What you need to know
Melissa Joan Hart earned her family nickname thanks to her breakthrough role.
“Clarissa explains everything,” the 49-year-old actress shot back in a recent Instagram post discussing the show’s catchy theme song.
“Fun fact: My sisters called me ‘Nana’ when I was little because of this theme song,” in which the lyrics are sung as “nana nana nana na.”
The tune stuck in her ear, she said, and “now all my nieces and nephews call me Aunt Nana.”
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In November, Hart appeared on Tori Spelling’s podcast, misSPELLING, and told guest host Elisa Donovan how “pretty boring” auditioning for the Nickelodeon series was.
“I auditioned about three times, and I was also auditioning for the role of Six in Blossom,” she said.
“So I think I went to each audition three times…When I got a call for something — the audition, the callback, then the second callback — I always wore the same thing, because I thought I was lucky.”
“I was wearing a pink T-shirt, which was like acid-washed overalls, and the producer really liked pink and blue, so it became like pink and blue,” she continued.
“But apparently he was watching two auditions in parallel, and my strap fell off at the same place. During the audition, at about three different places, I picked it up again… and it fell off, and I picked it up again. And it wasn’t until years later that he asked me, ‘You planned that, right?’ and he said, ‘He thought I was very good.’ He thought my 12-year-old self was planning things very carefully. ”
Hart played Clarissa for five seasons from 1991 to 1994. She then had a major role as Sabrina Spellman in Sabrina the Teenage Witch from 1996 to 2003.
Speaking to PEOPLE at the 2024 90s Con in Daytona Beach, Florida, Hart, who shares sons Mason, Braydon, and Tucker with husband Mark Wilkerson, reflected on her time on the show and playing the iconic Clarissa Darling.
“It was a really special time,” Hart said. “It was a lot of work… There were a lot of monologues, and the scenes were long, so we had to do everything as a live show even though it wasn’t a live show. It was really complicated to get it right.”
“It was a lot of fun and I knew she was a special character,” Hart admitted, adding that he thought the series overall, which explored everything from dating to how to deal with an annoying younger brother, was “great.”
