Melissa Joan Hart Reveals Who She's Still in Touch with from Clarissa Explains It All (Exclusive)

Though Melissa Joan Hart makes a habit of reuniting with her Sabrina the Teenage Witch cast at 90s Con and beyond, things are not as familiar with her Clarissa Explains It All costars. 

“I don't talk to any of the Clarissa cast,” Hart, 48, admits to PEOPLE, citing that the show, which aired in the early 1990s, was “pre-cell phones, pre-email, pre-everything,” which made keeping in touch all the more tough. 

“The cast just kind of all went in different directions and nobody kept in touch,” she adds. 

While she might not still speak to the actors she shared the screen with on the Nickelodeon series, there are other people from that time in her life that still hold a special place in her heart. 

“I'm very, very close to the girl who did my wardrobe [on Clarissa],” Hart says. “Michele [Roofthooft] and her husband David [Roofthooft], who was the executive producer's assistant, they actually got married at the end of the show. And they're still my closest friends, my son's godmother and [god]father.”

A few years later when Hart stepped into the role of Sabrina, she said that while they “kind of all had AOL addresses back then,” she did get “everyone's home addresses” and still sends cards to the crew from the show. 

Though the people she spent the late '90s and early 2000s with while on Sabrina still remain more of a constant in her life, Hart shares that as a character, she felt less of a connection to the teenage witch. 

"I had to go back and replay 16 again when I did Sabrina." Hart says of the role she scored once already in her 20s. “Not only was she younger than me, she didn't want attention. She wanted to be the wallflower. 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.”

“I feel like I definitely jived more with Clarissa and who she was than the Sabrina character, which people are always shocked about because I think people felt so at home with Sabrina,” Hart adds. “I definitely had struggled a little bit playing Sabrina.”

Clarissa, on the other hand, was an easier role for her to relate to in part because the two were growing up in tandem, she says.

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

Now, as a mother of three, in addition to acting Hart has shifted some of her energy and focus to philanthropy and works with World Vision to help combat poverty specifically in Zambia, where she has sponsored three children to date.

"I think sponsoring a child is the best thing you can do, as far as giving back. There's ways you can do it with time and there's ways you can do it with money," says Hart, who traveled to Zambia in 2023 with her whole family to see the organization's work. "And if you have the money to sponsor a child, it really makes such a difference because it not only protects that child that [World Vision has] identified ... you're helping their family, you're helping their community, their village."