What Happened to Nate Richert? Where He Is Now in 2026

If you were anywhere near a TV on Friday nights in the late 90s, you knew Harvey Kinkle. Floppy hair, permanent half-smile, the world’s most patient boyfriend to a girl who kept turning people into pineapples. Then the show ended, and Nate Richert basically vanished from screens for two decades. So whatever happened to him? The short answer: he swapped acting for songwriting, day jobs, and a surprisingly good podcast. Here’s the longer one.

01Profile

That instrument list tells you a lot, by the way. Nobody picks up the banjo and the harmonica by accident. That’s a man who fell hard for a particular kind of American music and never really got over it.

02The Rise: Becoming the Nicest Boyfriend on 90s TV

A Minnesota kid who started early

Richert grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and by his own account he was performing before he’d finished elementary school. In a 2016 interview with the arts publication Mannequin, he recalled that his first performance came at age seven, a tap dance to a Cole Porter standard. He described the effect of all that early training bluntly: “there is a part of my brain that is simply hardwired for this. I need it.”

Sabrina, and instant teen-magazine fame

In 1996, ABC launched Sabrina the Teenage Witch as part of its TGIF block, with Melissa Joan Hart in the lead and Richert as Harvey Kinkle, the sweet, slightly clueless high school crush who has no idea his girlfriend can bend reality. Richert has said he was 17 when he started on the show. He would end up playing Harvey across more than 120 episodes and seven seasons, through the show’s move from ABC to The WB and its shift from high school to college.

Why Harvey worked

Here’s the thing about Harvey that’s easy to forget: he wasn’t the standard 90s heartthrob. He wasn’t smoldering or brooding or secretly a vampire. He was decent. That’s the whole trick. In a sitcom powered by chaos, Harvey was the calm, kind, faintly bewildered center of it, and Richert played him without a hint of smirk. It made him a fixture of teen magazines and, decades later, the reason strangers still stop him.

03The Turning Point: Written Out of Sabrina

The end of season four left Harvey discovering Sabrina’s secret. Then, when season five began in the fall of 2000, he simply wasn’t there. Richert had been let go as the series retooled around Sabrina’s college years.

He didn’t talk about it much for years. When he finally did, on the Pod Meets World podcast in August 2025, he was candid: he said he was told the writers had “exhausted the story lines” for his character and were going in a different direction, and that being booted and then brought back for a handful of episodes was, in his word, “crushing.” He also described the strange whiplash of the return, telling TVLine that after doing something every single day for years, coming back only “here and there” meant “you almost lose your rhythm.”

Fans, it turned out, were not okay with a Harvey-less Sabrina. The backlash brought him back for cameos in season five, and by season six he was a series regular again, though the writers had moved Harvey on to a new relationship. By the 2003 finale, Sabrina and Harvey were endgame after all.

1996Sabrina the Teenage Witch premieres on ABC; Richert, still a teenager, is cast as Harvey Kinkle.
2000Harvey is written out at the start of season five. Richert later calls the firing "crushing."
2001After fan pushback he returns, and is a series regular again by season six.
2003The series ends. Richert steps back from screen acting almost entirely.
2004Releases his first album, Tone Control, leaning into folk and Americana songwriting.
2012Puts out two more records, Halogen Moon and Broken Bottles.
2018Publicly lists his day jobs on Twitter in support of actor Geoffrey Owens, drawing wide coverage.
2024Returns to screen in the TV movie Failure to Launch, his first credited role in years.
2025Appears on Pod Meets World (August) and Back to the Best (September) to talk about the Sabrina years.
2026Launches The Nate & Curtis Show podcast and reunites with Melissa Joan Hart and Beth Broderick.

04From Sitcom Set to Open Mic Nights

What Richert did after Sabrina is genuinely unusual for a former teen-TV lead: he stopped chasing it. There was no comeback tour, no reality show, no attempt to sell a gritty reinvention. He wrote songs instead.

The music is not a vanity project. He’s released three albums and plays a stack of instruments, and his sound sits in the Americana lane, borrowing from mid-century bluegrass, blues, jazz and country rather than anything that would have played over a TGIF montage. His streaming catalog includes tracks like “The Girl I Haven’t Met,” “Halogen Moon,” “Let Me Be Your Fool” and “Broken Bottles.” He has talked about playing open mics, which is about as far from a soundstage as you can get.

