John Goodman Says ‘The Conners’ Will Kill off Roseanne

John Goodman said Roseanne Barr’s Roseanne character will be killed off in The Conners spinoff this fall.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Goodman, who plays Roseanne’s husband Dan, mentioned that his character will be sad in the new series.

“It’s an unknown. I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” Goodman told the British publication, reports Deadline.

Elsewhere in the interview with the Times, Goodman said he was left “broken-hearted” by ABC’s decision to cancel Roseanne in May.

“[B]ut I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,’” Goodman said. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”

The network’s swift decision to pull the plug on the highest-rated sitcom of the 2017-2018 TV season was also shocking to him.

“I’ll put it this way, I was surprised at the response. … And that’s probably all I should say about it,” he told the Times.

ABC chose to order The Conners, a Roseanne spinoff, after the network canceled Roseanne in May in response to a racist tweet Barr published. ABC never commented on how Barr would be written out of the show, but the official plot synopsis mentioned a “sudden turn of events” that shakes up the Conners’ lives. Barr has no financial stake in the new series.

The rest of the Roseanne cast will return, including Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, Lecy Goranson and Michael Fishman.

ABC ended Roseanne after Barr sent a tweet comparing Valerie Jarrett, a former aide for President Barack Obama, to the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes characters. Although Barr tweeted dozens of controversial messages before, ABC swiftly reacted to mounting pressure and fired her.

Barr then gave multiple emotional interviews throughout the summer, insisting she is not racist and that her tweet was taken out of context.

“I’m sorry that you feel harmed and hurt,” Barr said to Jarrett during her interview with Sean Hannity in July. “I never meant that and for that, I apologize. I never meant to hurt anybody or say anything negative about an entire race of people, which I think 30 years of my work can attest to.”

“I know, I know, for a fact that she’s not a racist,” Goodman told the Times of his longtime co-star. Goodman later said he has not heard from Barr since the scandal exploded.

The Conners premieres Tuesday, Oct. 16 on ABC in the same 8 p.m. ET timeslot Roseanne held last spring.