Yahoo News Lance Bass and Danielle Fishel are making a movie about their doomed '90s romance
Nineties kids, rejoice! Danielle Fishel and Lance Bass are making a movie about their youthful romance.
The Boy Meets World star and the NSYNC member famously dated from 1999 to 2000, several years before Bass publicly came out as gay. During Monday's episode of Fishel's Boy Meets World rewatch podcast Pod Meets World, the actress and her cohosts, Rider Strong and Will Friedle, welcomed Bass as a guest, prompting the movie reveal.
"Lance and I are actually working on a movie about our love story and about our prom experience," Fishel said. "I dated Lance for about a year while I was on Boy Meets World. It was my senior year, and Lance came with me to my high school prom."
Lauren Lapkus and Marie Holland are writing the script, based on how Fishel and Bass met and fell for each other in the late '90s, after NSYNC taped a live special in 1999 for ABC's TGIF programming block, which aired Boy Meets World. Bass, who had a crush on Fishel, had his bandmate mate Justin Timberlake ask Fishel for her phone number. Fishel said she thought she would marry Bass, but alas, "It turns out I'm not Lance's type."
"I had envisioned our future," she said. "I held on for hope for way too long that we were going to get back together and get married and have a family." At prom, Fishel recalled, "Lance and I had a hotel room booked and I had a vision for what that night was going to be, and Lance was very nervous about what my vision for that night was going to be."
She added, "That is the night Lance talks about, where he felt like he was hurting me by not being honest with himself or anyone else about what was going on in his life so it was kind of the impetus for him to say, 'I'm going to end our relationship.'"
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic; Paul Archuleta/Getty Images Lance Bass and Danielle Fishel
For Bass, going to prom with Fishel was a turning point. "The reason we wanted to make this prom story into a film, I think so many people can relate to that story," he said. "So many people in the LGBT community, their prom night was the night they were like, 'Oh, wait a minute. This can't happen anymore.' This was the catalyst for me that made me start to accept myself, which took a long time after that, but that was definitely the first little straw that broke."
Bass didn't come out to Fishel until years later, but the two remained close friends. The singer shared on his own Daily Popcast podcast last year that he "always knew" Fishel would accept him after coming out.
"I had heard rumors that you were gay before you ever told me yourself," Fishel, who appeared as a guest, said. "All I felt at the time was this feeling of 'I hope that he isn't not telling me because he thinks that I won't accept him.'"
"I always knew you would completely accept me," Bass responded. "But you know, for someone being that young and going through that and being so closeted and not telling one person. It's just embarrassing. You don't want people to know because you're just so embarrassed about being gay at that point. It was a different time, you know."
Listen to Bass' Pod Meets World episode above.
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