John Stamos, famous at the time for “General Hospital,” says he couldn’t handle five-year-old Jodie Sweetin’s Stephanie Tanner stealing the show and called his agent to “get me the f— off this show.”
John Stamos has been pretty candid about his earlier years in the industry, and even the times his ego almost got in the way. He recently shared how jealousy of a five-year-old led to him trying to quit “Full House.”
The actor shared the story during his appearance on “Hot Ones,” revealing that he was expecting a show more along the line of “Bosom Buddies,” the subversive sitcom starring Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari as two bachelors who dress as women in order to live in an all-women’s apartment building. The shows shared some creators, but not much else.
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“It was pitched to me as a ‘Bosom Buddies’… with, you know, a couple of kids in the background,” he told Sean Evans between rounds of hot wings. “We did a table read of it, and I was the star.”
The actor was the most well-known of the cast at the time, having just recently won a Daytime Emmy Award for his work on “General Hospital.” He was picturing a focus on the three men living together to help raise the girls. What he didn’t expect was the kids themselves.
He found himself wondering why there was such a process casting kids who “are going to be in the background.” That, of course, isn’t at all what happened when the show went to air.
“We sit down, and we started reading, and Jodie Sweetin, who plays Stephanie, reads her lines, and people are dying laughing. I mean screaming,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What’s happening here?'”
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“They couldn’t even hear my lines, they were laughing so hard at her,” he said of the pint-sized scene-stealer. Sweetin was just five years old when the show began and quickly became a favorite among fans.
Stamos said that he stormed out of the table read and immediately called up his agent demanding they “get me the f— off this show.” Of course, that didn’t happen, with Stamos crediting Bob Saget for calming him. But Stamos remained unhappy for a long time, admitting, “I hated that show.”
“I fought it for a long time,” Stamos said of the show, before finally taking a step back and really looking at what they were created. Almost immediately upon release, “Full House” became a cultural phenomenon and beloved family show.
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“I finally said, ‘What am I doing?’ It’s a beautiful show we built with sweetness and kindness,” Stamos said. “There was no central character on that show is what I realized. The central character was love and we were the best representation of a loving family, not a ‘normal’ family. And it was the new normal, now an unconventional family.”
“Full House” would go on to run for eight seasons from 1987 to 1995. It would be followed by “Fuller House,” which shifted focus to the now grown-up kids, including Sweetin, as Stamos, Saget and Dave Coulier became “background” characters, recurring across its five seasons from 2016 to 2020.
To this day, fans remain devoted to the franchise and the stars who became the centerpiece and symbol of ABC’s family-friendly TGIF block of Friday night sitcoms throughout the 1990s.
