By the time she was 21, Melissa Joan Hart had already forged a successful career in television.
Though she’s played several characters across television, Hart recently admitted that she struggled to connect with her character in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The ABC sitcom, which aired from 1996 to 2003, followed her 16-year-old character as she came to terms with high school and her magical powers.
“Not only was she younger than me, she didn’t want attention. She wanted to be the wallflower,” Hart recently told People. “She didn’t know what to do with these magical abilities. She felt very lost, and other people were trying to help her solve it.”
Hart admitted that she may not have enjoyed filming the show for so long if it wasn’t for the zany situations her character always ended up in.
“If she wasn’t always in different costumes and kind of getting put in these weird situations where I got to be Cinderella or Alice [in] Wonderland or a trapeze artist or in Cirque du Soleil or whatever,” Hart said, “I don’t know if I would’ve enjoyed the experience as much as I did because I just didn’t identify with her very well.”
But there was one character who resonated better with her: Clarissa Darling, the cool teen she played in Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All.
“Being on Clarissa gave me that freedom to sort of figure out who I was while she’s figuring out who she is,” she said. “So it’s really a blurred line between me and Clarissa — we were the exact same age.”
Hart recently revealed that they attempted to get Clarissa Explains It All rebooted at Nickelodeon, but the plans fell through in development.
“Nickelodeon got a new president, and they kind of squashed the whole thing. So it was actually in the works, and yeah, it just sort of disappeared. It took like a year to do the contracts, which was the hardest part, and then it just kind of fizzled out. So I don’t think [it will happen],” she said during a 2022 appearance at ’90s Con, per People.
Hart later admitted that the idea they pitched for the reboot wasn’t her “favorite.”
“I believe it was that Clarissa is divorced and moving to California with her two kids and living on the beach in California with her aunt,” she told Business Insider. “So I don’t know. It wasn’t my favorite way in.”
Though a Clarissa Explains It All reboot is no longer in the works, Hart can be seen in the upcoming Lifetime movie, The Bad Guardian.
