Roseanne Barr wants to make her onscreen relationship with Randy Quaid a reality.
“I’m in love with him, and I wish he would leave his wife and marry me,” Barr, 73, quipped in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Tuesday, October 20. “I enjoyed making out with him so much that I wrote extra scenes where we would make out.”
Randy, 76, tied the knot with Evi Quaid in 1989. He was previously married to Ella Jolly from 1980 to 1989. Meanwhile, Barr has been in a relationship with Johnny Argent since 2003. She was previously married to Bill Pentland from 1974 to 1990, Tom Arnold from 1990 to 1994 and Ben Thomas from 1995 to 2002.
Randy and Barr costar in her upcoming self-financed, independent comedy series Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable. The eight-episode sitcom follows Barr as the matriarch of a mixed-race prepper family living in the Texas Hill Country. Her character sets out to take down a criminal empire to fund a lavish bat mitzvah for her granddaughter. Randy plays her husband and the local sheriff.
“She knows that she’s got to give her granddaughter a bat mitzvah because that’s part of their Jewish culture,” Barr told THR of her character. “One day, she gets a message from the good Lord that she’s got to take things into her own hands if she wants to be able to afford the greatest bat mitzvah that’s ever been in Bovine, Texas. And she uses everything at her command, which is her multireligious prayer group, and her formerly dormant sexuality.”
Barr continued, “I haven’t really showed it to anybody yet. But it is so funny. It’s the funniest s*** I’ve ever done, and I had a ball and I play a really wacky old lady this time.”
Meemaw, which does not yet have a streaming service or a release date, marks Barr’s return to television for the first time in eight years. The comedian was shunned from Hollywood in 2018 when ABC abruptly canceled her Roseanne revival after just nine episodes due to an offensive tweet Barr made about former Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is half-Black. (At the time, Barr wrote that Jarrett looked as if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”)
ABC later continued the story in the spinoff The Conners, which aired from 2018 to 2025. Barr was absent from the series, with her character being killed off.
“It was not a racist tweet. It wasn’t about race, it was about politics,” Barr insisted to THR on Tuesday. “What it really was was a three-month conversation between myself and journalists in Iran who were talking about attacks mostly on Iranian women in the streets.”
She continued, “And what I meant was the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Valerie Jarrett is part,” with THR noting that Barr did not offer evidence to support this allegation.
“Planet of the Apes is my favorite movie. [Screenwriter] Rod Serling said it was an analogy for what the Nazis did to the Jews. I always called the government in Iran Planet of the Apes, because that is exactly what they do,” Barr said. “In the movie Planet of the Apes, a militarized police force arrests human beings for speaking and reading, and that is exactly what they did to the women of Iran. That is a movie about fascism, it is not a movie about Black people.”
Barr told the outlet that Meemaw was her opportunity to heal from her firing.
“And a lot of the healing happens through my scenes with Omar Gooding, who plays my son-in-law,” she said. “He’s also a stand-up comic, and he’s a Black man. I met a lot of resistance casting Black actors. We had a lot of really great Black comedians audition for the role. A lot of people said no, they wouldn’t. ‘How could any Black person work with me?’ That hurt me.”
