More than 30 years after Full House came to an end, Jodie Sweetin opens up about how she has “drifted apart” from co-stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
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While appearing on the McBride Rewind podcast last week, Sweetin said she loved the fellow former child actresses. “I was really close to Ashley and Mary Kate… from the beginning,” she recalled. I would go to their room and hang out and play with them.”
She also said, “I loved being the older one [and the] caretaker, like, ‘Let’s be friends.’ They would come spend the night at my house,” she continued. “They’d come to my cabin on the weekends with my parents and I. We’d go horseback riding. We’d go to Disneyland. I mean, I’ve got pictures of us playing dress up at my house, like, they’re 3 [and] I’m 6, like, just kid stuff, and I loved it.”
The trio starred together on Full House from 1987 to 1995. Sweetin portrayed Stephanie Tanner, the middle child of the Tanner family, while the Olsen twins shared the role as the youngest, Michelle Tanner.
Although Sweetin and the rest of the original Full House cast appeared in the Netflix spin-off series, Fuller House, the Olsen twins declined to star in or even appear in the sitcom. The duo has since quit acting and gone into fashion.
Sweetin Says She and the Olsen Twins Haven’t Talked
Continuing to reflect on her former relationship with the Olsen twins, Sweetin says she hasn’t stayed in contact with either.
“We haven’t talked,” she said. “I think after Full House and growing up and everything, they’ve had an extremely different trajectory than any of the rest of us. People say, ‘Oh, well, do you guys not talk? Is it bad?’ No, they were 8 years old when the show finished, [and] we weren’t as close as we were. I didn’t see them all the time.”
Sweetin also pointed out that there wasn’t any “bad blood” between her and the Olsen twins after the show wrapped. “It wasn’t like there was bad blood between any of us, but they moved to New York and then got married and [built their] fashion empire and moved into that world. It was, like, we just sort of drifted apart.”
The Full House castmates last reunited at Bob Saget’s memorial service in 2022.
“I think they fiercely protect [their] privacy,” Sweetin noted. “But when Bob passed, it was the first time that all of us had been together in a long time. Bob would see them in New York, and I had seen them in L.A. It wasn’t bad blood, but that was the first time we’d all really been together again. It was just like it was before. It was normal. We all spent four days just constantly together after Bob passed, and it was like nothing had changed.”
She then added, “It’s not that there’s not a relationship there, it’s just that we live very different lives.”