John Stamos Tells Us What We Already Figured Out — He Hated ‘Full House’ at First
Since 1990s sitcom sentimentality is, apparently, a booming industry worthy of both lucrative TV reboots and profitable Patreon rewatch podcasts, here's a dose of anti-“Nick at Nite” nostalgia to bring us back to earth: Uncle Jesse hated his nieces, and their Full House, too.
Well, to be fair, it’s not so much that John Stamos hated his child co-stars on Full House, it’s more that, at first, he hated working with them so much that he wanted to quit the show. For some strange reason, Stamos has spent the last couple of months making it clear that the rosy retrospection with which the fans view every inch of the defining sitcom of San Francisco isn’t necessarily shared by one of its biggest stars. Case in point: Last month, Stamos revealed that, after a stressful scene in the show’s pilot, he demanded that his bosses fire the infant Olsen twins and replace them with more professional babies.
Obviously, Stamos would eventually change his mind (after determining that the replacement child wasn’t “attractive” enough for the role), but as Stamos revealed on the most recent episode of Hot Ones, his problems with his kid castmates weren’t a one-off incident. During just the first table read, Stamos nearly quit because he was upstaged by Jodie Sweetin, who played Stephanie Tanner. Elvis would never.
Between bites, Stamos made an admission to his host Sean Evans that anyone who’s watched an interview with him during his current media tour for his memoir already knew — he despised Full House when he first started on it. “I hated that show,” Stamos said, before semi-believably adding, “You know, obviously, I ended up loving it.”
When the General Hospital star first joined the sitcom, he was under the impression that the adults of the extended Tanner clan would be the focus of the series. Stamos recalled the exact moment he realized how wrong he was during the table read for the pilot, saying, “We sit down, we start 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?’ You couldn’t even hear my lines, they were laughing so hard at her! And I’m just slinking down in my seat.”
As soon as he could, Stamos dashed to the nearest pay phone, called his agent and demanded, “Get me the f— off this show!”
“I fought it for a long time,” Stamos said of his new gig as the ABC’s handsomest babysitter. “Then I finally said, ‘What am I doing? It’s a beautiful show. We built this with sweetness and kindness,’” he recalled, adding, “There was no central character on that show, I realized. The central character was love. And we were the best representation of a loving family.”
Apparently, Uncle Jesse’s love language was trying to get his nieces fired.
