Random Things You Didn’t Know About '90s Sitcom Stars (15 items)

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  (#1) Tim Allen Went Public About His Arrest History Before The First ‘Home Improvement’ Aired So A Scandal Wouldn’t Derail The Show

  Before he became a famous actor and comedian, Tim Allen had a troubled life. A recovering alcoholic (he has now been sober for more than 20 years), he had started drinking when he was just 10 years old - one year before his father was killed in a car accident. He also struggled with drugs, and in 1978, the then-25-year-old pled guilty to drug trafficking charges after being caught at Kalamazoo/Battle Creek (MI) International Airport with more than one pound of cocaine in his luggage. He ended up serving two years in jail.

  Allen had started his career as a comedian before his arrest, and he resumed this work after his release from prison, eventually becoming a regular at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles and performing his stand-up act on various late-night talk shows. Despite his limited acting skills and experience, he was cast as the lead in the ABC sitcom Home Improvement. 

  Shortly before the first episode of Home Improvement was scheduled to air, the actor learned that some of the tabloids were digging into his past, which led to him telling the show's producers about his criminal history.

  "Before we talked to Tim or anyone, I said, 'The worst thing we could do is try and hide this.' And I said, 'Let's talk to ABC, let's talk to Disney, and I think what Tim should do instantly is go out public and explain his story and get it out there,'" series co-creator Matt Williams said in an interview for the Home Improvement episode of E! True Hollywood Story.

  Allen agreed to come clean. Williams believed the actor's willingness to be open resulted in the media backing off, allowing the series to move forward as scheduled. It debuted on September 17, 1991, and quickly became a hit - in fact, it ranked in the Top 10 of the Nielsen ratings in all eight of the years it was on the air.
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  (#2) Roseanne And John Goodman Acted Like An Old Married Couple So Naturally, He Was The Only Actor They Auditioned For The Role Of Barr's Husband

  In 1987, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner were working as executive producers on The Cosby Show when they commissioned Matt Williams to write a pilot script for a potential series about a white working-class family. They then signed stand-up comic Roseanne Barr to be the female lead. Because she was an inexperienced actor, the plan was to cast skilled, experienced actors in the other roles, so that Barr could learn from them.

  According to Barr, John Goodman was the only actor who actually read for the part of her husband. "There were more [auditions] planned, but the second I met [Goodman], I fell in love with him," the actor told Entertainment Weekly in 2018.

  "I went in there, and it was just easy as pie," Goodman agreed. "We got along great. For some reason, I just knew I had the job."

  Matt Williams agreed with Barr and Goodman that there had been an immediate connection between the two actors: "We brought him [Goodman] in the room, he looked at Roseanne, and said, 'Scoot over,'" he told EW. "She said, 'Shut up,' he plopped down, and it was like they had been married for 16 years."

  The chemistry between the lead actors paid off big time, as Roseanne became a huge hit for ABC, ranking in the Top 5 of the Nielsen ratings in each of its first six seasons.
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  (#3) Will Smith Wanted His ‘Fresh Prince’ Character To Have His Name So He Wouldn’t Be Forever Associated With Some Fake Name

  On his iconic 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith's character is called - Will Smith!

  Yes, he uses his real name. Why? Well, when the rapper turned movie star had his Fresh Prince co-star Alfonso Ribeiro on his Will From Home Snapchat in 2020, the pair revealed that it was Ribeiro who came up with the idea. 

  "We had talked, and I said, 'Look, if you're ever going to do this show, you've got to be Will Smith,'" Ribeiro remembered.

  "You said 'Because people are going to call you that for the rest of your life!'" Smith laughingly agreed.

  Unfortunately, Ribeiro himself fell victim to this exact drawback - even years after the show ended, he had trouble booking work because casting directors worried that audiences would only ever see him as ‘Carlton.’ 
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  (#4) Matt LeBlanc Blacked Out The Night Before His Audition And Knocked A ‘Chunk’ Of His Nose Off On The Toilet

  How would Friends have been different if Louis Mandylor - not Matt LeBlanc - had been cast in the role of Joey? 

  Well, according to Kevin Bright, one of the show's directors, the decision on whether to cast Mandylor or LeBlanc pretty much came down to the wire. Oddly, LeBlanc's decision to go out drinking with a friend on the night before his final audition was - at least in part - responsible for him winning the role.

