Jodie Sweetin Shares the Real Reason Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen Passed on ‘Fuller House’

Jodie Sweetin is shedding light on why her Full House costars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen never came back for Fuller House.

Speaking on the Tuesday, June 30, episode of the podcast Taboo’s Comics & Kicks, Sweetin, who played Stephanie Tanner on the original series from 1987 to 1995, reflected on the Olsen twins’ absence from Netflix’s Fuller House, after they declined to reprise their role.

The absence was even worked into the reboot’s first episode, when the cast broke the fourth wall. “Basically it’s the first episode of Fuller House and the whole family’s back. We’re standing in the kitchen and we’re talking about all being together again,” Sweetin, 44, said on the podcast. “And then we say something about, ‘Well, if only Michelle were here, or Michelle’s off running her fashion empire in New York.’ And then we all just kind of looked to the camera like, ‘Uh-huh,’ because we would have loved for them to come back and play.”

“You know, this isn’t what they love,” Sweetin said of the twins skipping Fuller House. “I always say this to like people [who are] like, ‘Oh my god, did they hate it?’ Like, no, everyone’s on good terms with them, but they were 8 years old when this show stopped.”

Mary-Kate and Ashley, 40, began acting at 9 months old and shared the role of Michelle Tanner throughout Full House‘s original run. The pair went on to costar in more than 30 films together, including It Takes Two, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, To Grandmother’s House We Go and How the West Was Fun, before stepping away from acting to launch their luxury fashion house, The Row, in 2005. Mary-Kate now serves as creative director and Ashley as CEO.

“They have a different relationship to being on set all the time,” Sweetin said during the podcast. “They might not remember being 2 years old and having, you know, us all carrying them around and doing this stuff, but I do… They’re into fashion. They don’t want attention.”

“Their empire blew up and they don’t want attention, and I get it,” she added. “They had so much and were so invaded and for public consumption. I totally understand why they don’t want to do that. But we figured we’d, you know, toss it out there and be silly anyway.”