“It was just my job”: Jodie Sweetin recalls working at Rehab center as an adult for years after Full House 

Jodie Sweetin spent years working a regular job at a rehab center after Full House ended, and she was perfectly fine with that. The forty-four-year-old played Stephanie Tanner on the hit ABC sitcom from 1987 to 1995, joining the cast at just five years old. Life after Full House looked nothing like Hollywood for Jodie Sweetin.

Sweetin took on a director of operations role at a treatment center and held it down for several years, right up until Netflix revived the show with Fuller House in 2015. She brought it up on the Taboo's Comics & Kicks podcast on June 30.

"For me, it was never a big deal. It was just my job," Sweetin said.

"I think it was harder for other people. Working in treatment when people are detoxing and all of a sudden they're like, 'Are you the girl from Full House?' And you're like, 'Yeah, no, you're actually not tripping. I am,'" she added.

The questions didn't stop at recognition either.

"People would be like, 'What are you doing here?' I was like, 'Working and paying my bills.' Once people got to know me, they were like, 'Oh, you don't give a s***.' I was like, 'I don't care. I'm just here to be a functioning human,'" she explained.

Jodie Sweetin said being a child star didn't mean financial stability:

As per a report shared by Us Weekly, Jodie Sweetin was pulling in around $2,200 a month at the time. She wasn't complaining about it either.

"I loved my job. I loved working in treatment. I'd be there washing dishes and people would be like, 'You're taking out the trash?' I was like, 'Well, somebody has to,'" she remembered.

"It was never a big thing to me," she added.

The part that did get old was the assumptions. People who recognised her from Full House seemed to expect a very different bank account.

"It's always weird when [people] see you and they expect you have these millions of dollars or something from being on TV once, and you're like, 'Oh honey, that's not how it goes,'" she explained.

"Notoriety doesn't always equal financial stability," she added.

Jodie Sweetin felt this wasn't unique to her situation either. Child stars, she said, tend to run into this a lot.

"I think that happens a lot with child stars. You're suddenly in quote-unquote 'civilian life,' and it's not so much you that has the problem with it; it's that you're constantly answering the question of, 'Why are you here?' and having to justify that you're just another person," she continued.

Jodie Sweetin on Fuller House return and why the Olsen twins didn't come back:

Jodie Sweetin wasn't exactly sitting around waiting for Fuller House to happen. As per the report shared by Us Weekly, Warner Bros. had started developing a Full House sequel series back in 2014, and by the time it landed at Netflix and premiered in 2016, Sweetin had already made peace with a very different life.

"When I learned to be really happy in that environment, with hardly anything, with three divorces, two kids, working in treatment ... I was like, 'I'm good. I'm happy. I'm cool,' and then it was like all of the things fell back into place," she said.

Fuller House ended up running for five seasons, from 2016 to 2020, bringing Sweetin back alongside Bob Saget, Candace Cameron Bure, John Stamos, Dave Coulier, Andrea Barber and Lori Loughlin. One notable absence, though, was Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who chose not to reprise their role as Michelle Tanner.

Jodie Sweetin addressed the twins during her appearance on the Taboo's Comics and Kicks podcast, making clear there's no bad blood.

"Everyone's on good terms with them, but they were 8 years old when this show stopped," she pointed out.

"Then they did all of those movies and all that stuff that I don't know that they really loved doing all the time," she added.

Their relationship to the show was just fundamentally different from her own, she explained.

"So I think, for them, they walked away from all of us at 8 years old," Sweetin added.

Her own run on the show covered her formative years.

"Eight and earlier, you don't remember all that much," she quipped.

She went on to explain what she felt the twins had chosen instead.

"They have a different relationship to being on set all the time. They might not remember being 2 years old and having, you know, us all carrying them around and doing this stuff, but I do," she continued.

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"That's not their thing," she added.

Jodie Sweetin stressed that Mary-Kate and Ashley had simply gravitated toward fashion and away from the spotlight because acting is "not their thing" and they "don't want attention."

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