Jennie Garth, Shannen Doherty make nice

updated 5:08 p.m. ET Aug. 27, 2008

NEW YORK - Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty say they were nervous about reuniting for the new incarnation of "Beverly Hills, 90210."

The actresses feuded on and off the set of the 1990s cultural phenomenon, and Doherty left the series in 1994 following a rocky stretch during which she clashed with the cast and producers and showed up late for work.

Garth, 36, and Doherty, 37, hadn't spoken in years before filming their first scene together in the "90210" update, debuting Tuesday on the CW network. In this version, the drama centers on a new crop of West Beverly High School students.

"There had been so much buildup," Garth told Entertainment Weekly magazine, which features a joint interview with the actresses in its Sept. 5 issue. "Everyone was asking me before what it was going to be like. I was like, ‘I don't know. I haven't talked to her in 10 or 15 years.' I had that tension and I started to let it get to me. Is she going to be nice? Is it going to be a bad environment? But when I saw her everything was fine."

Doherty said "there were nerves going in," but she aimed to start fresh and move forward.

"I think when you're 18, your personalities conflict, then you meet up 10 or 15 years later, and the playing ground is totally different and you're fine," she said.

Doherty said she has no regrets about leaving the first "90210," which ran from 1990 to 2000 on the Fox network.

"It let me find a little bit of peace and discover who I was as a person," she said. "Not the person who the press made me out to be because I'd had a few bad experiences in my personal life, and I was struggling to figure out a bad husband or a bad boyfriend and I was doing it under the spotlight, so I wasn't reacting well to any of it."

Doherty said she and Garth "never punched each other," despite a passage in former castmate Tori Spelling's memoir "sTORI Telling" that alleges the two got into a fistfight.

"I don't think we ever hit each other. ... Scratching? I'm not going to deny that," said Garth.

The actresses' characters have matured: Garth's Kelly Taylor is a single mom and guidance counselor at West Beverly High, while Doherty's Brenda Walsh returns in a four-episode stint as a successful actress who encourages Taylor to date a cute English teacher. She even offers to babysit Kelly's 4-year-old son.

"All those people who wrote the ‘I Hate Brenda' newsletter are going to get mad at me now, like `Why are you leaving your child with Brenda?" Garth said.

"Hopefully those people have grown up," Doherty replied, to which Garth added: "I doubt it."

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