Imagine you were on TV from the age of nine months old onwards — and on a hit sitcom that ran for a pretty long time, no less. I’d imagine you wouldn’t like it too much after a while!
And it sounds like that was the case for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who you absolutely know from their eight-season reign as Michelle Tanner on the beloved ’90s TV sitcom Full House — which concluded when the twins were just nine years old.
So, during a recent episode of their podcast How Rude, Tanneritos, fellow former Full House stars Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber answered a fan question that went a little something like this: “Was there ever a point when the directors would favor working with one twin over the other and give them more time on set? In a situation like that, could they fire one and keep the other? How does that work with twins? Especially when they get older and you don’t need to switch out the crying babies.”
“It’s a really good question,” Jodie said. “And I would say yes, there was a point when they favored working with one over the other.”
Jodie also claimed that this preference was really only a thing “at the beginning,” when one Olsen twin wasn’t enjoying the act of being on set as much as the other. Drumroll, please…
It was pretty-much-still-a-baby Mary-Kate who wasn’t as easygoing on set as also-pretty-much-still-a-baby Ashley.
“Mary Kate did not like being out on set, but Ashley was like, ‘Cool, Whatevs.’ She was much more…docile about it,” Jodie claimed.
“That’s absolutely who they are. Ashley will be like, ‘Sure, whatevs.’ Mary Kate was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”
Andrea added that there were specific reasons why one of the Olsen twins might shoot a scene instead of the other one: “One would want to do a certain scene because it was more fun for them and the other one didn’t care,” she explained.
But according to Jodie, there was one type of scene that the twins both wanted to film: Scenes where they’d be eating candy. “That was the only thing that they were like, ‘This isn’t fair,’” she recalled. “They couldn’t have one twin eating more sweets than the other one, or the girls would riot.”
Who can relate? You can listen to the entire episode here.