  After the night of drinking, LeBlanc woke up in the middle of the night, needing to use the bathroom. "I got up too fast, and - I can't believe I'm telling you this - I kind of blacked out, as you do, and fell face-first into the toilet," he explained. "I hit my nose on the bottom of the toilet seat and a huge chunk of meat came off my nose. I'm looking in the mirror, and it's bleeding," the actor told Newsweek.

  The accident left him with a distinct scar on his face. When he showed up for his audition, he told Friends' creator Marta Kauffman the truth about how he had injured himself - and she responded by offering him the role!

  However, Mandylor did end up getting to play Joey - sort of. In the Season 6 episode, "The One with the Unagi," LeBlanc hires a lookalike to enter a medical research test for him with the goal of getting the $2,000 that would be paid to the participants. The part of  "Fake Joey" was played by Mandylor. 
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  (#5) Frasier's Brother Was Only Created After A Casting Director Noticed David Hyde Pierce's Resemblance To Kelsey Grammer

  If it wasn't for the fact that he resembled his future castmate, David Hyde Pierce may have never portrayed Niles Crane, the iconic role that earned the actor four Emmy Awards.

  In fact, there was no definite plan to even give Frasier Crane a sibling until an assistant casting director showed the series creators a headshot of Hyde Pierce, saying:

  "Doesn’t he look like Kelsey [Grammer] did 10 years ago?"

  Impressed by the resemblance, Frasier's creators did some digging into the actor's past roles. After seeing him portray a quiet, suicidal Congressman in the short-lived sitcom The Powers That Be, they set up a meeting with Hyde Pierce. It only took a brief interview to convince them to offer him the newly created role of Frasier Crane's younger brother.

  "I met with the producers, and we just talked for about 45 minutes, about what the brother might be,” Pierce recalls. “Niles was going to be a Jungian and Frasier was going to be a Freudian - things like that were tossed around. Not long after that, they offered me the part, and I thought, ‘What part?’ I hadn’t seen a script," Hyde Pierce told the Los Angeles Times in 1998.
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  (#6) Matthew Perry Doesn’t Remember Three Years Of Shooting ‘Friends’ After A Jet Ski Accident Accelerated An Addiction Problem

  Perry was determined to become a famous actor; in a 2002 interview with the New York Times, he admitted, "There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly. You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant."

  His dream came true shortly after he landed the role of Chandler Bing in the ensemble sitcom Friends. He played Chandler from the time he was 24 until he was 34. "I was in the white-hot flame of fame," Perry told The Today Show in 2013. "The six of us [the lead actors on the series] were just everywhere all the time." 

  But despite having the fame he had craved, Perry was struggling. "From an outsider's perspective, it would seem like I had it all. It was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism."

  But alcoholism wasn't the only issue that Perry struggled with. He was prescribed Vicodin after being involved in a jet ski accident in 1997 and quickly became addicted to the pills. "It wasn’t my intention to have a problem with it,” he told People in 2002. “But from the start, I liked how it made me feel and I wanted to get more.”

  In 2016, Perry admitted to the BBC that he doesn't even remember filming three years of the show. "I was a little out of it at the time - somewhere between Seasons 3 and 6."

  Perry first went to rehab in 1997. In 2000, he developed pancreatitis. As his life spiraled out of control, his Friends' co-stars tried their best to help, but as Perry admitted to People, "I wasn’t ready to hear it. You can’t tell anyone to get sober. It has to come from you."

  In February 2001, Perry reached out to his parents for help. "I didn't get sober because I felt like it,” he told the New York Times. “I got sober because I was worried I was going to die the next day." He re-entered rehab, where he stayed for more than two months before returning to work.

  In the years since, Perry has continued to act but has also dedicated himself to using his own experiences to try and help others who have struggled with addiction.
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  (#7) Paul Reiser Thought Helen Hunt Would Be Perfect For 'Mad About You' After Meeting Her At A Mutual Friend's Dinner Party

  When Paul Reiser came up with the idea for Mad About You, he loosely based the concept on his real-life marriage. And his real-life wife, Paula Ravets, played a significant role in Helen Hunt being cast as Reiser's on-screen partner.

