This Was George Clooney’s Excuse for Never Showing Up on ‘The Conners’
Over the course of its seven post-Roseanne seasons, The Conners has welcomed a number of celebrity guest stars to the show, including Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Patton Oswalt, Whoopi Goldberg and Dan Aykroyd, who thankfully resisted the urge to bust out his harmonica and force John Goodman into performing a Blues Brothers 2000 reunion concert.
But there are a number of actors from the original Roseanne series who, barring a last-minute cameo on tonight’s series finale, simply never appeared on The Conners.
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Executive producers Bruce Helford and Dave Caplan addressed some of these absences in a recent interview with TVLine. On the subject of Leon, Roseanne’s former boss-turned-business partner, played by the late Martin Mull, the producers claimed that they wanted to find a way to include him on the show, but it became a “moot issue” after he passed away last year. “It would have been a conversation, definitely for the finale,” Helford stated.
But the biggest actor that the show could have theoretically brought back was George Clooney. Back in his pre-ER days, Clooney played Wellman Plastics foreman, and Jackie’s eventual ex-boyfriend, Booker, in the first season of Roseanne.
It turns out that The Conners’ lack of Clooney content wasn’t for a lack of trying. “We did reach out to him numerous times,” Helford revealed. The From Dusk TIll Dawn star didn’t claim that he was too busy, or too famous, to return to his sitcom roots, but instead offered a different explanation. According to Helford, “He said, ‘You know that I would, but if I do it for you guys, I gotta do it for everybody I’ve ever worked with who has a TV show because it would be wrong for me not to,’ so that was his out on that.”
It’s possible that Clooney turned down The Conners to avoid committing to any potential reboots of The Facts of Life or the short-lived TV spin-off of Look Who’s Talking. But he had already turned down the opportunity to reprise the role of Booker for the Roseanne reboot, prior to Roseanne Barr’s firing. In 2018, Barr told Howard Stern that “George Clooney didn’t want to come on — so that was a bummer,” adding that “he’s said some really silly things about me, but I still love him.”
Incidentally, Clooney did make an appearance in the third season of The Conners, albeit in flashback form. At the beginning of the episode Jackie reminisces about her time at Wellman Plastics and remarks that Booker “looked just like George Clooney. Man, I shoulda hit that until I broke it.”
It’s still possible that the show could end with Jackie running off with Clooney, who could either play Booker or himself, now that we know that George Clooney exists in the Roseanne-verse.
