Was Jason Bateman the Bully or the Bullied As Kid Actor?

Poor widdle Jason Bateman. As a kid performer on Little House on the Prairie, he was hazed by unnamed older child actors on the set, he confessed on Hot Ones. 

Sean Evans was fact-checking a story about those same kids playing an April Fools’ joke on young Bateman. Did they really tell kid Jason that his character was going to die? “Untrue,” said Bateman, but the reality was worse.

“What they did do was, they pinned me down on the ground, straddled me with knees on my shoulders, and gave me noogies or whatever they call it on my chest,” Bateman alleged. “They knocked on my chest like I was a front door.”

But don’t feel too bad for Bateman. The clever kid dished out revenge that sounds worse than the noogies he received. He asked the show’s makeup artist to create black-and-blue “bruises” all over his chest. “And then I went to their parents and I said, ‘Look what your kids did to me.’ And that was good. I got them in trouble.”

Does Bateman’s “I’ll make it look like assault!” trick sound like worse behavior than the noogies? It’s completely in line with Bateman’s reputation as a bully himself, at least as described by another Little House costar. 

Patrick Labyorteaux was in a school for kid actors, between television jobs after his role as Andy on Little House on the Prairie had ended. One of his classmates was Bateman. “Whenever he would see me at school, he would call me ‘has-been’ and throw garbage at me,” Labyorteaux remembers. “‘Hey, has-been, got any work lately?’”

Bateman wasn’t just joking, Labyorteaux said. “No, he was really being a bully and being mean.” And somehow, improbably, Bateman always had garbage to throw.

Was Labyorteaux just a kid who was jealous of Bateman’s success? Todd Bridges, who worked on Diff’rent Strokes while Bateman was on the same lot filming Silver Spoons, backs up Labyorteaux. Bateman “always had some snide comments,” Bridges remembered. 

When Labyorteaux showed up at the studio on one of those filming days, Bateman started in again with the nasty wisecracks. “He would cut you low,” Bridges recalled.

So how did the two friends deal with the smartass who was always throwing garbage? 

“Todd and I threw him into the garbage can,” Labyorteaux confessed. Some commented on Labyorteaux’s podcast that maybe he was the bully, considering that Bridges and Labyorteaux were a few years older than Bateman.

“Yeah, he was younger than us,” Labyorteaux admitted, “but he was a really mean person.”