Marla Sokoloff’s bad girl on-screen past came back to haunt her when she had children.
The actress, 43, told Full House costar Dave Coulier on his podcast, “Full House Rewind,” on Friday, August 2, that her kids were “horrified” to see how her character Gia Mahan acted in the 90s sitcom – especially when she smoked.
Sokoloff’s character, Gia, was a bad-influence friend of Stephanie Tanner, played by Jodie Sweetin, with story lines involving the teen joyriding with boys and having a snarky attitude. Full House aired on ABC from 1987 to 1995.
“What do you tell them when they see Gia? ‘Don’t act like that?’” Coulier, 64, asked Sokoloff, who shares three daughters, Elliotte, 12, Olive, 8 and Harper, 2, with her husband Alec Puro.
“Exactly,” Sokoloff laughed. “Especially with the smoking stuff. They’re horrified.”
The Practice actress added, “They were like, ‘Mom! You’re smoking?!’”
Sokoloff reprised the role of Gia in the reboot, Fuller House, which ran from 2016 to 2020, a gig she took on before her youngest was born.
In 2019, she shared that during filming Fuller House, her oldest children, Elliotte and Olive, were “obsessed” with the show.
“I mean, sometimes I will come home from working on Fuller House and I walk through the door, and they are watching Fuller House,” she told In Touch in November 2019. “They stream, like, 800 episodes of it. I am like, ‘Guys, we need to take a break!’”
Despite their obsession with the reboot, Elliotte and Olive also watched the original series on Netflix.
“I think kids at school told them about it,” Sokoloff told the outlet. “I have no idea how they found it. It’s just the gift of Netflix, and they probably just [went] on one show, and it led them to another and they somehow got there.”
One perk of returning to film the reboot decades after the original’s first run was that her kids were able to meet the Tanner family in the flesh.
Fan favorite character DJ was particularly popular with Elliotte and Olive, and Sokoloff recalled that the girls were “starstruck” when they spotted Candace Cameron Bure on set.
“It’s kind of cool that they get to come to work and see it all happen,” she explained. “It also makes me feel better that what I am doing makes kind of sense to them, and I am not just gone and flying all over and leaving them. I think it’s nice for them to have some sort of pay off.”
In December 2019, Sokoloff, who has also directed films, talked to Moms about the lengths she goes to in juggling her family and work life.
“I had this calendar where every hot lunch was set up, every playdate, every after-school enrichment. Carpool. Activities. I did not have one day where they weren’t doing something,” Sokoloff said of directing her first movie, Christmas Hotel. “When I got there and I was on set, I never had to quickly text a girlfriend or text my husband to figure out how someone was getting home.”
