John Stamos Had the Olsen Twins Fired from ‘Full House’ for Being Crybabies

Uncle Jesse has two rules: Don’t touch the hair, and there’s no crying in show business.

John Stamos stuck so true to those two conditions during his time on the iconic San Francisco sitcom Full House that he was even willing to do the unthinkable to enforce them — he actually had Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen fired for crying so uncontrollably that they broke Stamos’ concentration during an important scene in the show’s pilot. While it’s generally reasonable for a star such as Stamos to expect professionalism from his peers in the workplace, the twins were barely 11 months old when Uncle Jesse kicked them out of the house. And here we thought Uncle Jesse was done with his “bad boy” phase.

Stamos appeared on the most recent episode of a fellow family-friendly sitcom star’s podcast where he told the story of the behind-the-scenes spat between himself and his “beloved” niece(s). On Josh Peck’s Good Guys Podcast, Stamos recalled the scene in the Full House pilot in which he and Dave Coulier’s character Uncle Joey were supposed to change baby Michelle Tanner’s diaper, but neither baby Mary-Kate nor baby Ashley could get through the scene without wailing uncontrollably. Stamos demanded that the producers “get rid” of the unbecoming babies, and the Olsen twins exited the project. 

But don’t worry — Uncle Jesse rediscovered his avuncular side and the pair returned to Full House once Stamos saw that the babies ABC hired to replace the Olsens weren’t “attractive.” 

“(Coulier and I) are carrying the baby downstairs,” Stamos recalled of the pilot scene. “We take her into the kitchen and hosed her down, we put a fan on her, wrapped her up in paper towels. She was screaming.” The noise was so loud that Stamos and Coulier couldn't continue with the changing scene, so the unspecified Olsen twin was switched out with her double. However, Stamos quickly found that the new Olsen twin screamed just as loud as the first one, saying, “They wanted to be anywhere else but there, and so did I.”

Stamos remembered how he loudly told the crew, “This is not going to work, guys” over and over, demanding the director “get rid” of his grossly unprofessional costars. The role was then recast with “two redheaded kids,” but Stamos found the new actors guilty of a much larger crime than crying on set — they were ugly. “I’m sure their parents loved them and thought they were attractive … but they weren’t attractive,” he said of the beastly ginger babies.

ABC quickly re-hired the Olsens so that production could continue with the original Michelles, and the rest is TV history. Somewhere in the world, a woman missed out on Marvel money because John Stamos didn’t find her redheaded big sisters to be “attractive” babies.