Full House Stars' Biggest Revelations About Their Castmates
The milkman and paperboy may have faded into obscurity, but "Full House" fans clearly can't get enough of their old familiar friends waiting just around the bend. The family-friendly sitcom's staying power is why its sequel series, "Fuller House," lasted five seasons on Netflix. (On the streaming service, this is the equivalent of the runs of "The Big Bang Theory" or "Modern Family.")
When "Full House" premiered in 1987, viewers didn't have the luxury of logging in and watching the Tanner clan whenever they pleased; they had a set time to check in with their favorite trio of male roomies and their young charges. But keeping that TV appointment (or investing in a VCR and some blank VHS tapes) was worth it to fans who felt like the "Full House" cast was family, thanks to the incredible chemistry of its stars.
Fun fact: the role of Danny Tanner almost went to actor John Posey, father of "Teen Wolf" star Tyler Posey. Now, it's hard to imagine anyone but the late Bob Saget being the heart and soul of the heartwarming series. "I played a character that was drawing on my most earnest self, my most loving of my children self," Saget told the Chicago Tribune in 2016. But behind the scenes, Saget wasn't the mature, mannerly man of the house that he portrayed on TV, and according to some of his co-stars' anecdotes about each other, he wasn't the only one who wasn't always on his best behavior.
John Stamos got the Olsen twins (briefly) fired
In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, Bob Saget recalled how some fans used to refer to "Full House" as "The Michelle Show." Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen, the cherub-cheeked twins who shared the role of Michelle Tanner, became so popular with viewers that they built a VHS empire, playing co-leads in dozens of movies in the '90s and '00s. But in a move worthy of Stephanie Tanner's most emphatic "How rude!," John Stamos almost killed the Olsens' careers before they got out of the crib.
In a 2023 appearance on the "Good Guys" podcast, Stamos recalled how he played the role of the bad guy when the Olsen twins were 11 months old. They'd been shooting a scene that involved Stamos and his co-star, Dave Coulier, spraying Michelle with a sink hose after changing her diaper. This understandably made both Olsens cry uncontrollably. "I couldn't deal with it. And I said, 'This is not gonna work, guys,' and I screamed it 10 times," Stamos recalled. "I said, 'Get rid of them, I can't work like this.'" Stamos got his wish, but said of the toddler actors who replaced the Olsens, "I'm sure their parents loved them and thought they were attractive ... but they weren't attractive." Say it again, Stephanie.
Stamos did give the new twins a chance, but he ultimately relented and asked for the Olsens to be brought back. And they got their revenge by refusing to appear on "Fuller House."
Bob Saget and Dave Coulier were real-life roomies
During a '90s Con panel in 2023, Dave Coulier reminisced about the first time he met Bob Saget. Coulier was just 18 at the time but was already pursuing his dream of doing standup comedy for a living. He saw Saget do a set at a comedy show in Detroit and immediately became a fan. "I've got braces on my teeth, and I'm like, 'Hi, Mr. Saget. How are you? You were really fun, sir.'" Coulier recalled, per People. "And he was like, 'Call me Bob.'" Coulier revealed that Saget gave him his phone number and told him to ring him up when he inevitably landed in Los Angeles, and Coulier did just that. "I ended up sleeping on his couch for two weeks while he went on the road," Coulier recalled. "He didn't know me! He just let me stay in his apartment, and then art imitated life." But when Coulier crashed at Saget's place, we're guessing that Saget didn't gain a creepy woodchuck puppet as another roommate.
In an interview with HuffPost, Coulier said that he landed the role of Joey Gladstone before Saget joined the "Full House" cast. Coulier had already shot the pilot with actor John Posey playing Danny Tanner when he learned that the role was being recast. After he learned who he would be doing a screen test with, Coulier recalled, "I was like, 'You gotta be kidding me because I was an usher in Bob's wedding.'"
