John Stamos Says ‘Full House' Could Have Been Very Different With the Original Danny Tanner
John Stamos opened up about an original version of Full House that never made it to air- with a different Danny Tanner, the beloved character eventually played by Bob Saget.
During a July 2026 appearance on Bobby Bones' podcast The Bobbycast, Stamos, who played Full House hunk Jesse Katsopolis for eight seasons, recalled shooting the pilot for the ABCsitcom with actor John Posey in the role of the Tanner family patriarch.
Soon after ABC picked up the series and told Posey he had the job, he was replaced by Saget, seemingly out of the blue, and an entirely new pilot was shot.
Stamos admitted it was a messy situation as it unfolded.
"I think I felt bad for the guy," he said of Posey. "But it wasn't like... we didn't know what the show was going to be. The show wasn't a hit for the first season. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, that guy's really losing out on something.' We were just shooting a pilot, and we didn't really know what we had."
"And I think, you know, the chemistry of the show …I don't know if the show would have been the same with the original guy, obviously. But it was a little weird," Stamos added of the hit series.
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Full House aired from 1987 to 1995 and was part of ABC's popular TGIF lineup on Friday nights. The beloved family-themed series centered on Saget's Danny Tanner, a widowed father of three who raises his daughters with the help of his brother-in-law (Stamos) and best friend (Dave Coulier).
Posey went on to roles inDallas, Cheers, Teen Wolf, and more, but he never forgot that he was almost Danny Tanner-for one episode, anyway.
In 2014, Posey told Yahoo! Entertainment he was approached to shoot the Full House pilot after an ABC talent scout spotted him in a comedy show.
"In all honesty, if somebody were to ask me now, I have no idea whether I was good in that pilot or not," he admitted. "But overall I thought everything was pretty decent. And the show went. [ABC] picked it up with me, and everything was fine, until about a month or so later when I heard otherwise. … I get a phone 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?'"
"It seemed like everything was fine," he noted. "We shot it. I learned as much as I could in a short period of time. And next thing I know... 'Hey, you're no longer employed.'"
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Posey later found out that Saget and Paul Reiser were two actors originally wanted for the Danny Tanner role, but both were obligated to other shows.
"I guess something opened up for him," Posey added of Saget. "Maybe he was fired from something, I think, and suddenly he was available. And I guess the executive producer talked ABC into allowing him to re-shoot. So that was the end of that."
Posey added that the Danny Tanner switcheroo was hardest on Candace Cameron and Jodie Sweetin, two of the young actresses who played his daughters in the pilot and would go on play Saget's character's daughters for eight subsequent seasons.
"I know that the young girls were all a little bit shattered when it happened, because we developed a pretty good relationship," Posey shared. "Candace, she was very upset that [it] fell apart. It was hard for the kids to have to do this all over again with somebody they didn't know."
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This story was originally published July 10, 2026 at 12:08 PM.