Someone, somewhere, has a very special souvenir from the Roseanne set. During a reunion with her TV daughter Sara Gilbert on The Talk on Tuesday, Aug. 5, former sitcom star Roseanne Barr retold a funny story involving a young George Clooney, who appeared in several episodes of her hit ABC series between 1988 and 1991. According to Barr, the then-future A-lister and notorious prankster took a picture of his genitals and taped it to the fridge, where it was apparently stolen from someone in the cast or crew.
“Well, we used to have a few cocktails after we wrapped on the set there—just the adults,” the 61-year-old comedienne explained. During one of those post-work happy hours, “George took a picture of his, um, wiener?” she continued. “What’s the better word?”
Laughing, co-host Aisha Tyler piped in, “Uh, penis?”
“Yeah. Well, he had these Groucho [Marx] glasses, and he put the Groucho glasses [on his nether region], so that the wiener was—instead of the nose, he took the nose off,” Barr said, to roars from the audience. “And he put [the picture] on the [Conner family] fridge for the next day when we came in.”
“I totally missed it!” Gilbert exclaimed. “I think I thought it was just a stuffed animal!” (Now 39, the actress was just 13 when Roseanne started filming in 1988; she played Darlene Conner, one of Barr’s TV children.)
Asked what became of the funny photo, Barr replied, “We would laugh at it all the time, and about the second day, it disappeared. I don’t know. I thought it would surface by now, but maybe they don’t know it was George Clooney.”
The Monuments Men star, for his part, has denied that such a picture exists. After Barr told the story back in 2006, Clooney—now 53 and engaged to Amal Alamuddin—told the New York Daily News he wouldn’t have taken such a risk at that point in his life. He did admit, however, to having pulled the same prank in his youth.
“I called it The Face,” he said at the time. “But I knew better than to do it at that stage of my career. I must have told her the story.” (In fact, in a 2008 interview with Esquire, he said the last time he’d done a “Mr. Face impersonation” was in 1988, the year he joined the cast of Roseanne.)
