During filming Sabrina, the apprentice witchBeth Broderick remembers having close encounters with a number of live animals, including an alligator that almost bit her!

Beginning in 1996, Broderick starred in the series for seven seasons alongside Caroline Rhea And Melissa Joan Hart. She and Rhea played otherworldly aunts Hilda and Zelda Spellman to Hart’s teenage witch Sabrina.

In a recent exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Broderick, 65, described appearing in a scene with “an alligator on a leash.”

“And people didn’t think the alligator was moving enough and that it didn’t look real enough,” she recalls. “It was very real, so they started pushing him, and he went crazy and he turned around and missed me by an inch and bit the couch and wouldn’t let go.”

She added: “I was like okay, it could be my leg. Okay, let’s not poke the alligator again.”

As strange as it is, Broderick said the cast “had crazy stuff like that on the show all the time.”

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In another incident, a lion on set walked through an electric fence and got loose — “he just walked through it and didn’t care,” Broderick said.

But it was yet another moment – ​​involving a chicken in a tuxedo! – which Broderick said was his favorite story of his time Sabrina.

“One day I was walking from my trailer to the set and I hear this crazy commotion in the costume room, and I look in, and our costume designer Diane is trying to measure a chicken for a tuxedo, and this chicken doesn’t fit. didn’t want to wear a tuxedo,” she said. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. And I thought, who else goes to work and sees that?”

“I mean, it’s a singular experience,” she added. “And he ended up wearing that tuxedo, that’s what he did. But I don’t think he liked it.”

As Broderick explained, moments like this were inevitable in a show about magic — largely because the team didn’t rely on modern technology like CGI.

“It was a crazy show. You had to film everything in real time, with practical effects and all that. It was quite an experience that you can never forget,” she said. “That’s how the show was, you made magic out of molehills… you made magic out of nothing.”