Roseanne Barr Says George Clooney Turned Down Return to ‘Roseanne’

Roseanne Barr revealed that George Clooney turned down the chance to reprise his role on the Roseanne reboot during a Tuesday interview on The Howard Stern Show.

Barr appeared on Stern’s show on Tuesday afternoon to promote her iconic sitcom’s comeback. The veteran talk show host asked her if any of the other cast members had been hard to book for the revival season. She had no trouble getting John Goodman, Sara Gilbert, Laurie Metcalf, Lecy Goranson or Michael Fishman, she said. However, Clooney didn’t want to reprise his recurring role as Booker Brooks.

“Well, George Clooney didn’t want to come on, so that was a bummer,” Barr admitted. “I thought, well, he lives in Italy.”

“He’s said some really silly things about me, but I still love him,” she added. Clooney played the foreman at the factory where Roseanne Conner worked in the show from 1988 to 1991. He also briefly dated her sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf). This was well before he appeared in his breakout role on ER, and long before he became known as an Academy Award-winning actor.

Barr didn’t seem to want to get specific about Clooney’s on set mischief, but Stern asked about some rumors. He mentioned a story where Clooney had destroyed a candy bar that the network sent to the set after the show reached number one in the ratings. Clooney was reportedly enraged after hearing about the kinds of gifts that the network had sent to other actors.

“[Clooney] goes, ‘Let’s go out, and I’ll throw it … and you hit it with a bat and then we’ll send the picture to the president of the network,” Barr recalled. “He goes, ‘they f-ing gave whatshisface a Rolls Royce on this network!’”

“That caused a lot of problems for me,” she went on. “I should not have sent that picture. But it’s so funny.”

Barr also recalled how Clooney would exacerbate her fear of being replaced on the show, saying that he would put the name “Sandy Duncan” up on her dressing room door, referencing the actress who replaced Valerie Harper’s spot on The Hogan Family.

Barr appeared on several other talk shows on Tuesday to discuss the long-awaited reboot. In an interview on The View, she discussed the choice to have her eponymous character support President Donald Trump, as she does in real life.

“Well, I wanted to show an accurate depiction of our country, you know?” Barr said. “People are really — I know so many families that are divided over the election, still, and they still are fighting and stuff. We wanted to show that, and how our family deals with it, and we all have the hope that people will start talking to each other again, because that’s what we need.”