Just yesterday “The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story” aired and it showed a side of the cast members behind the scenes that was quite salacious and drama-filled. Yes, the chemistry you see between cast members on TV shows isn’t always real or what it seems, and that goes for bad relationships between co-stars. It’s true that sometimes the people paid to play friends and lovers really can’t stand one another. Here are 11 examples of cast members who couldn’t get along from some of our favorite shows.
Paramount Domestic Television
Moesha
Though Brandy and Countess Vaughn had to play best friends on “Moesha,” they had a very contentious relationship, which Brandy recounted in detail as the cover darling of the April ’98 issue of Vibe.
“I think she’s very funny, very talented,” Brandy says. “I just feel like she wants to be in the position I’m in. People tell her, ‘You’re the reason why the show’s successful.’ And she’s told me that before. And she’s called me a b***h-to my face. She said, ‘I’m the reason why the show is successful, bitch.’ In front of a lot of people. And I looked at her like, Wow. I couldn’t say nothing about her because I wasn’t about to…”
“She knows,” says Brandy of Vaughn. “She wakes up and looks at herself in the mirror and she gets disgusted. I don’t.”
Yikes!
CBS
Good Times
Both Esther Rolle (Florida Evans) and John Amos (James Evans) were expecting “Good Times” to be a comedy that dealt with serious issues in a smart way that was positive. But Jimmie Walker’s character of J.J. was such a big hit on the show with his phrase “Dy-no-mite!” and somewhat coonish behavior, so writers focused on him after a while. Eventually, both Rolle and Amos were upset about direction of the show and were ready to go. Rolle had this to say about the character of J.J. in Ebony back in ’75.
“He’s 18 and he doesn’t work. He can’t read or write. He doesn’t think. The show didn’t start out to be that…Little by little—with the help of the artist, I suppose, because they couldn’t do that to me—they have made J.J. more stupid and enlarged the role. Negative images have been slipped in on us through the character of the oldest child.”
NBC
Golden Girls
According to Rue McClanahan, who played Blance Devereaux on “Golden Girls,” she didn’t have a relationship at all with Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy.
“Bea and I didn’t have a lot of relationship going on. Bea is a very, very eccentric woman. She wouldn’t go to lunch [with me] unless Betty [White] would go with her. She was very dependent on keeping everything as it always had been, and I was anything but that.”
New Line Cinema
Sex and the City
While Carrie Bradshaw and Samantha Jones were two very different people, they were good friends and understood each as characters on “Sex and the City.” But in real life, Sarah Jessica Parker admitted that at times she and Cattrall could rub each other the wrong way, saying “Sometimes feelings get hurt.”
“When you’re on set, you’re working 90-hour weeks, you’re never home, you’re exhausted. There are times when all of us have been sensitive and sometimes feelings get hurt. But I don’t have any regrets about how I’ve treated people.”
Cattrall agreed that working long hours caused issues from time to time, but there weren’t many.
“Nineteen-hour workdays are stressful, whether you’re driving a truck, working in a coal mine or on a set and trying to be your brightest at 4 o’ clock in the morning. But there’s a camaraderie that happened through all of that. The chemistry among the four of us is very strong.”
NBC
227
By the time the cast was filming the fourth season of “227,” co-star Jackée Harry (who played Sandra Clark) was a huge star, and won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy a year before. But with all that success came some issues with star of the show, Marla Gibbs (who played Mary Jenkins) because too much of the writing was starting to focus on Harry. She was eventually offered a spin-off show called “Jackée,” but after NBC rejected the pilot, Harry decided to leave “227” altogether. Good news though! The women get along just fine these days and both star on the Centric show “The First Family.”
Source: NBC
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Who could forget the drama between Will Smith and Janet Hubert (who played the original Aunt Vivian)? Hubert has been quite vocal over the last few years about her distaste for former TV nephew Smith. She initially said that she would never want to reunite with the cast until Smith apologized for past distasteful behavior, and in a chat with The Insider, she spoke about how important her character was to the show:
“[Smith] said ‘we’re just gonna replace her and act like nothing happened,'” Hubert recounted of her exit from the hit comedy in 1993. “Well honey, that is not what happened, is it? The world has let me know that my place on that show was very, very, very loved … I felt demonized and beaten up and crucified for many many years, no one came forward in my defense.”
Fox
The X-Files
While David Duchovny looks at former “X-Files” star Gillian Anderson as a sister, after working alongside one another from 1993 to 2002, they had some issues on-set from time to time.
“Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s nothing to do with the other person. All that fades away and you’re just left with the appreciation and love for the people you’ve worked with for so long. We used to argue about nothing. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
Fox
Martin
The show “Martin” went to hell when Gina (played by Tisha Campbell-Martin) left the show abruptly. We would later find out that Campbell-Martin accused Martin Lawrence of sexual harassment. She also filed a lawsuit against him and the show’s producers for that harassment, along with alleged verbal and physical assaults in ’96. The case was settled and for Campbell-Martin to appear in the series finale, producers had to ensure that she wouldn’t have to appear in any scenes with her TV husband. It’s unclear if the two are even on speaking terms all these years later, but I doubt it…
VH1
Single Ladies
Despite playing friends on the first season of VH1’s “Single Ladies,” on-set, LisaRaye and Stacey Dash couldn’t get along. In a chat with Jet a couple years ago, LisaRaye said that Dash acted as though she really didn’t want to cooperate and be on-set, so they would bump heads:
“Yes, there was a disagreement over a scene. And it really wasn’t with me. It was with the director. I think it was about 2 or 3AM and we’d been shooting all damn day. Stacey tried to argue with the director about a line. And I’m like: ‘Girl, if you don’t say what the director wants you to say.’ It wasn’t that serious at first, but it went there.
It’s a bunch of women on the set. We might all be on our damn period at any given point. I just wanted us to move forward. Then the argument took on a life of its own. ”
NBC
Cosby Show
You really can’t get Lisa Bonet to participate in any reunion shindig, whether it’s for “Different World” or “Cosby Show,” but there have been rumors going around for years that Bonet and Bill Cosby had friction. In fact, according to a piece in People from ’92, it was confirmed that Bonet was fired after returning to the show post-“Different World” because of “creative differences” and was not invited to show up for the series finale.
AP Photo/FOX, Michael Becker
American Idol
Ugh. Who could forget the issues between Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey during the 12th season of the show? Despite the show using their feud to get people to watch, ratings were still very low because the cattiness was outrageous. The ladies had their first public spat in October 2012 while filming auditions in Charlotte. Minaj was heard saying “I told them, I’m not f—ing putting up with her f—ing highness over there.” And things got worse when Carey ran to Barbara Walters and told her that she didn’t feel safe around the FemmeC. “Mariah says she can’t take a chance and she has hired extra security.” Thankfully, when the season ended they were both directed to the exit and haven’t had to deal with one another since.
