Despite his retrospective love for the beloved sitcom, John Stamos is the first to admit he “couldn’t deal” with some of his younger costars on Full House.
The actor — who portrayed the perfectly coiffed Uncle Jesse on the hit ABC show for eight seasons — has been candid about his issues with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (who shared the dual role of his youngest niece, Michelle Tanner) and Jodie Sweetin (middle child Stephanie Tanner) during the series’ run.
On a July 2023 episode of “Hot Ones,” Stamos recalled coming on the show as “the star” who was fresh off his dramatic turn on General Hospital.
“As they’re casting it, I’m like, ‘They’re spending a lot of time casting these kids who are gonna be in the background,’” he quipped at the time, admitting he was jealous of the laughs that Sweetin got from the first table read.
Stamos even got the Olsen twins temporarily fired after one of them couldn’t stop “screaming” during a scene.
“[Dave Coulier] and I were changing the baby. We’re carrying the baby downstairs, I think I was holding on to their armpits and Dave was holding her little feet,” Stamos recalled on Josh Peck’s “Good Guys” podcast in April 2023. “We take her into the kitchen and hosed her down, we put a fan on her, wrapped her up in paper towels. She was screaming. Both of them, they wanted to be anywhere else but there, and so did I.”
However, these headline-making moments were far from the only time Stamos has discussed his Full House set struggles. Keep scrolling for more:
Uncle Jesse Calls ‘Bulls—t’ on Mary-Kate and Ashley
Stamos was admittedly upset when the Olsen twins didn’t want to reprise their role as Michelle on the Full House spinoff, Fuller House, which ran on Netflix from 2016 to 2020.
“I call bulls—t,” Stamos tweeted in 2015 after Mary-Kate and Ashley claimed they weren’t contacted by Stamos to return. Years later, however, he owned up to his emotions — and revealed he and the fashion designers reconnected following costar Bob Saget’s death.
“When I did Fuller House they didn’t wanna come back. And I was angry for a minute. And that got out,” he recalled on a May 2023 episode of the “And That’s What You REALLY Missed” podcast. “But they were, like, ‘We loved our childhood. We loved being with you. We miss Bob.’ They came over to my house. They brought a pork chop and sage. I don’t know why, but thank you? It was a frozen pork chop, so that was really nice. So we stayed very close.”
Despite their reconciliation, Stamos threw shade at Mary-Kate when explaining why he dissuaded Peck from approaching her at Saget’s funeral in January 2022.
“Mary-Kate, God bless her, would’ve — you would’ve walked away being disappointed,” Stamos explained on Peck’s “Good Guys” podcast at the time. “Only just in that moment because of everything going on but also, she would’ve gone, ‘Yeah, OK, can you light my cig?’”
However, Stamos did bring Peck over to Mary-Kate, reminding her they starred in The Wackness together — “which was even worse,” Peck joked.
Wanting to Get Mary-Kate and Ashley Fired
After a particularly rough take with the Olsen twins — who were 11 months old at the time — Stamos was done.
“I said, ‘This is not going to work, guys,’ and I screamed it 10 times. I said, ‘Get rid of them, I can’t work like this,’” he recalled on the “Good Guys” podcast in April 2023. The show “got rid of them” and replaced the young actresses with “two red-headed kids … [who] weren’t attractive.”
He joked, “I said, ‘Bring the Olsens back, these kids are terrible! It was a day or something, we tried the other kids, it didn’t work.”
(The Olsens returned and played Michelle throughout the OG show’s run.)
Being Upstaged by Jodie
Stamos initially had it with Sweetin before realizing — in a very Tanner manner — what the heart of Full House was all about.
“Jodie Sweetin, who plays Stephanie, reads her lines, and people are dying laughing. I mean screaming,” he recalled on “Hot Ones” in July 2023. “I was like, ‘What’s happening here?’ You couldn’t even hear my lines, they were laughing so hard at her. And I’m like, slinking down in my seat like this.”
After scrounging to find quarters to call his agent from a payphone — “Get me the f—k off this show!” Stamos remembered saying — he ultimately swallowed his pride and came to the conclusion he didn’t need to be the star.
“I fought it for a long time and I then I finally said, ‘What am I doing?’ … There was no central character on that show, I realized. The central character was love.”
John Stamos Had a ’Really Difficult’ Time on Set
In an October 2022 sit-down with CBS Sunday Morning, Stamos got real about his struggles on the sitcom. “I’m not gonna lie, it was really difficult. A lot of it was. Because it just wasn’t where I saw myself,” he explained. “The reviews were like, ‘This show won’t last til Thanksgiving.’ And now, I’m so proud of it. I’m really happy I did that show.”
