John Stamos has said he was initially scared to return to work on his new show during the Covid pandemic because he feared for the safety of his son.
The Full House star, 57, plays a temperamental basketball coach who is sacked from his job and must take a job at an elite all-girls private high school in the Disney+ series Big Shot.
Filming of the series was disrupted multiple times because of coronavirus and Stamos had to isolate away from his wife, actress Caitlin McHugh, and their son Billy, three.
Reflecting on first learning about the pandemic last year, he said: “I remember we’d started hearing rumblings about it, certainly in the news and everything, but then at work, it was like, ‘oh, someone on another lot across town, they got it, they had to close down’.
“Then it was like on our lot. My friend Dan Fogelman, his show This Is Us shut down.
“And then finally, they said, ‘OK, everybody go home’. And, right when it happened, it was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m losing control here’.
“We’re trying to control it, and we couldn’t. And then after a few months, you go, ‘Wait a minute, we never have had control’.
“(We have been) so vulnerable through this thing. So here we are at home, and it just keeps going on and on and on.
“And Disney came around, they said, ‘Let’s try to go back to work’.
“I was scared at first; I have a three-year-old son.
“I talked to the cast, and some of them were OK with it, some weren’t. And I talked to the crew and they wanted to go back to work.
“Ultimately, I sort of did the math, and I thought, ‘When this thing comes down, and we start to come out of it, which is about right now, we’re going to need shows like Big Shot’. And I think I was right.
“But it was hard, we closed down three times.”
Stamos, best known for his role as Jesse Katsopolis in Full House and spin-off Fuller House and Tony Gates in ER, said filming was repeatedly disrupted.
He said: “Once was a false positive, and I quarantined for a few days.
“But then we got closed down again, I had to go into quarantine for 10 days and be away from my wife and kid, which was difficult because he was sending me a little video saying, ‘I want to cuddle’, and FaceTime; he knew I was in the house and it was hard.
“And then I’m going to work on the very last day, and as I’m walking to my car, they said, ‘Don’t come into work. you’ve been exposed’.
“So, it was very trying. I’m one of the luckiest on the planet, we did OK through this. But still, it was very difficult to not be around my family.
“But I’m glad we did. And Disney was fantastic. I mean, sometimes we complain about how strict they were about everything, and they still are; I was just doing some stuff yesterday.
“But thank God, because I’ve stayed safe and my family’s safe. So it’s good.”
Big Shot is out now on Disney+.