Melissa Joan Hart’s Maxim cover was meant to boost a movie, not nearly end her hit TV show.
Melissa Joan Hart posed for Maxim magazine back at the height of her fame in the 90s, and it almost cost the then 23-year-old her role on the show Sabrina, The Teenage Witch. The topless cover of the October 1999 issue referenced the character.
The headline “Sabrina, Your Favorite Witch Without a Stitch!” was a big no-no and there were claims that it violated a clause in her contract. But she wasn’t doing the photo shoot to promote the show and didn’t know about the headline when she did it.
Hart did the shoot to help promote the movie Drive Me Crazy. She was able to keep her role as Sabrina by apologizing, and she was able to successfully promote the movie thanks in part to the drama surrounding the cover.
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She said during an appearance on the podcast Sibling Revelry, that the cover, “made for Drive Me Crazy to come out and be a huge success.”
While the Sabrina crisis was averted and the cover helped her movie out, it did come with a cost. The smoking hot Maxim photo shoot put an end to any hopes of her appearing in Playboy.
Hart was offered money to appear in the magazine, but says she had to turn it down, because of the attention the Maxim shoot brought on her dad and brother.
Melissa Joan Hart prepares backstage at the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women Red Dress Collection in New York City. (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for AHA)
Why Melissa Joan Hart Said No to Playboy After Maxim Cover Despite the Big Payday
“I did Maxim magazine once and my brother was pretty young, he was like in middle school or high school, and I did Maxim magazine and he and my father were both being tortured by people at work going like, ‘Look at your daughter! Look at your sister!,’” she said.
“And then Playboy magazine came and asked me to do something, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ and they offered me a lot of money, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it because I don’t want my brother to be hurt… the last thing he needs. He’s already getting tortured by me and my underwear.'”
Hart would have been more than willing to do a Playboy shoot too. She wasn’t ashamed of her body or anything like that. She didn’t go through with it to spare her brother. It worked out in the end now that she has three sons of her own.
“I’m really glad I didn’t, because now I have three boys and I don’t need those images out there for them. Kind of happy I made that choice for my brother, which then also translates to my children.”
Playboy didn’t work out because it just wasn’t meant to be. That’s how it goes sometimes. Anyway, they’ll always have the Maxim cover shoot.