  Reiser had not decided on the actor he wanted to play Jamie Buchman when he first met Hunt. 

  "My wife and Helen had a mutual friend, and they had a dinner party, and this was just when I was writing the first episode [of Mad About You] ... I had no actress in mind," the actor-comedian said in an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. "And I met Helen, and she was just funny and smart and just kooky enough and off-balance enough and smart. We left, and I said to my wife, 'What do you think about her as you?' She went, 'She'd be great.'"

  Reiser added that he never would have cast Hunt if his wife had objected to the idea.
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  (#8) Jennifer Aniston Stuck In A Contract With CBS When She Was Offered Her Part On 'Friends' 

  Prior to landing the role of Rachel in Friends, Aniston was part of several failed shows such as Molloy - she played Mayim Bialik's spoiled sister - and the TV series version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1990-1991), where she played the title character's sister (the role that had been portrayed by Jennifer Grey in the hit film). She also was part of the ensemble cast on the sketch comedy series, The Edge.

  Fortuitously for Aniston's career, the struggling actor ran into Warren Littlefield, the then-head of NBC Entertainment, at a gas station one night in 1994.

  "[It's] 10:30 p.m. on Sunset Boulevard," Littlefield recalled in 2012. "I'm at the Chevron station gassing up, and Jennifer is over at the other island, and she comes over and she says, 'Is it ever going to happen?' and I say, 'We believe in you, I love you, I so believe in your talent, I'm sure it will.' A few months later, we handed her the Friends' script."

  One small problem - by that time, Aniston was contracted to do the CBS series Muddling Through. Although it could have cost NBC millions of dollars if they ended up having to re-shoot her scenes, the network decided to go forward with Aniston playing the role of Rachel on Friends. And it worked out for both the actor and NBC, as it wasn't long before CBS decided to pull the plug on Muddling Through.
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  (#9) Julia Louis-Dreyfus Has Never Watched The Pilot Episode Of 'Seinfeld'

  Julia Louis-Dreyfus rose to fame by playing Elaine Benes, the best friend/ex-girlfriend of the title character, on Seinfeld. Oddly, she does not appear in the pilot episode - the main female character was originally supposed to be Claire, the server at Pete's Luncheonette. But when NBC said it would only pick up the show if a stronger female character was added, Larry David reached out to Louis-Dreyfus, whom he had met when they both worked on Saturday Night Live. She ended up beating out Rosie O'Donnell and Megan Mullally for the role of Elaine.

  Allegedly, Louis-Dreyfus has never seen the Seinfeld pilot episode. The reason why? Superstition.
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  (#10) Danielle Fishel Was Not The First Choice To Play Topanga On 'Boy Meets World'

  Danielle Fishel became a teen star playing Topanga Lawrence, the love interest of Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) on the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World from 1993 to 2000. But she was not the first choice for the role.

  "They hired somebody else for it and then they ended up letting that person go halfway through the week and I replaced her," Fishel revealed in an interview with E! News. Even after she was cast, she wasn't meant to play a big role on the show. "It was only supposed to be one episode, maybe two episodes, and then it became doing many more episodes than that, and then I was eventually a series regular."

  The actor originally cast in the role of Topanga was Marla Sokoloff, who may be best known for Lucy Hatcher on the legal drama The Practice.
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  (#11) 'NewsRadio' Incorporated Phil Hartman's Previous Career As A Graphic Artist Into An Episode

  Before turning to comedy, Phil Hartman studied graphic arts in college. After graduation, he started his own design business, where he created more than 40 album covers for bands such as Poco, Steely Dan, and America (who were managed by his brother). He also created the advertising logo for the iconic group Crosby, Stills & Nash.

  Hartman joined an improvisational comedy troupe in the mid-1970s. He got a big break when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1986, but in 1995, he left SNL to join the ensemble cast of the sitcom NewsRadio, where he portrayed the arrogant, free-spirited news co-anchor Bill McNeal.

  But even as he pursued a career in comedy and acting, he didn't leave his love for art behind. And the NewsRadio producers found a way to incorporate Hartman's former career as an in-joke. In the Season 2 episode, "Bill's Autobiography," Hartman's character finds a recording of the news director (Dave Foley) singing America's "A Horse with No Name."

