OH MY, WINNIE! How you've changed! Or, more accurately, how Danica McKellar has changed.
McKellar, who played sweetheart Winnie Cooper to Fred Savage's Kevin
Arnold on five seasons of "The Wonder Years," reunites with him on tonight's
episode of
his NBC sitcom, "Working."
"He's grown up a lot, but there's still the same old chemistry there even though the characters are completely different," she told The News.
"It was strange calling him a name besides Kevin on camera," she said. "I never have that impulse with Fred in person, but when the cameras are rolling, it's difficult to call him something else."
The cute adolescent girl is long gone, metamorphosed into a poised, lovely young woman who put her acting career on hold so she could focus on her math studies in a UCLA honors program.
"For the first couple of years I did TV movies and a few guest spots," she told The News. "But I found myself having to decide whether to study for that math test or study for this audition."
College won. "I decided that since I never got the full high school experience, I might as well get the full college experience," she said.
Not that she's complaining. "Sure, I lost something, but I gained a
lot," she noted.
"I learned a lot about myself playing Winnie Cooper. It was like looking
in a mirror. I think they were actually writing about me, sometimes," said
McKellar, who found herself acting out adolescent problems before she actually
experienced them.
"I felt very close to Fred and Josh [Saviano, who played nerdy best
friend Paul]. They were like brothers to me. I own every episode and to
watch us grow
up is very special for me."
Although Savage interrupted his Stanford education to take the "Working" lead, Saviano is still in school, at Yale, and wants to go to law school, she said.
McKellar doesn't boast about it, but she's graduating this spring summa
cum laude. "My major is pure mathematics, more of the theoretical stuff
and less
grounded in practical things. It's the abstract problems that I love
most."
How abstract?
"I did a research project completely independent of my undergraduate studies. It was in statistical mathematics," she said.
Aha. And what was the title of the project? She took a deep breath and responded: "Percolation and Gibbs-states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models in two dimensions."
Despite her obvious passion for higher math, McKellar said she has no plans for graduate school right now and is going back to acting.
"One thing I've learned, sometimes life shows you things you didn't know were there," she said. "I'm at peace knowing what I want to do right now."
GRAPHIC: I 'WONDER' WHO'S KISSING HER NOW: Danica McKellar
and Fred Savage as the picture of 'Wonder Years' innocence and 'Working'
experience