Jaleel White finally addressed former costars Reginald VelJohnson and Jo Marie Payton‘s past claims that he was “difficult” to work with on the set of Family Matters.
“They’re also over 70 and I’ve been told not to argue with my elders from the time I was 12 years old,” White, 47, told Andy Cohen on the Tuesday, November 19, episode of his SiriusXM radio show. “With Jo Marie, it’s always like, ‘What day did I catch her on or what day did the interviewer catch her?’”
White didn’t shut down VelJohnson, 72, and Payton’s potential negative experiences, adding, “I’ll be self-aware enough. As a 13-year-old kid, anytime I was called to set, I always brought my basketball. I dribbled my basketball everywhere.”
He continued: “I can hear the script supervisor to this day going, ’Oh, here he comes with that basketball.’ If that is the extent to which I was called difficult, then OK. I digress.”
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Family Matters, which aired from 1989 to 1998, was a spinoff of the Perfect Strangers and followed a middle-class Black family living in Chicago. The hit sitcom starred VelJohnson, Payton, Darius McCrary, Kellie Williams, Jaimee Foxworth, Bryton McClure and Michelle Thomas.
White joined Family Matters halfway through the first season as the Winslows’ nerdy neighbor Steve Urkel. The role was only meant to last one episode, but Steve became a breakout character that paved the way for White to join the main cast.
“I was not welcomed to the cast at all,” White claimed on TV One’s Uncensored in 2021. “They know what it was. … I didn’t think anything of it being cast to be on Family Matters, because it was supposed to only be a guest spot, one and done.”
Payton, 74, later noted that White was “just a kid” when Family Matters was on the air. She instead blamed “some of those adults” on set for allowing White to allegedly “run wild and do whatever he wanted to do, thinking he can say what he wants to say, you know, and hurt people’s feelings and all that.”
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In his memoir, Growing Up Urkel, which was released on Tuesday, November 19, White elaborated on VelJohnson and Payton’s comments about his behavior on set.
“Am I difficult to work with? I wondered for the first time. They’ve said publicly that I was spoiled. But was I really?” he wrote. “I think we were all affected by certain privileges and autonomies so I try to refrain from revisionist history or being the pot to call the kettle black.”
White also recalled Payton often being late for table readings. In one instance, Payton allegedly told her costars she was tardy because her rearview mirror fell off her car so she drove back home to get her other Mercedes.
“Whenever I hear in interviews, thirty years after the fact, the different ways in which I might have been a difficult costar, it’s safe to say I never held up any table readings because I had to go back home and get my other Mercedes,” White quipped in his memoir.
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During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, White explained why he wasn’t trying to reference any of his former costars’ specific claims.
“I never felt any need for any get back [at my costars]. First of all, I live my life to do better. That’s the truth. I have a 15-year-old daughter. If I put out a book, I want her to be proud of it,” he told Us. “I also write things to try to be timeless. So addressing anyone’s personal accusations, I feel makes the book not nearly the literary work that I wanted it to be.”
Growing Up Urkel is out now.
