Melissa Joan Hart struggled to relate to Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 'I just didn't identify'

No, it wasn't just the magical powers that made the actress feel disconnected from her character.

There was something about Sabrina.

Although Melissa Joan Hart portrayed the main character in TV's Sabrina the Teenage Witch for seven seasons, from 1996 to 2003, she never quite related to her.

Hart, now 48, was 20 when the show first aired on ABC. Sabrina, a 16-year-old just learning that she had magical powers, was not like her. At all.

"Not only was she younger than me, she didn't want attention. She wanted to be the wallflower," Hart told PEOPLE in an interview published Thursday. "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."

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Sabrina dealt with the same ups and downs of any high school student. Being a witch brought additional problems.

"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."

The Melissa and Joey alum felt much more connected to Clarissa, the main character of the Nickelodeon show she started out on, Clarissa Explains It All. That series, about a cool teen who faced all the challenges of growing up in suburbia, aired for five seasons, from 1991 to 1994.

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Hart was 15 when that show premiered.

"Being on Clarissa gave me that freedom to sort of figure out who I was while she's figuring out who she is," Hart said. "So it's really a blurred line between me and Clarissa — we were the exact same age."

While the show had a definite fandom, Hart explained in 2022 that, despite the trend, fans should not expect a reboot.

Related: Melissa Joan Hart says Nickelodeon 'squashed' the Clarissa Explains It All reboot

"We tried that, actually," Hart said at '90s Con in March 2022, according to PEOPLE. "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]."

A year later, Hart told Business Insider that she hadn't been a fan of the Clarissa reboot plot that was pitched anyway.

"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 said. "So I don't know. It wasn't my favorite way in."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.