Dave Coulier introduced Candace Cameron Bure to her husband
When Dave Coulier wasn't wearing shirts that looked like the entirety of the '80s vomited on them, you might have seen him rocking a Detroit Red Wings jersey on "Full House." In fact, he told Post Grad Problems that he wore one the day the cast filmed the show's opening as a tribute to his favorite hockey team. His love of hockey also helped Candace Cameron Bure find love.
In 1994, Coulier invited his "Full House" castmates to the Rock'n the Puck Celebrity Hockey Game. Candace has shared different accounts of what went down during the charity event. "[Coulier] pulled me over to the side and he said, 'Hey, I met this really cute Russian hockey player and I want to introduce you,'" she recalled on "Today" in 2007. Candace learned that the player, Valeri "Val" Bure, watched her show while he was learning English. (After all, knowing the phrase "You're in big trouble, mister" could come in handy when facing off against English-speaking opponents.) However, in 2014, Candace told HuffPost that she was watching the game when she decided that she wanted to be introduced to Val. "I was like, 'I want to meet that one, the blond one,'" she said.
Regardless of how exactly the meeting happened, it resulted in Candace and Val getting hitched in 1996. "Dave Coulier still has a hockey stick that my husband signed for him that says, 'Thanks for Candace,'" Val's happy wife recalled.
Jodie Sweetin's bleak experiences with the Olsen twins
While Jodie Sweetin and the Olsen twins had a strong sisterly bond on "Full House," Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen were not interested in having an on-screen family reunion years later. Speaking to ET about the Olsens' resistance to making a cameo on "Fuller House" in 2016, Sweetin revealed, "I think we've kind of given up." Their participation would have given Sweetin an opportunity to create some much happier post-"Full House" memories with her former co-stars than those she shares in her memoir, "UnSweetined."
In one passage, Sweetin recounts a wild night she spent catching up with her "Full House" castmates over dinner and drinks. Afterward, they headed to John Stamos' house to keep their party going. "Ashley and I got really, really drunk," Sweetin writes. "She eventually got sick and John stepped up and took care of her. At some point, we all passed out in John's bed. It was totally platonic — nothing weird happened." When Bob Saget returned in the morning, Sweetin recalls him exclaiming, "This is like the 'Full House' episode from hell!'"
Sweetin also shares a heartbreaking experience she had when she saw Mary-Kate Olsen at a restaurant opening and tried to speak to her. "She completely ignored me," Sweetin writes. "Then afterward at the Roosevelt, I saw her again. I started walking toward her and she walked away." We're guessing Sweetin was too hurt to shout "How rude!" at her.
John Stamos went on a date with Lori Loughlin
Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky were couple goals on "Full House," and according to John Stamos, he once viewed Lori Loughlin as an off-screen love interest. But apparently, the way he growls "Have mercy!" and his untouchable hair weren't enough to make Loughlin feel the same way. During a 2013 HuffPost Live interview (via Us Weekly), Stamos revealed that he and Loughlin went on a single date before their "Full House" days. They were in their late teens when they explored Disneyland together. "No disrespect to her family and her husband now, I would say that she could be the one that got away," Stamos mused.
When Fox News spoke to Loughlin about Stamos' comments three years later, she quipped, "It was very flattering. I'm going to put that on my tombstone — 'the one that got away.'" But Loughlin has also suggested that her Disneyland date with Stamos wasn't as romantic as he remembers it to be — and she's confronted him over what he says to the press about it. "I say, 'Why do you tell people that we made out on the Matterhorn?'" Loughlin shared in a BuzzFeed interview. "And he goes, 'Because it sounds funny!' I think the real truth is we're too old to remember." While the co-stars' shippers probably won't ever get the real-life love connection that they daydream about, at least they can console themselves by watching Stamos sing "Forever" for the umpteenth time.
Lori Loughlin's kissing scene support
"Stranger Things" star Millie Bobby Brown spoke about her first kiss being with a co-star and how awkward the experience was when Maddie Ziegler interviewed her for Interview magazine in 2016, and she's not alone; Candace Cameron Bure's first kiss also occurred while she was playing a character. "Do you know how nerve-racking that is to know that your parents are watching you have your first kiss at 13 years old?" Bure said when Hollywire asked her to share the "Full House" moment that embarrassed her the most. Luckily, Loughlin was there to give her some pointers. "I was like, 'Do I keep my eyes open or closed? Because I don't know what I'm doing,'" she recalled.
