Jodie Sweetin Recalls Reshooting ‘Full House’ Pilot to Replace Previous Actor in Bob Saget’s Role

The family patriarch of Full House almost looked a lot different when the team behind the hit sitcom initially couldn’t get then-up-and-coming actor Bob Saget for the role of Danny Tanner.

Jodie Sweetin — who played Stephanie Tanner throughout the run of Full House and its revival series, Fuller House — appeared on the Wednesday, June 24 episode of Taboo’s Comics & Kicks where she discussed the early days of getting the show off the ground in 1987.

Specifically, Sweetin, 44, discussed the pilot they shot with another actor in the Danny Tanner role. “We started doing the show, and we’d shot an entire pilot, actually, with a different dad, John Posey, who was a lovely human being and very sweet and wonderful,” she explained. “But, Bob was always 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,” she continued. “Which [series creator] Jeff Franklin had to fight for so hard because that’s a lot of money… A lot of money.”

According to Sweetin, Franklin was confident he was making the right call despite the money it cost to reshoot. “He was like, ‘I know it, I just know this is who we need as the dad and this is going to be it,’” she said. “And he was right, so…”

Speaking to Alabama.com in 2021, Saget — who died in January 2022 at the age of 65 as a result of head trauma, NPR reported — revealed that he always “felt guilt” about replacing Posey, calling it “sad.” However, at the time, he also noted, “that’s life.”

Meanwhile, Posey spoke to Yahoo!, where he implied there were no hard feelings and revealed a third option for Danny Tanner that was reportedly in the mix.

“And from what I was told, they were looking all over the country for people and couldn’t find a guy, although I later found out that Bob Saget and Paul Reiser were the two guys they were after first, and they were both unavailable,” he revealed. “They were obligated to other shows. How you go from those guys to me is kind of a mystery, because we couldn’t be more different.”

Fortunately, Posey’s Hollywood career recovered from the unaired and reshot pilot: He’d go on to have roles in Teen Wolf, Better Call Saul and Boston Legal.