Ed O’Neill and Amanda Bearse’s friction working on Married … With Children proves that not all costars go together like a horse and carriage.
“I did a thing on the show that involved Amanda Bearse that I regretted,” O’Neill, 77, confessed during the Thursday, January 18, episode of the “Dinner’s on Me With Jesse Tyler Ferguson” podcast. “We didn’t get along.”
O’Neill clarified that he and Bearse, 65, actually got along “for a long time” and were “great friends” when the sitcom began.
The actor recalled things going sour during season 6, hypothesizing that O’Neill, Katey Sagal, Christina Applegate and David Faustino being asked to be part of a 1989 TV Guide cover had something to do with the tension.
“Her and David Garrison were the neighbors, and they were told they could not be on the cover. Because they had a rule: Only so many could be on the cover,” O’Neill claimed, noting that the magazine “violated that for like two shows, I think it was M.A.S.H. and Dallas. That was an exception. [They] weren’t doing it for us. We were lucky to get it.”
O’Neill alleged that both Bearse and Garrison, 71, approached him on set and asked him to go to bat for them with the show’s creators. “[Amanda] said, ‘We expect you to go to Ron Leavitt and tell him, this doesn’t work. We’re all on the cover,’” O’Neill claimed.
He confessed to host and former Modern Family costar Jesse Tyler Ferguson that he should have said, “Fine, I’ll talk to him about it.” But instead, O’Neill remembered telling Bearse, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m sorry you guys aren’t on the cover, I really am. I wish you were. We can’t do anything about it.”
Looking back, O’Neill said that he does “regret” how he responded to his castmate’s plea for help on the matter, claiming now he would handle it differently.
O’Neill played patriarch Al Bundy alongside Sagal’s Peggy Bundy on the Fox series from 1987 to 1997. The show documented the Bundy’s working-class life with their two children, Kelly (Applegate) and Bud (Faustino). Bearse portrayed their neighbor Marcy D’Arcy throughout all 11 seasons.
O’Neill previously addressed his falling out with Bearse in 2013, revealing that when he wasn’t invited to Bearse and Carrie Schenken’s 2010 wedding, he knew something was wrong between them. He told the Television Academy at the time that he thought it was because he said it was “silly” to have two brides wearing tuxedos.
“I don’t know whose fault it was. We just sort of grew a bit apart,” he explained. “Maybe I reminded her of someone she didn’t like, an uncle or something.”
Five years later, Bearse was asked about her and O’Neill’s relationship during a Q&A session at a fan convention. “Are we filming this?” she responded with a smirk. “I follow the Thumper [from Bambi] rule. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Bearse played coy about their dynamic, but alleged that O’Neill was “not happy toward the end of the series, so that affected everything.”
