Melissa Joan Hart says she was nearly fired from 'Sabrina' over racy Maxim photo shoot
Melissa Joan Hart is recalling almost being fired from her hit show, “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” after posing for a racy photo shoot.
The actor went down memory lane, looking at photos from the past while on the "Pod Meets World" podcast with Will Friedle, Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong, when she shared what happened after she posed in her underwear for a 1999 Maxim magazine cover.
Hart was at a party for her film “Drive Me Crazy” when her lawyer told her she was being “sued and fired” from her show. It was an emotional day already, as she had just broken up with her boyfriend and been dropped from “Scary Movie.”
“While I’m at the party ... my lawyer shows up and goes, ‘You did a photo shoot for Maxim magazine?’” Hart said. “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.’”
“So I get a phone call on my cellphone from my mother, my producer, who was like, ‘What did you do?’” she continued. “I'm like, ‘I don’t know, whatever my publicist told me to do ... at the photo shoot. I did a photo shoot for Maxim! It’s Maxim, of course you’re going to be in your underwear.”
While upset, she said she cried even harder when her father, who isn’t the “warm, cuddly, kind,” asked if she was OK and hugged her.
“I'm crying even harder because my dad is hugging me, I’m being fired from my show, I was just fired from the movie, and I just broke up with my boyfriend,” she said.
At that moment, the crowd from the “Drive Me Crazy” premiere was trickling into the party, including Britney Spears, who did the lead song for the film. When looking at the photo of her and Spears at the event, she explained why her “eyes were red in that picture.”
At the time, she said, she was accused of being in breach of her Archie Comics contract, which said that she “would never play the character naked.”
On the Maxim cover, they did not use her name and instead wrote, “Sabrina, your favorite witch without a stitch.”
They believed that she was in breach of her contract, but she said that ultimately they “had no ground to stand on” to fire her. “That was supposed to be me promoting my movie. It wasn’t supposed to be the character. I had no control over what they wrote in the cover.”
Hart ended up writing an apology letter and “it was all gone.”
The "silver lining," she said, was that “Drive Me Crazy” was a huge success.
In a statement to Variety, a representative for Archie Comics said, “Archie Comics knows nothing and has heard nothing about this, and it was decades before the current administration at Archie. It’s ancient history.”
ABC did not immediately respond to TODAY.com's request for comment.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
