John Stamos begged his agent to get him ‘the f**k off Full House’
John Stamos became a huge star as Uncle Jesse in the ‘90s – but now admits he begged his agent to get him “the f**k off” the show.
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John Stamos nearly ran away from playing Uncle Jesse faster than you can say, “Have mercy.”
The beloved Full House star — who starred on the family-friendly sitcom for eight seasons from 1987 to 1995 — reveals in his memoir If You Would Have Told Me that he begged his agent to get him out of doing the show following the first table reading.
“The final scene calls for the whole cast to gather around a baby’s crib and sing the theme song to The Flintstones,” Stamos recalls, per Variety.
“By the time we get to ‘Have a Yabba-Dabba-Doo Time,’ I’m having a Yabba-Dabba-Don’t Time.”
The actor then remembers avoiding his fellow cast and crew as he headed to the lobby as fast as he could and beelined to the closest pay phone.
“I jam a quarter into a pay phone, get my agent on the line, and gently suggest, ‘Get me the fk off this show!’” he writes. “I’m dying to pull the rip cord on this family-friendly hell, but I’ll fulfil my contractual obligation to shoot the pilot. Keep it professional. The thing will crash and burn faster than my reputation, and I hope I can salvage some dignity with my next project. For now, stay cool. Control what you can control.”
While the first season of Full House got a slow start, it started to gain traction once it began airing after Who’s the Boss, which Stamos describes as “one of ABC’s biggest hits” at the time.
“With that simple strategy, Full House lands in the top ten throughout the summer,” he explains in his book. “We find an audience and they follow us to season two.”
Fortunately, by that point, Stamos had already begun forming a bond with his castmates. But that doesn’t mean they were always close. The Big Shot star — who once had Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen fired because they cried too much — writes that he didn’t think Bob Saget was right for the role of Danny Tanner at first, and claims that the comedian was jealous of his friendship with Dave Coulier.
“Bob is the humblest egomaniac I’ve ever met, but he undercuts his narcissism by being so damn loveable,” he writes. “A walking contradiction, he makes up for his self-inflicted insecurity by being a self-inflicted aggrandiser.”
He continues, “I know Bob is wickedly talented. I just don’t tell it to his face at this point. But if I want to learn anything about comedy, I need to study Bob … Bob and I tolerate each other and attempt to avoid interfering with each other’s creative processes, though it can be challenging.”
The three men — Stamos, Saget and Coulier — eventually put their differences aside and became “brothers” when all three of their sisters got sick around the same time.
“All the fear, fighting for family, and frustration of loss has pommeled down some of our pettiness on the set,” Stamos says. “We’re seeing not only what is important in our own relationships with each other, but also our relationships with the fans out there who are struggling with issues of life and death.”
This article originally appeared in Decider and was reproduced with permission.
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