Tori Spelling broke down Hilary Swank’s intensely emotional reaction to being let go from “Beverly Hills, 90210” in 1998.
“We were all in our dressing rooms. Hilary and I had become quite close,” Spelling said during Friday’s episode of the “90210MG podcast,” noting that her recollection was from her “perspective” and was “not gonna get it verbatim what [Swank] said” during the encounter.
Spelling recalled that she, Swank and Swank’s then-husband, Chad Lowe, had “hung out” together at the time.
“I was kind of her safe place on set, and she would talk to me about everything,” Spelling shared. “And she said, ‘Paul Wagner wants to talk to me in his office. Do you know what it’s about?’”
Spelling told Swank that she didn’t know what it was about. However, Spelling waited for the actress as she attended the meeting.
“So she goes in, and she comes back, and she’s crying, and she comes into my dressing room,” Spelling recalled, adding that Swank declared that she just “got let go” and that she was “being fired from the show.”
“I hadn’t heard any of this, we didn’t know,” Spelling recalled thinking. “She was hysterically crying.”
Spelling then shared Swank’s fear of being finished in the industry, noting that she wasn’t “going to get this wording correct.”
“She was like, ‘Oh my god. If I get fired off of ‘90210,’ I’m never gonna make it,’” the “Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” alum recounted.
Spelling said Swank’s despair was “ironic,” given that had she “stayed on ‘90210,’ she would not have been able to audition for ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’ She would not have been able to get that role, do that role and then win an Academy Award.”
Swank, 51, overshot the mark after her 2000 Oscar victory for “Boys Don’t Cry,” scoring another coveted best actress win in 2005 for “Million Dollar Baby.”
Swank previously admitted to being crushed by the firing. “I was on ‘90210’ in the eighth season when no one watched it anymore, and Luke Perry was long gone, so I was fired off the show at that point,” she told Conan O’Brien back in 2014. “And I was devastated.”
She added, “I’m thinking, no one watches this show anymore, and I got fired off of a show that no one watches.”
Swank divulged that she nabbed her career-making role in “Boys Don’t Cry” just two months later.
“I looked at it as a silver lining,” she said in part. “Like, it’s always such a reminder, when something bad happens, there’s something else that could be looming around the corner.”