  "The real Phil kicked in when he was drawing," Stephen Root, who was on NewsRadio with Hartman, told Grantland in 2014. "He would draw a lot on set. That’s when he was most relaxed."
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  (#12) Before Turning To Stand-Up Comedy And Acting, Martin Lawrence's Goal Was To Be A Professional Boxer 

  In 1992, Martin Lawrence was given his own sitcom on Fox. The series, entitled Martin, ran for five seasons and led to the stand-up comedian turned actor getting cast in leading roles in hit films such as Bad Boys and Big Momma's House.

  But as a teenager, it appeared that Lawrence was on his way to becoming a professional boxer. He had a natural gift for the sport, becoming a Mid-Atlantic Golden Gloves runner-up and winning an AAU title. 

  "I could do work with these things [his hands]," he said on a 2020 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, showing the talk show host some of his moves.

  If it wasn't for his mother, he may have continued to pursue boxing rather than turning to comedy. "I got my eye swollen. I came home and I had a big eye, and my mom said, 'That's it. No more for you.' And I've been doing comedy ever since."
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  (#13) Mark Curry Actually Practiced With The Golden State Warriors

  On Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, Mark Curry played a high school teacher who, after not making it to the NBA out of college, eventually gets a tryout with the Golden State Warriors. The actor, who is a native of Oakland, CA, was a big fan of his hometown team, and he was both excited and nervous when he was told he would get to practice with the actual team as part of the storyline.

  In an Instagram Live chat with former NBA player Ryan Hollins, Curry spoke about how he was late to his first practice with the team because the arena guards didn't believe he was there for an actual tryout. Don Nelson was Golden State's head coach at the time, and the first thing he did was tell Curry to attempt a free throw - if he missed it, everyone on the team except for the actor would have to run.

  "[Warriors' All-Star guard] Tim Hardaway [Sr.] said, 'MF, you better make it.' {Fellow Golden State player] Tyrone Hill said, 'I will whip your a**,' and I step up like a G and make the shot," Curry told Hollins.

  Later in that same practice, "I tried to dunk on Tim Hardaway [Sr.]. I come through, and he [struck me] so hard. I thought I broke my neck. I said I broke my neck, I laid there [on the ground], and that was the Golden State situation."
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  (#14) DJ Jazzy Jeff Got Tired Of People Wanting Him To Recreate The Handshake He And Will Smith Did On 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air'

  Before getting his own sitcom, Will Smith had risen to fame as one half of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. The other half of the duo, Jeff Townes, had little interest in acting, but when The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air became a reality, he agreed to play the recurring role of Jazz - the best friend of Smith's character. Will and Jazz always greeted each other with their special handshake - a swinging movement involving a mid-five, point-back snap as both guys went "Pssh!"

  But if someone runs into Townes, they might want to think twice about asking him to recreate this signature move.

  "I got really, really annoyed that everybody wanted to do the handshake," Townes admitted in an appearance on Smith's 2020 Snapchat series Will at Home when asked if anything bothered him about people acting like he was his Fresh Prince character.

  "Our not-so-secret handshake," Smith laughingly replied.

  "You would see in people's eyes when they were about to sneak your handshake, and I would just grab their hand and hold it," the DJ continued. "Aside from that, I'm good."
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  (#15) 'Will & Grace' Star Eric McCormack Said His Weight Cost Him Acting Jobs

  Eric McCormack shot to fame and won an Emmy Award for playing Will Truman on the NBC sitcom Will & Grace. He played the role from 1998 to 2006 (and from 2017 to 2020 in the reboot of the show). But before being cast in Will & Grace, McCormack was a struggling actor whose weight cost him opportunities in image-obsessed Hollywood.

  In 1997, he was in line to get cast in the [short-lived] Jenny McCarthy sitcom Jenny. Before his final audition, McCormack's then-manager Joan Hyland callously told him, "You’ve got two weeks … get your face back."

  The actor said it marked a "very big turning point" in his career, joking that it had been easy to hide behind a beard and heavy layers of clothing while living in Calgary, Canada. But when he shaved off the beard, he said, "Wow! I was not going to be on Melrose Place the next day, let’s put it that way."

  McCormack decided to lose some weight, and whether or not it was an actual facto, he ended up having a successful audition.

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