Ed O'Neill on Incident That Caused Feud With 'Married With Children' Co-Star
Nearly 25 years later, he still has regrets about how it went down.
Long before he played the cantankerous Jay Pritchett on ABC's Modern Family, Ed O'Neill starred as the patriarch on another long-running sitcom; Married... with Children, which ran for 11 seasons on Fox from 1987 to 1997. During a recent appearance on his former Modern Family co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson's Dinner's on Me podcast, the 77-year-old actor broke his silence about a rift in the cast that evidently soured the working environment.
O'Neill had been regaling Ferguson with stories about the public response to the sometimes controversial show, and how people would often remark to him that his character Al Bundy reminded them of an uncle or male relative—but never themselves, because who would want to draw that comparison—when he suddenly switched gears. It sounded as though he had been wanting to get it off his chest for quite some time.
"I did a thing on the show that involved Amanda Bearse that I regretted," O'Neill confessed. "We didn’t get along, but we did for a long time. We were great friends. And I could guess, you know, I don’t want to speak for her, but it started when we got the cover of TV Guide. And her and David Garrison were the neighbors, and they were told that they could not be on the cover, because they had a rule that only so many could be on the cover."
"Now, they violated that for like two shows, I think it was M.A.S.H. and Dallas. That was an exception, weren't doing it for us," he explained. "We were lucky to get it, and it was like the sixth year in or something, we were thrilled that we got the cover of TV Guide, that was big. And Amanda and David came out in unison from their dressing room, we were on a sound stage, and she said, 'We expect you to go to [series co-creator] Ron Leavitt, and tell him, 'This doesn't work. We're all on the cover.'"
In fact, it was the July 29–Aug. 4, 1989 issue of TV Guide that O'Neill ended up appearing on, along with his co-stars Katey Sagal, Christina Applegate, and David Faustino. Garrison, who played Steve Rhoades, left the series in 1990 following the fourth season, though it's unclear whether the incident had anything to do with his decision.
"I should have said—if I was diplomatic—I should have said, 'Fine. I'll talk to him about it,'" he continued. "But instead, I said, 'Not, I'm not doing that. I'm sorry you guys aren't on the cover, I really am, I wish you were. But we can't do anything about it. What do you want me to do, lie and tell you that I'm going to bat for you?'"
When asked if he would have handled it differently now, O'Neill said that we indeed would have. "And that's my regret," he admitted.
And unfortunately, it seems as though the pair never repaired their friendship. During a Q&A session at a 2018 fan convention, Bearse was asked was her real-life relationship with O'Neill was like, and she did not mince words. "Are we filming this?" she asked. "I follow the Thumper [from Bambi] rule. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Meanwhile, for his part, O'Neill said in a 2013 Television Academy interview that the feud stemmed from not being invited to Bearse's wedding. Clearly, he's had more time to ruminate since then.