“I certainly had to apologize to [executive producer] Aaron Spelling. I think my entire crew and cast were, needless to say, shocked,” Biel recalled. “The worst part was I had to go back to work. The thing comes out, and literally I had to go back to work that next morning. Everybody was… they didn’t know if they should look me in the eye, and I was just a mess.” Biel would part ways with the series in 2002, in season seven, before making a few additional appearances in seasons eight and 10.
Last year, the stars of The CW’s One Tree Hill alleged that they were coerced into posing for a 2006 Maxim cover involving Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan, and Danneel Ackles. “I literally got told, ‘If you do not go and shoot this cover with your co-stars, we will guarantee you that you will never be let out for a press day, a movie, an event, any of your charities. We will keep you here forever,’” Bush said on the cast’s Drama Queens recap podcast. Morgan said she was told, “The studio wants to cancel your show. If you don’t start to generate some buzz and attract these male numbers, then we’re dead and all your friends are going to lose their jobs.”