Andrea Barber revealed that she and Jodie Sweetin also turned to Loughlin for advice when they found themselves in the same stressful situation, with one of their big questions being whether they had to French kiss the male actors they were filming with. "She'd be like, 'Calm down, it's okay. It'll all be fine. I'll go talk to the boys and just set them straight,' and just be like, 'No tongue, be nice,'" Barber recalled on "The Dr. Oz Show" (via the Daily Mail).
According to John Stamos, he has also sought Loughlin's counsel, and she deserves some credit for his ageless appearance. "I do whatever Lori Loughlin does. I go to her facialist, I go to her people," he told Harper's Bazaar.
The guys did a scene with their pants down
While "Full House" is a family-friendly show, the off-screen antics of its trio of adult male stars weren't always G-rated. The actors also weren't the best influences on each other, as Dave Coulier confessed to HuffPost. He recounted how he, John Stamos, and Bob Saget were filming a taxing scene on the show's backyard set when one of them devised a goofy way to lighten the mood. "I remember, we all pulled our pants down, just to make the crew laugh," he said. Their plan worked, but the actors forgot that their young castmates could also see what they were doing. "Everybody had monitors in their dressing rooms," Coulier explained. He, Stamos, and Saget soon got a dressing-down from some unhappy mothers. (The creator of "Full House," Jeff Franklin, told Entertainment Weekly that he regularly fielded complaints from the moms of the show's child actors.)
In an interview with Esquire, Saget said that Coulier had a habit of removing his pants, explaining that he liked to use nudity to get laughs. "I had a birthday party in Vegas, with Stamos and six buddies. We're in the bowling suite at the Palms, and Dave Coulier took off his clothes and sat on the bowling alley," Saget recalled. "He sat on the bowling alley naked with his legs spread." That's not all that happened, but the rest of Coulier's special birthday performance in the buff is too NSFW to describe.
Candace Cameron Bure and Scott Weinger went to prom
On "Full House," D.J. Tanner and Steve Hale played high school sweethearts whose prom night episode was must-see TV. (There was even a Jesse and the Rippers performance!). Candace Cameron Bure and the actor who played her on-screen love interest, Scott Weinger, also went to her senior prom together. In 2016, Bure used their prom pic to promote Season 2 of "Fuller House" on Instagram. And in an interview with Popsugar, she threw a little shade at the black, off-the-shoulder mini dress with ruffled sleeves and a plunging neckline that D.J. picked out for her prom. "I wore a much more elegant dress in real life," she said. It was also black, but it was a trendy slip-dress.
In a 2019 interview with TooFab, Bure recounted how Weinger gave her another reason to dress up when he invited her to the star-studded 1992 premiere of the Disney animated movie "Aladdin" at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Weinger was one of the guests of honor, as he voiced the titular character. "I remember kind of thinking, 'Scott and I are just friends, and he invited me to the premiere, but is this a date?'" Bure recalled. "I was kind of confused and didn't know, and at 16, I wasn't about to ask." Weinger admitted that he didn't realize how big of a deal the premiere was going to be but said, "I guess it was kind of a date."
Dave Coulier married an actor who played Michelle
In a 2017 interview with BuzzFeed, John Stamos shared an interesting tidbit of trivia about Dave Coulier: He married an actor who appeared on "Full House." Or, as Stamos described her, "The girl that played big Michelle." The actor's name was Jayne Modean, and she appeared in the 1990 episode "Those Better Not Be the Days." It was like "Fuller House" set in an alternate universe, where Michelle didn't move to New York to work in the fashion industry and instead refused to leave home. Danny Tanner, Jesse Katsopolis, and Joey Gladstone imagined all three of the Tanner girls still living with them as adults, and as the grown-up version of Michelle, Modean was still dropping the catchphrase, "You got it, dude!"
