New show, new generation of child actors.
Full House stars Candace Cameron Bure and Andrea Barber were children themselves on the classic family sitcom, which aired from 1987-1995. On the spinoff Fuller House (streaming on Netflix Feb. 26), the actresses reprise their original roles and are now moms, with four children between them joining the the TV family.
D.J. is now a widowed mom of three kids: Jackson, Max and Tommy, and her BFF-turned roommate Kimmy has a daughter, Ramona. And all five kids (baby Tommy is played by twins) impressed their costars.
“They’re great kids, they clicked right into this. None of them have done a sitcom before, which is remarkable,” Dave Coulier, who appears in 3 of the 13 episodes, tells PEOPLE. And the new kids are getting the same treatment that the old kids did in the Full House days.
“We’re still doing all our stupid shenanigans, me, John [Stamos] and Bob [Saget], and we’re getting, ‘Guys, there’s kids here.’ So that hasn’t changed!”
• Michael Campion, 13, “Jackson Fuller”
“I still can’t comprehend that I’m on Fuller House. Exciting is the wrong word. It’s way more than excited,” Campion tells PEOPLE. “It was so cool to see the whole cast because I’ve watched Full House, I don’t know, since I was 3?”
The lifelong fan, who says he’s seen every episode of the original show at least once or twice, agrees with fans who marvel over how the cast looks today.
“It was really weird to see them because it looks like they didn’t age,” he says of meeting his costars. “They’re just like an older version of their kid selves. It’s very weird.”
• Elias Harger, 8, “Max Fuller”
Filming Fuller House “was fun because I got to make a lot of friends,” Harger tells PEOPLE. “The live taping nights were very exciting because there’s a lot of dancing and music.”
And Harger says his TV aunt was a good role model on the show. “Jodie [Sweetin] gave me a lot of advice. She was the middle kid on Full House and she has girls around my age and my sister’s age. She was sort of like a mom to me.”
“Elias is going to blow people away,” says show creator Jeff Franklin. “That kid is going to be a breakout star. He’s really, really funny, doing jokes and rhythms I have never seen out of a little kid before.”
Soni Bringas, 13, “Ramona Gibbler”
Unlike the other two older kids on Fuller House, Bringas wasn’t a Full House lover from the start. “My family came from Spain after it aired, so I didn’t get the chance to grow up with Full House,” she says. The actress made up for lost time studying Kimmy Gibbler scenes on Youtube – and she asked for the DVD box set for Christmas.
“She’s so good, I just can’t with her,” raves Barber of her TV daughter. “She’s a prodigy. I can’t believe she’s only 13.”
And Bringas said she felt comfortable with her castmates from the start. “It was a blast. The best part was being able to go to work every day and it didn’t really seem like work. It seemed like a fun job you get to do. The old cast was super welcoming and I felt right at home since the first day I got there.”
Fox and Dashiell Messitt, 1, “Tommy Fuller Jr.”
Talk about growing up in front of the cameras: “When they started at 7 months old, they didn’t even know how to crawl. And in the process of doing the show they started crawling and started walking,” says the boys’ mother, Kacy Andrews. “So a lot of milestones while they were working.”
The “very happy babies” (who previously appeared in a commercial and on an episode of Kirby Buckets) enjoyed their jobs on the Fuller House set, adds their mom. “They like stimulation and I think they really enjoyed the whole thing.”
Formerly a producer, Andrews says she knew that twins often had more work opportunities than singletons, so she and her husband began seeking work for them to help pay for college. Especially since the twins came as a surprise.
“I suffered infertility for a long time and we adopted my oldest 6 years ago,” she says. Andrews tried to get pregnant with the help of an egg donor but was unable to do so. The couple were left with three frozen embryos and little hope for another child. Then a longtime friend offered to be a surrogate for Andrews.
“We [transferred] one embryo and it split. And these little babies came to life!” she says. “I think we’re just along for the ride here with these very special miracle babies.”
