Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen almost got the pink slip experience before they celebrated their first birthday. During a new podcast interview, John Stamos claimed he almost got the twins fired while filming Full House Season 1 when they were only 11 months old. Stamos recalled getting frustrated while filming a famous scene when he and Dave Coulier’s characters were taking care of Mary-Kate and Ashley, now both 36.
“[Dave] and I were changing the baby,” Stamos told his Grandfathered co-star Josh Peck on Monday’s episode of Peck’s Good Guys podcast.”We’re carrying the baby downstairs, I think I was holding on to their armpits and Dave was holding her little feet. We take her into the kitchen and hosed her down, we put a fan on her, wrapped her up in paper towels. She was screaming.”
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Mary-Kate and Ashley clearly didn’t want to be there, Stamos said. Neither did he. “They were 11 months old, and God bless them. And they kept switching,” he said. The situation only got worse, and Stamos told producers that the Olsen twins were not going to work out.
The producers hired “two red-headed kids,” but they just weren’t as cute as the Olsen twins. Stamos realized he made a mistake. “I said, ‘Bring the Olsens back, these kids are terrible!’” Stamos told Peck. “It was a day or something, we tried the other kids, [but] it didn’t work.”
In Full House, the Olsen twins shared the role of Michelle Tanner, Danny Tanner’s (Bob Saget) youngest daughter. Stamos played Danny’s brother-in-law, Jesse, while Coulier played their friend Joey. The three men teamed up to raise Danny’s daughters after Danny’s wife Pam died. Candace Cameron Bure and Jodie Sweetin played Michelle’s older sisters D.J. and Stephanie.
After Full House ended, the Olsen twins made a few movies together, but they are now retired from Hollywood. They now run their own fashion label and declined to appear on the Netflix sequel series, Fuller House. Stamos, Saget, Cameron Bure, Sweetin, Andrea Barber, Lori Loughlin, and Scott Weinger all reprised their roles, though. Saget died in January 2022 at 65.
Stamos told Howard Stern he did try to convince Mary-Kate and Ashley to appear in Fuller House. “I did call, I talked to Mary-Kate and I explained kind of what the show was going to be, and told them I would love them to be on there and they decided not to, which I respect,” Stamos said in 2016, notes PEOPLE. Fuller House is still streaming on Netflix, while Full House can be found on Hulu.