In a 2009 interview with Clifton Merchant Magazine, Modean was asked if Alanis Morissette's 1995 hit "You Oughta Know" is about Modean and Coulier's relationship. On "Jim Norton & Sam Roberts," Coulier said that he thinks he's the "Mr. Duplicity" whom Morissette eviscerates in the breakup anthem, which also references one of her ex's other lovers. Modean wasn't sure if the lyric "And would she have your baby?" was aimed at her but said that she's a fan of the song. Oh, and the answer to that question is yes: Modean and Coulier welcomed a son named Luc in 1990, the same year they got married. Two years later, the couple divorced.
John Stamos and Bob Saget shared a bed
Bob Saget and John Stamos didn't always share the close bond that Danny Tanner and Uncle Jesse had on "Full House." Speaking to People, Saget confessed, "The first four years, John and I didn't get along that well." But when they finally became friends, they made up for all that lost time.
In his memoir "Dirty Daddy," Saget recounts the time he and Stamos took a trip to Las Vegas together. Saget didn't have mercy on his liver and kidneys while they were watching an Elvis Presley performer, and he later paid the price for drinking too much. "[Stamos] literally ended up taking off my shoes, cutting up my room-service steak, and feeding me so I wouldn't yack," Saget recalls. Stamos also crawled into bed with his pal after he fell asleep. "When I woke up the following day I realized ... I had just slept with John Stamos," Saget writes.
Saget's saga might be considered tame in comparison to other Sin City tales, but he spilled a dirty little secret about Stamos. "He goes through phases where the hair does not get washed," Saget told People of his co-star's legendary locks. "Sometimes it has its own self-grease." Dave Coulier revealed that so much of it accumulates that he started calling Stamos "Mud" after he smacked him during filming and got his fingers stuck in that glossy mane. So, at least Saget and Stamos only shared a bed and not a pillowcase.
Dave Coulier couldn't stop cutting the cheese
According to Bob Saget, Dave Coulier was frightfully flatulent, and one of his talents was the ability to pass gas whenever he pleased. Often, he did so in the presence of his "Full House" castmates. "The set always smelled like his a**. All the show's eight seasons of out-take gag reels have the whole cast leaving the stage abruptly the moment Dave releases his a** fumes. It gave true meaning to the term gag reel," Saget writes in "Dirty Daddy." Coulier confessed that he even let one rip right in the face of one of the Olsen twins, and John Stamos caught him in the act. "Stamos just looked at me and goes, 'What's wrong with you?'" Coulier recalled during a panel at 90s Con 2023, per CinemaBlend. "And he goes, 'You know what? You're gonna stunt their growth.' And they are tiny." Coulier couldn't recall which twin was on the receiving end of the rank wind, but in a 2004 appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Ashley Olsen revealed that Mary-Kate Olsen is almost an inch shorter than she is.
Coulier insisted that he didn't know that a twin was behind him at the time the odoriferous incident occurred, but could it be one of the reasons why the "Our Lips Are Sealed" stars stayed far away from the "Fuller House" set?
The Olsen accident that Bob Saget took care of
During the early days of "Full House," a full diaper was a job hazard that Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen's co-stars had to be prepared for. Luckily for the cast, Bob Saget was a father himself — the Olsen twins were just eight months older than his daughter Aubrey — so he knew the drill. "I actually did change Mary-Kate's and Ashley's diapers once. And that was four years ago," he writes in "Dirty Daddy," which was published in 2014. "Ashley came up with the punch line to that joke." (Looks like someone's love of potty humor rubbed off on at least one Olsen.)
However, Saget seems to reveal that his solution for dealing with the discovery of a dirty diaper in the middle of shooting a scene wasn't to get the Olsen wearing it a clean one. "I didn't want the poo to cause a rash and soil my television child's butt so I decided to take the time to remove the aforementioned substance from the diaper so that my television baby was poo-free," he recalls. Add this anecdote to the list of possible reasons why the Olsens have distanced themselves from their star-making series.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, the Olsens' other co-stars shared some less embarrassing stories about what they were like during the early years of "Full House." According to Candace Cameron Bure and Andrea Barber, the girls would threaten to sing if they didn't get their way.
