‘Full House’ Stars Reveal Which Olsen Twin Didn’t Like Appearing on the Show

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen shared a role as Michelle Tanner on Full House, but that doesn’t mean both of them were super psyched to be acting.

On the Nov. 20 episode of How Rude, Tanneritos, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber, who played Stephane Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler, respectively, answered questions from fans about their hit series. Full House ran for eight seasons, from 1987 to 1995. 

A listener asked about the Olsen siblings’ split performance. “Was there ever a point when the directors would favor working with one twin over the other and give them more time on set? In a situation like that, could they fire one and keep the other? How does that work with twins? Especially when they get older and you don’t need to switch out the crying babies.”

Mary-Kate and Ashley, now 39, were just nine months old when they started filming the series. By the time the show ended, they were nine years old. 

“It’s a really good question,” Sweetin, 42, said. “And I would say yes, there was a point when they favored working with one over the other.” But, she said, it wasn’t when the twins were older: “it was at the beginning,” she said. 

The twin who was much happier to be in the scenes? “It was Ashley,” she said. “Mary Kate did not like being out on set, but Ashley was like, ‘Cool, Whatevs.’ She was much more kind of docile about it.” Sweeting said it was “funny” because they kept those personalities throughout their lives. “That’s absolutely who they are. Ashley will be like, ‘Sure, whatevs.’ Mary Kate was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ”

There were other reasons why one might appear in a scene instead of the other. “There would be certain scenes that one would do and what the other one wouldn’t or something like that,” Sweetin said. Barber, 49, said, “One would want to do a certain scene because it was more fun for them and the other one didn’t care.”

Sweetin added that the directors “had to divide up the sweets eating scenes because that was the only thing that they were like, ‘This isn’t fair.’ ” They couldn’t have one twin eating more sweets than the other one, or the girls would riot. 

But the actresses said that the show definitely never considered firing a twin. “It’s kind of a package deal,” she said. The other reason, of course, was child labor laws, and the younger an actor is, the less time they can work. 

“When you have younger kids, you are almost always using twins because there is no way that you would get stuff out of an infant or a little kid, a toddler without going over the time,” Sweetin said. “You need two bodies.”

The actresses pointed out that even though the show’s episodes were just 22-minutes long, they took around “five hours” to film. They joked that audiences for the tapings were “very surprised” and ended up “famished” by the end of the taping. 

Full House helped launch Mary-Kate and Ashley into child stardom. In 1992, they starred in their first TV movie, To Grandmother’s House We Go, which featured both playing different characters for the first time. Other early projects included 1993’s Double, Double, Toil and Trouble and 1994’s How the West Was Fun. They made their feature film debut in 1995’s It Takes Two.

Other teen-friendly movies they made included Holiday in the Sun and Billboard Dad. Their last film together was 2004’s New York Minute, which was also Ashley’s last acting role. Mary-Kate retired from acting in 2012. They were the only cast members who didn’t return for the five-season Full House sequel series Fuller House, which premiered in 2016.

In 2006, the twins founded their award-winning luxury fashion line The Row.