Jodie Sweetin’s friendship with former Full House sisters Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen has changed over the years.
“I loved them. I was really close to Ashley and Mary Kate … from the beginning,” Sweetin, 44, said on the Tuesday, April 21, episode of the “McBride Rewind” podcast. “I would go to their room and hang out and play with them.”
She continued, “I loved being the older one [and the] caretaker like, ‘Let’s be friends.’ They would come spend the night at my house. They’d come to my cabin on the weekends with my parents and I. We’d go horseback riding. We’d go to Disneyland. I mean, I’ve got pictures of us playing dress up at my house, like, they’re 3 [and] I’m 6, like, just kid stuff and I loved it.”
Sweetin starred as Stephanie Tanner on Full House from 1987 to 1995, while the Olsen twins, now both 39, shared the role of younger sister Michelle Tanner. Sweetin and the rest of the OG cast reunited for Netflix’s Fuller House revival, sans Ashley and Mary-Kate. (The Olsens now run a renowned fashion empire and have stepped back from the Hollywood spotlight.)
“We haven’t talked,” Sweetin said of her relationship with the twins on Tuesday’s episode. “I think after Full House and growing up and everything, they’ve had an extremely different trajectory than any of the rest of us. People say, ‘Oh, well, do you guys not talk? Is it bad?’ No, they were 8 years old when the show finished, [and] we weren’t as close as we were. I didn’t see them all the time.”
Sweetin had spent time with Ashley and Mary-Kate at “family events and dinners,” which became less frequent after Full House wrapped.
“It wasn’t like there was bad blood between any of us, but they moved to New York and then got married and [built their] fashion empire and moved into that world,” Sweetin acknowledged. “It was, like, we just sort of drifted apart.”
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Sweetin last reunited with Mary-Kate and Ashley at a memorial for Full House patriarch Bob Saget after his death in 2022.
“I think they fiercely protect [their] privacy, but when Bob passed, it was the first time that all of us had been together in a long time,” Sweetin said. “Bob would see them in New York, and I had seen them in L.A. It wasn’t bad blood, but that was the first time we’d all really been together again. It was just like it was before. It was normal. We all spent four days just constantly together after Bob passed, and it was like nothing had changed.”
She concluded, “It’s not that there’s not a relationship there, it’s just that we live very different lives.”
