Starring in a sitcom can leave you with many life lessons … and help you teach some, too.
On the latest episode of their podcast, How Rude, Tanneritos!, co-hosts and Full House stars Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber sat down with Anne Marie McEvoy — who played “popular girl” Kathy Santoni — to discuss her time on the ABC sitcom, and how it impacted her life afterward.
“I didn’t do it because I wanted to be an actress at all,” McEvoy, 48, told Sweetin, 42, and Barber, 48, about her decision to appear on the show at age 13. “It was a job to get money for college. I was always going to leave Hollywood … I never had a thought that I was going to stay.”
Playing the on-again, off-again friend of Barber and Candace Cameron Bure’s characters Kimmy Gibbler and D.J. Tanner, McEvoy said that despite knowing her career in Hollywood would not last forever, she took the role “very seriously.” “You go in. You do your best and then you really wanna get better at it,” she explained.
McEvoy admitted that many people did not understand her decision to leave the limelight. “People would look at me like, ‘She’s gotta be pulling my leg. She’s not actually — everybody wants to be famous, don’t they?’ ” the former actress recalled. “That’s not what I wanted.”
The Full House star who wanted to “be a mom, have a PhD and be a professor,” was able to make her dreams come true while staying connected to the hit show. “I study adolescent development and teach classes on it,” she shared with Sweetin and Barber. “And I taught a whole version of the course around Full House. I used examples from Full House.”
McEvoy explained how the course came to be, saying, “People would find out and quietly after class, would say, ‘I was watching TV last night, and I saw you. Was that you on Full House?’ I would respond ‘You have an exam tomorrow. What are you doing watching TV?’ ” she added with a laugh, “Close to the beginning of the semester I was outed and everybody found out. And you can’t really talk about much else so then I just leaned into it.”
The class at the University of California, Irvine included examples about “adolescent sexuality, drinking, family and peers,” she explained. “It’s a fantastic show for that. All the biggies about identity. Your sense of who you are and trying on makeup and fighting with your friends and Full House, I mean, that’s what it is, was.”
While McEvoy still doesn’t plan to return to acting full-on, she reprised her role as Santoni in a 2016 episode of the Netflix reboot Fuller House, a move she credited to her daughter.
“I was not gonna say yes and then finally my now-19-year-old said, ‘I don’t know, Mom, I think it’d be kinda cool’, ” the professor recalled. “I was like, ‘You know what? I better do that.’ Lightning shall strike. So that was that.”
