John Stamos is a charming, mellow, even moving public figure nowadays, but based on the stories he tells he wasn’t always that way. Recently the actor has opened about the early days of Full House, and he doesn’t exactly come off like the good guy. Indeed, he admitted to temporarily getting the Olsen twins fired. Now we’re learning he almost quit because he was jealous of another child colleague.
As per Entertainment Weekly, Full House creator Jeff Franklin went on cast member Dave Coulier’s podcast, where he reminisced about the show’s very first table read. The biggest star there was Stamos, who’d earned a Daytime Emmy nod for General Hospital, and he’d even been the lead in the spy thriller Never Too Young to Die with Robert Englund, George Lazenby, and Gene Simmons. (The movie was not a hit.) But he wasn’t the one people left talking about.
“Jodie [Sweetin] just stole the whole thing,” Franklin recalled, naming the actress who’d spend years playing middle sister Stephanie Tanner. She was only five when the series began, but she was already “knocking jokes out of the park.”
That didn’t please everyone. Coulier chimed in, saying “And I remember walking out with John and he’s like, ‘The whole show’s gonna be her. We can’t do this.'”
Franklin said Stamos was not happy about “having to play second fiddle to these really funny kids.” He even called his agent, telling him, “This is a mistake. Get me off this show.”
Obviously he didn’t, and the rest is history.
As it happens, Stamos himself talked about the incident on his recent episode of Hot Ones.
“It was pitched to me as a Bosom Buddies… with, you know, a couple of kids in the background,” he remembered. “We did a table read of it, and I was the star. I was coming off of General Hospital. We sit down, and we started reading, and Jodie Sweetin, who plays Stephanie, reads her lines, and people are dying laughing. I mean screaming. I was like, ‘What’s happening here?'”
Stamos added, “They couldn’t even hear my lines. They were laughing so hard at her.”
He recalled ringing up his agent after, saying, “get me the f*ck off this show.”
Stamos admitted he “fought it for a long time,” but he “finally said, ‘What am I doing? It’s a beautiful show.'”
You can watch Stamos on Hot Ones in the video below.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
