Bob Saget almost didn’t play Danny Tanner in Full House

Bob Saget almost didn’t play Danny Tanner in Full House.

The late comic and actor’s posthumous birthday is on May 17, and he would have turned 70. Bob was discovered useless in January 2022 and died from blunt head trauma that probably occurred from an “unwitnessed fall.” He is best recognized for his position as the beloved patriarch on the ABC sitcom, which ran for 8 seasons from September 1987 to May 1995.

The present adopted a just lately widowed Danny, who acquired assist from his brother-in-law, Jesse Katsopolis, and his childhood best buddy, Joey Gladstone, to lift his three daughters, D.J., Stephanie, and Michelle, in his dwelling in San Francisco. The remainder of the solid included John Stamos, Dave Coulier, Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Andrea Barber, Lori Loughlin, and Blake and Dylan Tuomy-Wilhoit.

In a July 2021 interview with Alabama.com, Bob shared that the producers who produced the ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies with Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari — Tom Miller, Bob Boyett, and Jeff Franklin — needed him for Full House. Bob had labored as an viewers warm-up comic for the present and made a visitor look in the first season.

Bob told the outlet he wasn’t accessible because he was on CBS’s The Morning Program. But that was soon after he was let go from the present and ended up changing the actor they’d employed as Danny for the unaired pilot, John Posey.

“Then I got fired from The Morning Program, and they wanted me still for Full House. So I took the job, and it meant everything. It was a sitcom, it was on ABC, it was a family show. They were reshooting my stuff from the pilot because I replaced someone [John], which is always sad. I always feel guilt about it, but that’s life,” Bob explained.

Jeff, who was also the creator of Full House, appeared on Dave’s podcast Full House Rewind in July 2025, the place he spoke about reshooting the pilot and the casting of Danny.

Jeff shared that he had always initially needed Bob, whom he had turn into pals with after they met when Bob was engaged on Bosom Buddies. The 71-year-old director said he was “amazed” by Bob and his job as the viewers warm-up man. He said he told Bob he must be a sitcom star and hoped they’d work together.

In the episode, Jeff talked about that Posey had performed a chemistry read with Dave and Stamos, calling it “great” and saying Posey was “a sweetheart of a guy.” The present bought with him picked as Danny, however then Bob was fired from CBS and was “available and interested.”

“[Posey] was great, but he’s not a comedian, you know, he was an actor, and you know this is a comedy, and you want the three funniest guys you can get, and that cast was so magic and I just thought if we could just get Bob in there, it would just be….it would put us over the top,” Jeff said.

Dave talked about that he and Stamos did a display take a look at with Bob on the set of the ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers. Jeff famous that the display take a look at was a “secret chemistry test” that he organized so he “had something to show people — because Bob was not an actor either. He’d done a couple of guest shots, but he wasn’t really an actor, and he wasn’t Bob Saget yet.”

Jeff went on to say it was “tough” to reshoot the pilot that value almost one million {dollars}, and “to break John Posey’s heart was not fun either,” however he knew it wanted to be performed.

“I just had this gut instinct, from the beginning, that Bob could be one of those classic TV dads,” he added. “I just fought for him as hard as I could. I said, ‘This is going to make the show so much better. We have to do this.’ It took a lot of convincing, and they finally said OK.”

Posey, who’s the father of MTV’s Teen Wolf star Tyler Posey, spoke with Yahoo! Entertainment in April 2014 about being changed by Bob. He shared that he discovered he was being changed while shifting from Atlanta to Los Angeles, the place Full House was filming. The 70-year-old actor was in the center of Mississippi when he discovered the news, noting, “It made for a long drive, as you can imagine.” He told the outlet that his pager had gone off and his agent had called him with the news.

“[I] returned the call, and it was my agent saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but for some reason they’re testing Bob Saget.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about? Why would they do that?’ I didn’t know at the time that he was the guy that they originally wanted, that he was just unavailable. I guess something opened up for him. Maybe he was fired from something, I think [CBS’ The Morning Program], and suddenly he was available. And I guess the executive producer talked ABC into allowing him to reshoot. So that was the end of that,” Posey elaborated.

John also shared that he had gotten the Full House pilot when he was first approached by somebody at ABC to “‘get in front of our comedy development people'” after they noticed him in the comedy group, Comedia, in Atlanta.

The unaired pilot, which had been hid for years, was included as a bonus feature on the present’s season one DVD, launched in February 2005.