In some alternate universe, it’s David Spade sharing scenes with Mr. Woodchuck on Full House, not Dave Coulier. Spade recently revealed he tried out to play Joey Gladstone on the 1990s ABC sitcom before Coulier landed the role.
“When I moved here, it was one of my first auditions when I had a little heat on me, and I read for Joey,” Spade remembered in a recent installment of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” video series.
Spade recalled acting out a scene in which Joey struggled to do laundry. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but let’s just say I safely didn’t get that close,” he said.
Around the same time, Spade “almost” got a starring role on the police procedural In the Heat of the Night. “What a different career,” he said. “So if I got that, that show went for, like, seven years. No comedy.”
Finally, Spade got his big break as a Saturday Night Live cast member during the early 1990s before starring in the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me!
“So Full House would have been different, but again, I guess when you look back at everything that happened that went wrong, it worked out,” he told Esquire. “But, man, the turmoil of not getting stuff. Oof. Rough. That stuff really roughed me up, like mentally, when you’re not getting stuff.”
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As for Coulier, he had a near-miss of a different sort during the Full House auditions. After his tryout, an executive producer asked him to do a reading for Danny Tanner, but the role that went to Bob Saget.
“I actually had three auditions, and two of them happened at the same audition,” the actor told Glamour in 2016. “I went in, and my character wasn’t named Joey Gladstone at the time. I actually picked the name and gave it to [creator] Jeff Franklin. He was trying to come up with a different name for the character, and I suggested Joey Gladstone.”
Coulier went on: “As I was walking out of the room, [executive producer] Tom Miller stopped me and said, ‘That was great, but can you also read for the role of the father?’ I said, ‘Sure, give me a couple minutes.’ So I went and rehearsed, came back in, read for the role of the father, and they said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ Jeff Franklin put his arm around me … and he said, ‘You really did a great job.’ Sometimes you hear that and never get the job, but when I went home, my manager called and said, ‘You got this Full House pilot.’”
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