Creative fulfillment is when your soul is fed by your art. Creative success is when good people who like your art feed your belly. — Nate Richert, interview with Mannequin, August 2016

The part of the story he’s been most open about is the one that kept him off screen. In 2018, when Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens was mocked for working at a grocery store, Richert used his own situation to push back. He wrote on Twitter that he was “currently a maintenance man, a janitor, a carpenter, and do whatever random jobs I can get to pay the bills,” adding that he does “improv and songwrite to maintain my sanity” and noting that actors “so very rarely have job security or consistent work, quality healthcare, a reasonable retirement.” The Hollywood Reporter covered the posts in September 2018.

He has also said publicly, in response to a fan asking why he’d disappeared from major roles, that anxiety and subsequent depression were his “major game stoppers,” and that it took a decade to learn to cope. That’s his own framing, offered voluntarily, and it reframes the whole “where did he go” question: he wasn’t hiding, he was rebuilding.

On the personal side, Us Weekly reported that Richert married Malorie Felt in 2019 and that the couple jointly filed for divorce in 2023. He’s kept that chapter largely off social media, and it’s worth leaving there.

05What He Is Doing Now

The podcast with Gordie

The most consistent thing in Richert’s 2026 is a microphone. He and Curtis Andersen, who played Gordie on Sabrina, launched The Nate & Curtis Show, a weekly, deliberately unpolished conversation between two friends from the industry. Richert announced it on Instagram in his usual deadpan register.

This is my very good friend Curtis. You may know him as Gordie from [Sabrina the Teenage Witch]. We been recording our Zoom chats and are preparing to share them with you. That’s right, Harvey and Gordie started a podcast. Available to your ear canals soon. — Nate Richert on Instagram, as reported by Parade

It’s held up. As of late July 2026 the show has run well past two dozen episodes on Apple Podcasts, with new installments landing weekly and the most recent posted in mid-July. The two drift between Sabrina set stories, casting-room war stories, television history and where the business is heading, including the industry’s ongoing arguments about AI. It’s also available on YouTube, with a Patreon for listeners who want to chip in.

A cast reunion that broke the internet for a day

On March 31, 2026, Melissa Joan Hart posted a photo of herself out with Richert and Beth Broderick, who played Aunt Zelda, captioned “When the magic fam comes together!” It went everywhere. Coverage ran from Parade and TVInsider to Spanish-language outlets like Infobae and La Nación, most of them fixating on how different Richert looks now, beret and all, 23 years after the finale. The comment sections filled up with variations on “oh my lord it’s Harvey” and, inevitably, demands for a reboot.

Still writing songs, still taking work

Richert’s Instagram bio still lists him as an actor, director and songwriter, and music remains the through-line. He returned to screen briefly in the 2024 TV movie Failure to Launch, and he continues to turn up at fan conventions and on rewatch podcasts, where he’s become one of the more thoughtful interviewees about what happens to child and teen actors when the machine moves on. He’s not pretending the 90s didn’t happen. He’s just not living there.

06Summary

The Nate Richert story doesn’t have a tidy comeback arc, and that’s kind of the point. He was the boy next door on one of the defining teen sitcoms of the 90s, got written out at 22, spent years working trades while figuring out how to manage his own head, and came out the other side making the exact music he wanted to make. In 2026 he’s talking into a mic every week with an old friend, and the audience found him anyway.

Nate Richert in 2026: Quick Facts

He's 48, born April 28, 1978, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
He played Harvey Kinkle across more than 120 episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch from 1996 to 2003.
He was written out in season five, called the firing "crushing" on Pod Meets World in 2025, and returned after fan backlash.
He's a folk and Americana songwriter with three albums, playing guitar, banjo, drums and harmonica.
He has spoken openly about working as a carpenter, janitor and maintenance man between acting jobs, and about anxiety and depression keeping him off screen.
He co-hosts the weekly podcast The Nate & Curtis Show with former castmate Curtis Andersen, still releasing new episodes as of July 2026.
He reunited with Melissa Joan Hart and Beth Broderick in a viral photo posted March 31, 2026.

If you want to check in on him, he’s genuinely reachable: active on Instagram, occasionally sharp on X, and putting out a podcast episode most weeks. That’s not a man who disappeared. That’s a man who chose a smaller stage and got comfortable on it, which, if you think about how many former teen stars never manage that, is its own kind of happy ending.