Full House star John Stamos has confessed that he had Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen temporarily fired from the classic family sitcom during the show’s early days.
During an appearance on Josh Peck’s Good Guys Podcast, Stamos — who played Uncle Jesse on Full House — revealed he was so frustrated with the Olsen twins while filming the sitcom that he briefly had them replaced at one point. Full House first aired on ABC in 1987. At the time, the Olsen twins were less than a year old. According to Stamos, the breaking point was when they didn’t stop crying during a scene he shot with the twins. “I did it. I didn’t try,” he said when asked if it was true he tried to replace them during production. Stamos claimed he “couldn’t deal with it” at the time, adding, “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.'”
Stamos subsequently confirmed the show brought two “red-headed kids” in to replace the Olsen twins, jokingly saying, “I’m sure their parents loved them and thought they were attractive… It had nothing to do with [them being] red-headed, but they weren’t attractive.” However, Stamos had a change of heart after a few days. “Bring the Olsens back, these kids are terrible!” he said. “It was a day or something, we tried the other kids, it didn’t work.”
The Olsens Twins’ Role in Full House
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen both played Michelle Tanner, the daughter of the late Bob Saget’s Danny Tanner, in Full House. Michelle was a recurring character in Season 1 before becoming a series regular for the rest of the comedy’s eight-season run. The Olsen twins’ portrayal of Michelle won them plaudits as the character became known for her charm and causing occasional mischief. Stamos remembered the struggles of caring for the Olsens on-set, recalling an instance when he and Dave Coulier, who played Joey Gladstone on the sitcom, were tasked with watching Michelle during a scene.
“[Dave] and I were changing the baby,” Stamos said. “We’re carrying the baby downstairs, I think I was holding on to their armpits and Dave was holding her little feet. 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. They were 11 months old, and God bless them. And they kept switching.”
This isn’t the first time Stamos has spoken about his problems working with the Olsen twins during Full House, as he alluded to his attempts to remove them from the series in Lifetime’s 2015 documentary The Unauthorized Full House Story. While Stamos later appeared on the Netflix sequel series Fuller House, which ran from 2016 to 2020, the Olsen twins passed on the spinoff due to it conflicting with their fashion careers. Fuller House explained Michelle’s absence by saying she left San Francisco for New York to run a fashion empire, a nod to the Olsens’ real-life status as fashion moguls.
