Full House almost had a very different Danny Tanner.
Jodie Sweetin, who played middle child Stephanie Tanner throughout the beloved sitcom’s run on ABC, recently recalled shooting the series’ original pilot with another on-screen dad before Bob Saget was brought in as the Tanner family patriarch.
“We started doing the show, and we’d shot an entire pilot, actually, with John Posey, who was a lovely human being and very sweet and wonderful,” Sweetin, 44, said on the Tuesday, June 23, episode of Black Eyed Peas rapper Taboo’s Comics & Kicks podcast.
Posey, who would go on to become a household name on shows like Better Call Saul, Boston Legal and Teen Wolf, was a relative unknown at the time of his original casting as Danny Tanner, having only just made his on-screen debut as Mr. Jacobi in Manhunter in 1986.
But despite Posey making a positive impression on Sweetin during the original pilot, Full House creator Jeff Franklin had always had Saget in mind for the role of Danny. Unfortunately for him, Saget was originally under contract for The Morning Program on CBS at the time and was unable to take the part. However, when that show came to an early end, Franklin jumped at the chance to redo the pilot with the up-and-coming comic in the lead role.
“Bob was the first choice for Danny. So when he was no longer doing the show that was conflicting with Full House, we reshot the entire pilot, which Jeff Franklin had to fight for so hard because that’s a lot of money,” Sweetin explained. “He was like, ‘I just know it. I just know this is who we need as the dad. This is going to be it.’ And he was right.”
Posey, 70, previously recalled receiving the call that his Full House role was being recast during a 2014 interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, saying at the time, “It was my agent saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but for some reason they’re testing Bob Saget.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about? Why would they do that?’ I didn’t know at the time that he was the guy that they originally wanted, that he was just unavailable.”