“I can’t believe we’re back here. It was just emotional and overwhelming and beautiful,” Bure said.
When actress Candace Cameron Bure stepped on the set of Fuller House, the highly anticipated Full House reboot, she experienced a wave of déjà vu and nostalgia.
“I cried once I saw [John Stamos] on the stage,” Bure tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It just got more and more surreal, and it was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re back here.’ It was just emotional and overwhelming and beautiful.”
Bure says the original Full House cast has remained great friends since they stopped filming 20 years ago in 1995, but emotions were still running high during their onstage reunion. As each castmember stepped on set, Bure looked around in awe.
“We’re all just looking at each other going, ‘I can’t believe’ — it’s weird that we’re back together, and we’re doing this again,” Bure says.
Bure spoke to THR just after wrapping a day of filming the 13-episode Full House revival for Netflix. On the show, Bure plays D.J. Tanner, the eldest daughter of the Tanner family. Full House fans last met D.J. as a high school graduate who was about to take on the world as a college student at the University of California Berkeley.
Now, Bure revisits the character two decades later as D.J. Tanner-Fuller, a recently widowed mother of three young boys. Her sister Stephanie (Jodie Sweetin) and best friend Kimmy (Andrea Barber) have moved in with D.J. to help support her and the boys. The show will debut in 2016 with most members of the Full House cast returning, although Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen will not be reprising their shared role.
The house on set has been even fuller lately: Bure has been bringing her real children along with her over their summer break, and they have found an unexpected new set of playmates.
“My kids love the boys on the show who are playing my kids,” Bure says. “They’re hanging out with the other kids in the trailer, playing video games or stealing golf carts or running around the Warner Bros. lot. They’re just having a blast together.”
As a mother of three kids both on the show and in real life, Bure tells THR knowing the ups and downs of motherhood firsthand has helped tremendously with her role. Even the writers have been paying close attention. Bure says the writing team has incorporated aspects of Bure’s own parenting style into that of her character.
“The writers are getting a lot of good material from me, and they’re pretty much amping up the kind of mom I am in real life,” Bure says. “So, I relate to [D.J.] a lot. And it’s helpful because even though we’re not exactly like our characters, we still have our own nuances, and you know smart writers will play to those strengths and find those within the writing so it becomes funny and more natural for us to do.”
On top of a busy shooting schedule, this month Bure published her third book, Dancing Through Life: Steps of Courage and Conviction, which explores her journey on the 18th season of Dancing With the Stars (she finished third).
“I think always when we expose our weaknesses …we help each other grow and realize, hey, we’re not the only ones and we’re not alone,” Bure said. “I realized that I was capable of more than what some of my fears held me back from doing and realizing that I could even lower some of my expectations of trying to be perfect.”
