John Goodman makes sad confession about Roseanne Barr relationship years after her firing
John Goodman has shared a sad confession about his former on-screen wife Roseanne Barr in the wake of her sudden axing from their sitcom reboot.
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John Goodman has revealed he hasn’t spoken to his former on-screen wife Roseanne Barr in many years and doesn’t think he will ever again.
“We haven’t talked for about seven or eight years,” the actor, 73, told The Hollywood Reporter, noting that, “I’d rather doubt if she wants to talk to me.”
The two played husband and wife on Roseanne, which ran on ABC from 1988 to 1997 and returned for a 10th season in 2018.
Plans for an 11th season were cancelled after Barr, 72, the matriarch of the blue-collar Connor family, compared Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to US President Barack Obama, to an “ape”.
She also falsely alleged that Chelsea Clinton was married to George Soros’ nephew and that Soros was a Nazi sympathiser.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” President of ABC Entertainment Channing Dungey said in a statement at the time.
Barr still refuses to take accountability for the tweet.
“The way I feel about it is God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” she claimed in an interview last month.
After the show’s abrupt cancellation, ABC ordered up a spin-off called The Connors, in which Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and other cast members reprised their roles from the original series. The show explained Barr’s absence by having her character die of a drug overdose.
Goodman, who also starred in The Righteous Gemstones, admitted that he didn’t think The Connors would last as long as it did, finishing after seven seasons.
“I didn’t think [the Roseanne reboot] was going to go beyond the initial five or six episodes,” he confessed.
“I thought it’d be a one-off thing, and then we got picked up, and Roseanne got fired. I thought that was it, and as soon as they dismissed the cast, I picked up Righteous Gemstones.
“Then we got to do the show again as The Conners. I didn’t know how long it would last, but I sure enjoyed it while I was there.”
Despite the frostiness between himself and Barr, Goodman only spoke warmly of the controversial comedian.
“We hit it off from jump street,” he remembered. “She made me laugh, and I made her laugh, and wow, it was so much fun. We’d get so many viewers for the show back then — 20, 30 million people. Things are so different now, but it was a special time.”
Barr has confirmed that she is not in touch with any of her former co-stars.
“No, I’m not friends with none of them. They’re all in the past,” Barr told Fox News Digital in June. “We don’t talk.”
Despite claiming not to “hold any bitterness,” she did snipe that “they f***ed it all up with their greed and ridiculous stupidity to f**k all that up. F**k them, but I wish them well.”
This article originally appeared in Page Six and was reproduced with permission
Originally published as John Goodman makes sad confession about Roseanne Barr relationship years after her firing
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