Niamh Shackleton
Melissa Joan Hart has revealed that she was once offered a juicy deal with Playboy, but she chose to turn it down.
Hart rose to fame on Sabrina the Teenage Witch after making her acting debut on the Nickelodeon show Clarissa Explains It All between 1991 and 1994.
As the years went on, she's starred in the likes of Melissa & Joey and No Good Nick, with her most recent project, A Merry Little-Exmas, landing on Netflix.
At the peak of her fame in the 90s, Hart, now 49, did a Maxim Magazine shoot in her underwear. Playboy then followed suit and asked the actress to do a shoot with them, too, but Hart turned it down.
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Discussing this on Kate and Oliver Hudson's Sibling Revelry podcast, Hart shared why she turned down the big opportunity despite being offered 'a lot of money'.
"I was like, 'I can’t do it,'" she said. "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 by that, like the last thing he needs. He’s already getting tortured by me and underwear, let alone completely.'"
Hart went on: "And I would have been willing to do it because I was like, I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m proud of my body. I’m fine with that. But then I’m really glad I didn’t because now I have three boys and I don’t need those images out there for them."
All these years later, the actress still doesn't regret her decision and said that she's 'kind of happy I made that choice for my brother, which then also translates to my children'.
Hart has three children with her husband, Mark Wilkerson: Mason, 19, Braydon, 16, and 12-year-old Tucker.
She said of this: "I always kind of knew that that would be a correlation, that someday, I would have children that would you know, what do I want them to see? And I kind of played that through my siblings’ eyes."
Hart may have dodged a bullet by not doing the shoot, as a handful of women who once did shoots for the well-known racy magazine later regretted it — one being Kim Kardashian.
Kardashian did a shoot for the magazine in 2007 and later said she felt 'uncomfortable' doing it.
"I’m sorry I did Playboy," Kardashian told Harper's Bazaar in 2010. "I was uncomfortable. [My mom said], 'Go for it, they might never ask you again. Our show isn’t on the air yet, no one knows who you are.'"