5 Actors Who Hated Their Sitcom Characters
For funny actors and aspiring stand-up comics, landing a long-running sitcom role is like winning the lottery. You get guaranteed work for years and, even in the streaming era, the chance for a lifetime of residual checks. But some sitcom stars insist on biting the humor hand that feeds them. Here are five actors from successful TV comedies who wish they had never landed their roles in the first place…
Chevy Chase, ‘Community’
Chase, who had been irrelevant for years before finding a new generation of fans on Community, got himself canned for using a racial slur on the set. Fine, no problem, Chase told Marc Maron on the WTF podcast — he didn’t want to be there anyway. “I honestly felt the show wasn’t funny enough for me, ultimately,” Chase explained. “I felt a little bit constrained. Everybody had their bits, and I thought they were all good. It just wasn’t hard-hitting enough for me.”
This article not your thing? Try these...
“Hey, no one was keeping you there,” Joel McHale told Chevy, via PEOPLE. “That’s Chevy being Chevy. I wrote about this in my book, but I was like, ‘Hey, the feeling’s mutual, bud.’”
Bea Arthur, ‘Golden Girls’
Arthur didn’t always hate playing Dorothy on The Golden Girls, but she resented what the role ultimately became. By the end, she wanted out because of stale storylines that reduced Dorothy to being the brunt of certain kinds of jokes. “Unfortunately, the things that were said about Dorothy were that she was big and ugly,” according to the book, Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind The Lanai. “And that wears on an actress after a while."
Arthur also wasn’t nuts about working with Betty White. “She was not that fond of me,” White said in 2011, according to The Village Voice. “She found me a pain in the neck sometimes. It was my positive attitude — and that made Bea mad sometimes. Sometimes if I was happy, she’d be furious!”
Jeannette McCurdy, ‘iCarly’
McCurdy wrote a whole book about her miserable experiences playing Sam on iCarly and Cat and Sam. Much of her vitriol was reserved for “The Creator,” an unnamed producer on both shows who was responsible for alleged abusive behavior. (Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV adds plenty of voices in support of her allegations.) But McCurdy hated Sam as well. On her Empty Inside podcast, she told Anna Faris that she was “so unfulfilled by the roles that I played and felt like it was the most just cheesy, embarrassing” thing.
Robert Reed, ‘The Brady Bunch’
Reed, who studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, believed playing Mike Brady was beneath him. “He was such a stickler, he used to read with the script in one hand and the other he had in the Encyclopedia Britannica,” said producer Sherwood Schwartz in the Los Angeles Daily News. “Every day of every week, he was a pain in the neck, and you can go a little further south of that. If something didn’t ring the truth bell with him, he’d walk off the set and not tell you why.”
Andy Kaufman, ‘Taxi’ (?)
According to many, Kaufman hated the idea of being forever identified with his breakout role of Latka. “This was to be his legacy-in-shorthand,” wrote Bill Zehme in Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. “He sensed/feared the imminent cultural shackling of it from the get-go.”
When the show was canceled, Kaufman allegedly exclaimed, “Thank God.”
But Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon, who was a writer on Taxi, said stories about Kaufman being difficult on the show are “complete fiction.” On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Simon explained that Kaufman’s co-comedy conspirator Bob Zmuda made up a lot of the troubled stories around Kaufman and Taxi. The notorious prankster would have loved Zmuda’s revisionist history, Simon admitted.