Bob Saget got his castmates to do whippets
Bob Saget played the dad who would give his kids a stern talking-to if he caught them using any illicit substance (not that Danny Tanner ever had to worry about his kids doing such a thing). But behind the scenes, Saget was being the pressuring peer that those anti-drug PSAs from the '80s and '90s warned you about. In "Dirty Daddy," he recounts convincing his co-stars John Stamos and Dave Coulier to join him in getting high off nitrous oxide.
The younger "Full House" cast members were shooting a birthday party scene that didn't require the presence of the older stars, and Saget started getting irritable and bored while sitting around and waiting to film his own scenes. "I grabbed Dave and John and we went into the prop room backstage ... I swung open the refrigerator, and behold! Six cans of whipped cream," he writes. He was aware that inhaling the nitrous oxide inside the cans, which is known as doing a "whippet," can cause serious health issues — but he did it anyway. "Dave and John followed my lead," he recalls. "I guess we got high, don't think so though. It was hard to tell, 'cause we were in a hurry and whipped cream started squirting everywhere." Saget later told Pitchfork that he felt guilty about the incident. However, he quipped, "Nitrous oxide ... can be brain-damaging, but we were doing 'Full House,' so the damage had been done."
The Olsens knew about that creepy countdown
In 2004, Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen turned 18 years old. It was a date some of the biggest creeps on the internet had been looking forward to for years. "Lex and Terry" radio show hosts Lex Staley and Terry Jaymes even created an infamous internet countdown to the girls' 18th birthday called "The Olsen Twin Jailbait Countdown Clock!" Per The Washington Post, Staley and Jaymes admitted that the Olsens were just 14 when the two men began counting down to the day that the twins would be considered legal adults in all 50 states. It's not hard to guess why this was something that they cared about (just read the name of that countdown again).
In "Dirty Daddy," Bob Saget reveals that the Olsens knew about the countdown website. "As if millions of guys would suddenly have their chance to have their way with the twins," he scoffs. "What a smarmy group of douchebags." The Olsens' own publicist, meanwhile, was more forgiving of the clock watchers. "[The twins are] a fantasy if you're a 6-year-old girl and perhaps they're a fantasy if you're a 50-year-old man," he told The Washington Post ahead of their 18th birthday. "That is, I think, the magical thing about them, is they seem to span such a broad range of demographics."
Until his tragic death, at least the Olsens had Saget on their side. "I am very close emotionally with Ashley and Mary-Kate," he told Us Weekly in 2018.
Jodie Sweetin helped John Stamos get sober
In her memoir "UnSweetined," Jodie Sweetin details her long history of substance use issues and her struggle to get sober. Her harrowing experiences ended up helping John Stamos after his 2015 DUI arrest, and he later credited Sweetin for helping him celebrate four years of sobriety.
In 2019, Stamos honored Sweetin's advocacy for addiction recovery by presenting her with the Writers in Treatment's Experience, Strength and Hope Award. "When I finally humbled myself to ask for your help, I realized that the perky little blabbermouth had become the master of wisdom and was right by my side during some of the most difficult days of my life," Stamos said of his co-star, per Variety. "Thank god, my wife and my new son will only know me as a sober husband and father. This is Jodie's legacy in my life."
So, while Bob Saget may be gone and fans no longer have new "Fuller House" episodes to look forward to, it's nice to know that the show's cast members have a hand to hold onto everywhere they look. And perhaps fans will get another reboot someday; some members of the cast told "Today" that they'd love to revisit their characters again. "I think Bob would want that," Andrea Barber said. In fact, Saget told Entertainment Weekly in 2016, "What we're expecting it to do is be so beloved by the fans that later there will be a 'Fullest House.'"
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).